Gartner’s prediction accuracy

Care of a Twitter note from Hutch Carpenter, I have been reading a Gartner report on the state of the hype cycle for social software.

It was interesting reading, but I am going to save it (or social bookmark it) for reading in a few years time. The reason: back in about 2001/2002, I remember Gartner doing a report on the state of ERP II – being inter-company (between company) transacting, as opposed to intra-company (within company) which is where ERP’s strength was supposed to be.

At the time, I recall Gartner making major predictions about how ERP II would be a new revolutionising tool for business. 6-7 years later I am still waiting to see that.

I wonder if the Gartner analysts ever review old predictions and see how accurate they were? It would be interesting to see the analysis.

My take on latest analyst views

My favourite analyst site, AMR Research, often has raises some issues on its ‘First Thing Monday‘ page that provide me with blogging ideas:

A Google chrome comment – summarises the prospects of Chrome from an enterprise perspective as a

browser, a platform for Google Apps, omni-client platform strategy and a replacement for the Windows environment for desktop and mobile applications

The state of enterprise software skills in the US – AMR now believes only 2 ERP vendors, SAP and Oracle, are the main players in the US. I wonder what Microsoft thinks of that?

I find the Gartner site to be pretty poor in terms of getting quick news analysis, but one of their analysts was on ClassicFM last night (again) discussing some discontinuities that are coming from the Internet. At least he was aware of SA’s local issues around the Internet, e.g., why Software as a Service (SaaS) is not taking off here due to our Internet bandwidth problems. Also discussed was the future impact of social software – very much aimed at the big corporates rather than SMB market – which makes it sound unimportant to the majority of SA companies.

Why analysts don’t know what’s going on in SA

When I read analyst reviews of what’s going on in various markets, I often get the feeling that none of it applies to South Africa. Now I understand why.

In a recent AMR note about Oracle in Africa and the Middle East, Bruce Richardson made the telling comment that AMR hadn’t visited SA in 11 years.

11 years ago I was the Alliance Manager at Digital Equipment SA responsible for, among others, 10 ERP players. In the hardware vendor market, there were at least twice as many players as there are now. In South Africa, we still had Nelson Mandela as president, and there had been only one open general election. The local IT environment had developed significantly, and we aren’t so dominated by international players.

Shame on you AMR. South Africa has changed hugely in 11 years, and you haven’t even bothered to update yourselves.

Mis-led analyst

I recently spoke with a woman who works as a research analyst for a large local IT firm with international operations. During our conversation I mentioned a large JD Edwards customer I know who has decided that JDE is not going anywhere and will be moving to SAP in the next few years. She commented that the company should consider instead Microsoft Dynamics AX.

When I asked her why that comment, she said it would be easier than SAP. So I proceeded to inform her that SAP had thousands of customer references whereas AX had (maybe) scores, that while SAP skills weren’t plentiful there were more of them than AX skills, and that AX wasn’t necessarily easy.

This led me to wonder how this analyst had been mis-led. She is not a technical person and hasn’t touched an ERP system in ten years, so somewhere she heard a ’spiel’ and was led to believe it. Without an understanding of the technical issues of how ERP systems are customised, she had no experience on which to evaluate the ’spiel’.

How many companies are mis-led by unaware analysts who don’t have the necessary background to evaluate the software they are supposed to be reviewing?