Sunday, April 15, 2007

Would you buy a report from this analyst?

If you're trying to sell a report and pass your company off as experts in a particular field, at least get the press release right. I'm picking out this specific statement from Research and Markets' Identity Management report:
"The report profiles 93 companies including many key and niche players worldwide such as BEA Systems, BMC Software, BNX Systems, Computer Associates, Netegrity, Courion Corporation, Entrust, Inc, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Corp, M-Tech Information Technology, Novell, Oracle Corporation, Ping Identity Corporation, RSA Security, and Sun Microsystems, Inc."

Can you spot the problem? Netegrity is no longer a company and hasn't been for 2 years. They were acquired by CA in 2004. If you're trying to pass yourself off as credible (especially as an analyst that people may not have heard of), don't make mistakes with your pitch.

I should be fair and note that they seem to know this as evidenced by the report's table of contents but most people are time-poor and don't have time to explore details. They skim read and if something looks out of place or incorrect, they immediately write it off as a waste of time. It looks to be an interesting report at face value, but I'm certainly not going to pay money to find out...even if I did have the 3496 Euros they are charging for it.

2 comments:

James McGovern said...

While Netegrity is owned by CA, I think the analyst firm simply acknowledged its more familiar name. In the blogosphere, you will see references to Documentum and RSA Security still even though they are owned by EMC...

Ian said...

Thanks for the comment James. I think the main difference in your example is that the "Documentum" name is still being used by EMC. RSA Security, while owned by EMC is still trading as a separate entity. CA hasn't used the "Netegrity" name for quite awhile, even though they still use "Siteminder". That's the main reason why I picked up on Netegrity and not RSA.