Given the increasing scrutiny<\/A> under which Gartner and IDC now find themselves, it’d probably help their credibility if they, like the financial analyst community, started disclosing revenues they receive from the vendors they cover. At their scale, vs. the smaller boutiques, I think it’s going to become an imperative.<\/DIV><\/DIV>And personally, it may end up being a determinant of whether we’re willing to do business with such firms<\/EM>. Transparency’s a good thing.<\/DIV><\/BLOCKQUOTE>If the answer to any of my questions above is no then perhaps you should consider alternatives.<\/P>
My key argument in the last blog was that ten years ago nobody would have believed that Linux would be used widely in the enterprise. Open source was something for sandal-wearing university students. <\/DIV><\/DIV>But the costs of supporting a proprietary industry were being borne by customers. Eventually they began to shrug those shackles off, as the students got job as IT architects. Today a swathe of open source technologies are being widely adopted by enterprises, in development and production.<\/DIV><\/DIV>RedMonk has great relationships with developers and architects now. What happens when they become architects and CIOs?<\/DIV><\/DIV>Is it really so hard to imagine a shared model for market research and analysis will ever take off?<\/DIV><\/DIV>What if you could cut your Gartner budget by 30%, and improve your corporate decision making in the process? What would you do with the money? What if you could base your best practices on peer experience, rather than someone else’s tablets of stone, brought down from the mountain?<\/DIV><\/DIV>Gartner is like a mainframe in 1979. Ripe for deconstruction.<\/DIV><\/DIV>We now have new collaboration, coordination and governance techniques that can underpin a change in how analysis is done. We should learn from the experiences of the Eclipse Foundation. <\/DIV><\/DIV>Wouldn’t it be nice to think that one day in the not too distant future enterprises had access to, and could contribute to, their own platform quadrants. No magic required, just aggregated decision-making.<\/DIV><\/DIV>Basically openness wins over time. It lowers costs for everbody, and accelerates innovation.<\/DIV>