Recently almost every time that DCIG notices its brand being compared to other analyst firms, it is most often against the likes of Gartner, IDC and Forrester, with its Buyer’s Guides most commonly compared to the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Some have even gone so far to wonder if the DCIG Buyer’s Guide may eventually replace the Gartner Magic Quadrant. A better way to view the DCIG Buyer’s Guides is as a complement to the Gartner Magic Quadrant rather than as a replacement for it.
To understand how to best use the DCIG Buyer’s Guides, it is first important to grasp what was the genesis or motivation for the DCIG Buyer’s Guides. As a former storage engineer for a Fortune 500 company, my team members and I routinely used the Gartner Magic Quadrant as a starting point to identify and evaluate the vendors in a particular space. In that respect, the Magic Quadrant was helpful in helping us identify who the major players were and which ones we should consider in a forthcoming buying decision.
But where the Gartner Magic Quadrant broke down and still breaks down is that it only provides the names of vendors and how they compared at a high level. That viewpoint was only of marginal assistance to my team who actually had to evaluate and make recommendations on the technologies that these various vendors had to offer. The Gartner Magic Quadrant broke down even further when a single vendor offered multiple products in a particular space as is often true with storage arrays.
This left my team members and I with the rather arduous task of:
- Identifying which product or products each vendor offered
- Identifying the features available across all of these products
- Determining which of these features each product supported
- Establishing which of those features were relevant in our environment
- Weighting and scoring these features appropriately
- Creating a short list of products for our company to consider for further evaluation or purchase
The DCIG Buyer’s Guides tackle many of these product evaluation steps that organizations would normally have to complete by themselves. The Buyer’s Guides identify the products in a particular space and normalize the names of the features they have to offer. DCIG then assigns its own weightings to each feature based upon our past experience as end users, adds some statistical analysis to it and then professionally lays out the results. The result is a product that end-user organizations find immensely valuable to aiding and accelerating their research.
As an analyst firm we take additional steps to make our data as complete and accurate as possible. After the DCIG analyst completes the product surveys, each completed product survey is made available to the respective vendor to review and provide feedback. In order to facilitate rapid side-by-side product comparisons, DCIG then takes the information on each individual product survey and creates a standardized data sheet for each product that exposes key differentiators. Once the data sheet for each product is created, it is made available to the vendor to review and provide feedback.
Every vendor is given two opportunities to review the data DCIG has collected. Every vendor is also invited to set up a no-cost analyst briefing prior to the scoring and ranking phase. In cases where the vendor chooses not to engage DCIG in the process, a disclaimer is added to the data sheet for that product indicating that all information on the data sheet is based entirely on publicly available information and DCIG’s own knowledge of the product, and that no information was provided by the vendor.
Please note, DCIG does not currently test any of these products or their features. It should also be noted that DCIG does not currently contact thousands, hundreds or even dozens of users to achieve a consensus as what the “right” weighting for a particular feature is. Finally, we have no truth detector in place to determine whether or not a vendor accurately represents the capabilities of its product or products in its publications or the feedback it provides DCIG. However these assumptions probably largely hold true regardless of which analyst report you read.
It is also of note that DCIG does its research and reaches its conclusions without any receiving any upfront payment from any vendor. While we certainly hope that one or more vendors will license the final results, it does not always happen. This is the risk DCIG takes each time it develops a Buyer’s Guide and it has examples of Guides that have been licensed as well as those that have not been licensed.
Perhaps a better or proper context to view the DCIG Buyer’s Guide process and its results is that of an end-user organization doing its own research, creating its own weightings and rankings for the features being evaluated and then choosing to publish its findings.
This is why DCIG now has two offerings to diffuse the perception that some may have that only those vendors who pay DCIG to license the Guides can take advantage of the Buyer’s Guides or the process that goes into their development.
- DCIG now offers a Lead Generation program that includes its Buyer’s Guides. By making the Buyer’s Guides available in this manner, any vendor who is included in a Buyer’s Guide, regardless of where they are ranked in a particular Buyer’s Guide, can leverage it to gain access to the names of end-user organizations who may download the Guide as these are often individuals responsible for making buying decisions.
- DCIG also makes the underlying software it uses to do its assessments and create its Buyer’s Guides available as a software-as-a-service in the form of its Supplier Evaluation Software (SES). If you disagree with our final results or our priorities do not align with your priorities (and they may not,) you can still gain access to our underlying methodology and research to then do your own assessment.
DCIG is appreciative of the fact that it is now often mentioned in the same context as other leading analyst firms in the space. However DCIG is not really looking to displace them or the value they bring to the market place. Rather we are looking to augment their findings by helping organizations aggregate available data in the market so they can do faster, more thorough assessments of products as well as communicate how DCIG ranks and scores these products from our viewpoint.