Weekly roundup: Forrester, IT-director and Quocirca (Part II)

Following up on our previous post Weekly roundup: Forrester, IT-director and Quocirca (Part I), here's the rest of last week's round-up.

On Friday, Forrester organised a breakfast for AR professionals, which was very well attended with over 50 AR (lost of blue chip AR but also some AR agencies and smaller firms represented). On the Forrester side, we had Ian Taylor, Principal for the Oral Programme (their AR "club" with membership fee), ex. META Group Consulting Peter O'Neill, now turning infrastructure analyst, Martha Bennett, VP & research director for their European financial practice and Luiz Olivera, runs the ARM council in Europe. No execs, just the ubiquitous Dunc' who pitched on AR rules: be candid was the key takeaway.

The rest content was... interesting. Martha came out very well with content and with her top vendor peeves about analysts and vice versa (Read David's post for the detail: Forrester: Biggest moans about vendors). All entertaining. They also provided some trends on the industry, and amongst other things predicted IT vendors would stop selling directly to users by 2010. Things got even more interesting when some vendors asked if they intended to cover hardware -which in Forrester's view is becoming less strategic/important. Peter O'Neil was at pains to explain why he got the job to cover infrastructure, when his new colleagues predict it's going down the drain. Someone asked a quick run down on Forrester's strategy and they seemed to collectively struggle to answer. Martha hopefully gave an elevator pitch but they were clearly not at ease. And Luiz rushed through the Analyst Relations and & Marketing council, which is a combination between a gated community and a RAS seat. At £21k a pop, including event tickets and a dedicated contact. Oops.

The opinion of the AR professionals we spoke to was that the event was inconclusive at best, we learnt nothing on Forrester's strategy and differentiators, nor did they give vendors any good reasons why they should do business with them.

So what was the point? For AR professionals, great networking opportunities as David puts it. On Forrester's side, it's quite unclear what they were trying to achieve: maybe this was a lead generation for the ARM council but they never really got down to the sales pitch. It's quite striking that Forrester, alike most of its competitors, don't know how to address the AR community –one of its key decision makers/influencers! The pastries were nice though, thanks for the brekkie...