Gartner Takes Mystery Out of Magic Quadrant Process
Technology companies and online businesses for whom we arrange briefings with key industry press and analysts occasionally ask us if buying Gartner services will help their chances of a better (or any) position in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for their particular industry. We usually have to remind them that a vendor's client status with Gartner won't move the needle for them on it's own, as Gartner gets 80% of its revenue from IT buyers who rely on them to be neutral evaluators. Then we typically find ourselves explaining how Gartner is different from some of the other analyst firms that ARE pay-for-play ;)
It's helpful to refer to Gartner Research Director Lydia Leong's blog post detailing the process of creating a Magic Quadrant report.
"We lay this process out formally in the initiation letters sent to vendors when we start MQ research, so I'm not giving away any secrets here, just exposing a process that's probably not well known to people outside of analyst relations roles," she wrote.
Here's Lydia's summary of the objective process that she and the other Gartner analysts follow, which generally takes about four months:
- Step 1: Define a market and inclusion criteria.
- Step 2: Get approval from chief analysts.
- Step 3: Decide evaluation criteria and weights.
- Step 4: Send the evaluation criteria and weights to vendors.
- Step 5: Do hour long briefings with vendors.
- Step 6: Contact three to five reference customers provided by the vendor (however, Gartner mostly relies on the experiences of its clients).
- Step 7: Enter the numeric scores into the tool that generates the Magic Quadrant graph.
- Step 8: Write-up all the text.
- Step 9: Peer review.
- Step 10: Alter text and numeric scores accordingly.
- Step 11: Send the vendors a copy of the graphic and text written about them for fact-checking.
- Step 12: Finally, it goes on to editing and review.
Lydia goes into more detail here.
Alison Minaglia