Ray Wang Leaving Forrester

I worked for the analyst firm META Group from 2001 to 2005. One of our hallmarks was that we were not only vendor-neutral but occasionally vendor hostile. The tone was set by our founder, Dale Kutnick, who hand-edited every article that was posted. If he scrawled a large “VW” across the front page of a submitted article, you knew it was toast. “VW” meant “vendor whore”.

In my four and a half years as an analyst, covering ERP software and services, I received a lot of booty from vendors, including forty-four very expensive pens, countless leather notebooks and bags, many Flash drives, an iPod, and seats at sporting matches. Since this was the case for all of the analysts, you can imagine that some heads were positively turned.

In the salad years of IT advisory firms (1996 to 2001), there were a number of “stars”, all of whom shared one key characteristic: they were tough but fair in their articulate scrutiny of the software and services vendors and thus provided their clients with knowledgeable and trusted input.

Gartner’s acquisition of META Group in 2005 continued a trend of market consolidation that started early in the millennium with the disappearance of Giga, the Horowitz Group, Yankee, and others. This led to the formation of several smaller and more specialized analyst firms (http://www.tekrati.com/ is an excellent source) and the pool of analyst “stars” at the few remaining firms (Gartner, IDC, and Forrester) has considerably diminished. Ray’s departure from Forrester continues this trend.

Ray is not loved by all the vendors and that’s to his credit. Wise vendors have sought his objective advisory but even more so, in his years at Forrester, he has staked out a strong position as a client advocate, most notably in spearheading the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights (http://snipurl.com/pb64z).

We all trust that Ray will continue with his excellent blog, A Software Insider’s Point of View (http://blog.softwareinsider.org/) and that his client advocacy will still shine brightly.

For more tributes to Ray from other analysts, see Dennis Howlett, Frank Scavo, and Josh Greenbaum. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1167, Frank Scavo (http://fscavo.blogspot.com/)
and Josh Greenbaum (http://ematters.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/hey-ray-dont-be-a-stranger/).