Credit where it's due - my former boss David Rossiter has done a great job of detailing the recent changes at Ovum, although he's missed a couple of other leavers in Elsa Lion, former Senior Analyst in Ovum's mobile team, who has taken a market intelligence role at Orange and Carl Gressum, who used to run the ConnectedHome service, but who has moved over to Premonvision recently and is currently presenting in Korea.

At the recent IIAR meeting, Ovum SVP David Mitchell was confronted about the number of changes in the analyst teams over the past year or so, but he was apparently upbeat about the quality and number of analysts (I couldn't be there, but my colleague Agi reported back to me).

All this comes at a time when Ovum's advisory services are being re-organized to fit Datamonitor's bundled service approach as the acquisition dust begins to settle. Interesting times indeed...

H&K's global AR team has quite a lot of exciting news to announce, but while we're waiting for that, I thought I'd point out that H&K UK has a new website.

It's quite a lot zippier than the last version and I even had a new photo taken for it. A prize for the avid reader who finds it in the shortest time!

[Clue: it's only one click away from the homepage]

 

I've spent the past few days in Mumbai, India attending the NASSCOM 2008 India Leadership Forum. The sell-out event was, without question a great success, bringing around 2000 stakeholders from the global outsourcing industry together under one roof for three days.

I have spent much of my time at NASSCOM introducing H&K client ITIDA to analysts and consultants who were attending the event. ITIDA is promoting Egypt as an outsourcing destination as part of Egypt's ICT Strategy 2007-2010. Discussions at the forum have been overwhelmingly constructive and reaction to the path of progress that Egypt has embarked upon and its stated strategy of partnering with the Indian outsourcing industry was received very positively.

The conference and the trip as a whole has been an eye-opening experience for me on a personal level - seeing this country of such contrasts for the first time and getting a sense of the optimism and ambition that is driving Indian business in the early 21st century. At the Global Leadership Awards ceremony, Shri Praful Patel, Indian Minister of State for Civil Aviation gave several examples of the tremendous leap that Indian companies have made over the past decade. He also observed that India will place aircraft orders of more than $100 billion over the next ten years.

It is undeniable that much remains to be done in order for the wealth created by those businesses to impact the country's poor meaningfully - the conference was hosted in the lavish Grand Hyatt, from whose windows the widespread poverty within Mumbai is impossible to ignore - but Indian economic success permits development in the wider country.

ITIDA's spokespeople including its CEO, Dr Hazem Abdelazim, stressed that Egypt is learning from India's success, particularly the important role that NASSCOM has played in this. They also highlighted that the policies adopted by the Egyptian Government aimed at returning some of the country's industrial wealth into improving the welfare of the people, particularly through education.

On a slight Web 2.0 tangent (who would have thought it?) I managed to make several new contacts, thanks partly to NASSCOM Connect, which allows registered delegates to contact one another and partly through sheer serendipity. One very charming person I met is Kiruba Shankar who runs social media consultancy Business Blogging Pvt Ltd and who was part of the forum's blog team. I was very pleased to learn that blogging has taken off in India together with other social media technologies. Indeed over breakfast today I learned that the Times Of India reckons it's India's buzziest media brand and I've watched numerous TV ads proclaiming that TOI's email/SMS package is the most advanced available.

*Full disclaimer: NASSCOM and ITIDA are both clients of H&K 

As I mentioned previously, we’ve been working hard in the London AR team and that’s reflected in the fact that the team is growing - we’re delighted to announce the appointment of Marc Duke and Agnieszka Augustyniak.

Marc joined the team as a senior consultant in September and has been bringing his analytical skills to bear on several accounts. With ten years AR experience gained working at both vendors and agencies, he is well-known and highly respected in the AR community, having excellent contacts and broad experience. Marc will be instrumental in continuing to build our business and is helping us to expand the AR practice into a broader influencer proposition enabling it to cross-sell into industries outside technology.

Agnieszka also joins the team as a consultant.  Agnieszka joins H&K from the AR team at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).  Agnieszka will help to ensure H&K execute AR programmes across existing accounts. Moreover, her first-hand experience of working in a major outsourcing company is already proving invaluable with our current client base.

H&K UK will continue to expand the proposition and to convert business from existing PR accounts, working closely with the rest of our global team.  The practice aims to hire another full-time dedicated AR consultant early next year.

I was surprised today when Carter Lusher became my ‘friend’ on Facebook.

Surprised, and slightly concerned because Carter is AR Director at HP Corporate and the main contributor to the HP’s Corporate AR blog, whereas my profile on Facebook is distinctly unprofessional – to set the scene, my profile photo has me dressed as Father Christmas and the most recent ‘stories’ are that I have been ‘cuddled’ and ‘drunk dialled’ by other friends (both of whom I have met and consider to be good friends in the real world, since you ask).

Thankfully, Carter asked me a couple of questions, which allowed me to explain myself. He asked me how I was getting on with Facebook and whether I have managed to weave social media into my work.

My answer was rather long and Carter suggested I post a version of it on ARcade, so here goes:

I’ve been a member of various online communities for about a dozen years, from when I lived in Sweden (1995-1997). I have met many of my closest friends through sites like Shortcut (Swedish language community for young professionals) and Last Thursday (an irreverent place that is currently down for maintenance).

I’m a member of most of the big communities, from Bebo (started by my friend Paul Birch together with his brother Michael and Michael’s wife Xochi) and Dopplr on the fun side to Xing and LinkedIn on the professional front, but I treat them very differently. Much like my (and Carter’s) personal/professional blogs, I consider it appropriate to express myself according to the channel. You won’t find me writing about AR on Facebook, I prefer to leave that to places like ARcade and the IIAR. On Facebook and my personal blog, you’ll read about my exploits at Santacon and, at Christmas time, about volunteering for the homeless charity Crisis, both of which I’m passionate about, but there just isn’t a strong link to work (although I did persuade two colleagues to dress up as Santa last year).

Not long back, I took part in a discussion with the great and the good within H&K and argued that folk should be allowed to access Facebook, etc. on their work PCs. My position is that if we’re not on these sites, we’re lagging behind the competition and that’s professional suicide in PR. The only way to keep up to speed is to experiment. It’s also the best way to find out what’s useful and what’s not – am I the only person who can’t see the point of Me.dium?

Social media is changing business and personally I feel that companies that take policy decisions not to even comment on blogs or engage with social media are myopic and in time it will cost them dearly (even if they can be very useful – we create them for clients and for internal use – an email newsletter is like sooooo 1993!).

Conversely, I’m really pleased that Carter, already a prolific and talented blogger outside work, has started an AR blog – he’s a leading light in AR and practitioners can learn a lot from his posts. Moreover, by engaging in the online conversations, HP will benefit by understanding changes that are affecting the analyst community.

I saw how online communities transformed business life in Sweden, which is several years ahead of most other countries in this space – wait and see what happens to the US and the rest of the world now that we’re catching up.

Social media/the web will force existing unwieldy institutions to adapt or die – witness the Creative Commons, of which I’m a big fan. All mainstream IP systems are creaking at the seams and the Internet is speeding up the process.

Have I managed to weave Facebook into my work? No. My reply to Carter was the first time I’ve ever used it in anything like a professional capacity. Do I use social media in my work? All the time. From Twitter to Cogenz, I’m constantly connected, constantly scanning the web and testing new tools and it makes me and the rest of the H&K AR team better at what we do. We also have access to and use H&K's proprietary tools.

It’s not surprising that I’m such an advocate, having worked on Language Army and Friends Abroad, both of which base their successful business models on community. I have also guest lectured on social media at Warwick University.

Oh, and to prove my geeky credentials once and for all, I haven’t had a TV for years as I prefer surfing the net to goggling the box.

In short, I’m quite happy to be Carter’s friend on Facebook, as long as he doesn’t expect me to do anything sensible on there.

Top tip: If you’re ever travelling to the Bay area, ask Carter for a restaurant suggestion. I did and can guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Disclaimer: HP is a client.

(Corrected from original posting on Tuesday, September 4, 2007)

First it was the move towards silos; IDC pushed more and more core research and analysts into their Insights practices, Gartner moved media and automotive technologies out of core research.  Then came the breakdowns by job role (Forrester and Gartner); special websites, research and tools for AR practitioners, sales people, marketers.  In some cases, such as Forrester views, the new job role breakdowns do not actually come with a price increase.  But with more and more of the most basic core being cut away from subscriptions, research clients are getting jittery, sometime misinterpreting even well-intended changes in coverage as an excuse for price increases.  And in other cases, the price increases are very real.  A few recent examples:

- Gartner Hype Cycle for Semiconductors was outside of core research and therefore unavailable. This has been changed back; let's hope it was just a mistake.  Hype Cycles are about as core as you can get.

- Everything is Dataquest.  It seems that more and more of Gartner's published reports that a year or two ago would have fallen squarely into core research are now being labeled as Dataquest. 

- Also noticing a trend towards Gartner Forecast reports no longer being part of core research.  Examples include worldwide (not regional) forecasts for mobile devices, semiconductors and storage. 

-  And the above doesn't include Gartner's 'premium research' which stretches to areas like SMB, retail... etc.

With so many analyst sales reps heading into Q4 contract negotiations, they would do well to remember that the market is extremely sensitive to yet another price increase, yet another "shift" in service.

This begs the question; what is defined as core research?  It seems that the analyst firms are doing their best to slice and dice IT research into as many separate portions as can be made profitable, but where does it end?   I am sure we're not the only folks out there feeling the pain of these new policies.  Please feel free share your experiences with pared-down access, and the explanations you have received from your reps as to why what used to be included now requires extra investment. 

Steven Frantzen, Group VP, CEMA, and General Manager, EMEA Research, IDC and Martin
Hingley, Chief Research Officer, IDC EMEA, will be addressing members at the September IIAR Forum.

The forum will also include elections to the Board of the IIAR.

The forum takes place on September 20 from 4:30 p.m. BST at Oracle's City Office in London. Click here for a map and directions.

Forums are open to IIAR members. To join the IIAR, visit its website. There are also a limited number of guest
places available for those who have not previously attended a meeting - if you would like to attend as a guest, please email your interest to Hannah Kirkman (hkirkman (at) analystrelations.org).

It's been (another) busy week and I am a bit late on picking up that Cisco has launched an Analyst Relations blog. Thanks to David for drawing my attention to it.

In the first post, Skip MacAskill, Director of industry analyst relations at Cisco sets out the objectives of the blog and calls for suggestions to help with building the agenda for the forthcoming Cisco C-Scape Global Forum in December. The second has a video clip of Cisco Chairman and CEO, John Chambers explaining how his perception of industry analysts has shifted over time.

It's great to see Cisco inviting interaction and using compelling content right from the off. Cisco has a particularly strong AR capability, so hopefully they will build on a cracking start and include insights from the wider team - it would be nice to hear from the European and Emerging Markets AR teams, for example.