Valley View Ventures: successfully herding cats?

What differentiates a one-man-band from a fully blown up philharmonic orchestra?

Most insiders agree that there are excellent self-employed analysts and that the recruitment quality of large firms is at best inconsistent. A customer (end user) mentioned to us recently that he did not know what he'd get from Gartner when he picked up the phone and asked for advice: either a very smart chap would turn up or he'd deal with a librarian on the phone. However, economies of scale are an important factor in this business: to max-up the utilisation of unique (and expensive) analyst resources, one need a good sales, marketing and back office support to allow them to concentrate on gathering and writing research and consulting clients. If you're a one man band, when you sell you don't deliver and if when you're delivering you're not selling.
Selling is tougher too, for the same reason that you hear small groups singing in a noisy crowd. Which probably explains why independent analysts tend to go through peaks and troughs of activities?
The other thing individual analysts lack is a strong brand: a vendor usually do not commission an IDC paper (check the number of hits here!) for the high-quality prose but for results it delivers in terms of leads.

This is where Valley View Ventures claims to have a solution: they're a broker agency for IT industry analysts, apparently doing well and not afraid of a bit of emphasis:
"With a triple digit annual growth rate, V3 is the fastest growing group of IT industry analysts in the world."

V3 markets, represents on a commission basis and invoices for 11 firms (and 30 individuals) covering a range of subjects, providing a one-stop-shop. V3's founder, Fred Abott, is a seasoned professional who can advise on which analyst to use where, for a range of services, including good old papers, advisory and consulting. The fact he's worked everywhere -Gartner, Aberdeen, DH Brown, Hurwitz, Giga- probably helps.

We wish best of luck to V3, hoping they can create all the conditions for a balanced IT Analysis market.

PS: there are also a handful of papers authored by Fred Abott on the IT Analysis industry on this page -including....

• IT Industry Analysis : Flying Upside Down without Getting Dizzy
• What happened to the IT industry analysis objectivity?
• Wow, Customers are saying that? Making Sense of Survey Research