It gushes money
Gartner’s business model is genius. They gather information from vendors and users – for large fees from both – and then sell that information back to them for even more money. Bliss.
They own a toll booth on the user/vendor information highway. And collect $1.3 billion a year from the traffic – over $300,000 per employee. Drool.
But the best is the Magic Quadrant, Gartner’s money-spinning qualitative graphic. You’ve seen it, but here’s a blank version.
From Ron Harris over at StorageMojo. He sums up everything that’s always bothered me about the Gartner business model and it’s use by IT Management over the years.
I’ve been in many situations where the Magic Quadrant has been one of the prime inputs on purchase decisions despite all of the technical and functional reasons why the selected product was not adapted to the project.