What Did Gartner Do That Made Their Advice So Wrong?
Gartner interviewed some very large IT vendors who happen to be among the largest customers of Gartner’s analysis business. In that business, Gartner has both IT vendors and IT customers as their clients, and writes reports making recommendations to IT customers indicating which vendors should be preferred. An IT vendor who is Gartner’s customer is assured that Gartner will write something about that vendor in Gartner’s reports to IT customers. Thus, large IT vendors represent a significant profit center for Gartner, and Gartner must listen to them. Gartner gave the desires of these vendors more weight than they should have in producing their conclusion on EIF 2.0. They state the vendors sentiment in their report on the industry representatives workshop: The issue of open standards is a controversial topic among the industry representatives. Their opinion is that the framework should allow competition among standards, open and non-open. Think about software from the vendor’s perspectiv
