Enterprise software research firm Aberdeen went under the microscope of WSJ columnist Lee Gomes. What follows is a pretty nasty dissection of their business and the indictment that the firm is no longer a research firm, instead being just marketing under a different name.
The WSJ article is reg required so I’m not linking to it, but Jason Busch has a really good commentary on it worth reading.
The only analyst firm that NewsGator is a client of is Forrester, primarily because between Charlene, Oliver, and Jeremiah they cover the full spectrum of our business sectors, which the other firms do not. I also think their research is a little edgier than Gartner.
What followed was essentially a critical examination of the Aberdeen business model. To summarize, vendors pay what the story suggests is around $30,000 on average, to be featured as a sponsor of a single survey (there were 212 reports published last year each “typically with four or five sponsors”). According to the columnist, Lee Gomes, “Most of the half-dozen Aberdeen sponsors I talked with described the attraction of sponsoring a report as a chance to rise above the noise of the marketplace by being associated with something customers consider ‘research’.”