Although we offer advice on company positioning and messaging to VC-backed and later-stage/mature vendors, we often find it challenging to clearly articulate the position of our own services. Specifically, when it comes to the rather specialized division my colleagues and I sit in: Gartner Invest. As I write, we represent a small part of a $6 billion revenue, $34 billion market cap firm. We partner with some of the brightest minds in the investment community, yet our business is frequently misunderstood. The goal of this note is to shed a light on an often overlooked, but extremely exciting part of Gartner’s ecosystem. It’s a slightly longer read, but if you are interested in learning more, I think it will be worthwhile.

The Background (yes, it’s important!): Technology Buy-Side and Gartner’s End-User Business

Our pedigree is key here and taking a few extra minutes will help you understand the drivers behind our investor business much better. Since 79′, Gartner’s core business has been to partner with and advise Chief Information Officers and their teams (across various industries). As CIOs think about how to meaningfully improve and advance the businesses for which they work, we help them think through, create, and execute technology strategy as part of that mission. We’ve come a long way since 79′, and today we work with over ~15k enterprises and count ~11k CIO clients. These CIOs (and their direct reports) engage us daily for guidance on high-level technology and enterprise strategy, tactical planning, vendor contract negotiation, and implementation work. Last year we worked through ~465k advisory sessions with them. Since technology is now front and center to any organization, we’ve seen CIO strategy evolve to become core to the broader organizational strategy.

Why does this matter?

Decades of servicing and building deep relationships with technology end-users has allowed us to develop a proprietary, fact-based perspective on their strategies, decision-making, buying behaviors, vendor selection criteria, as well as the tactical implementation challenges and opportunities they face. This insight, gained from hundreds of thousands of direct advisory conversations and close collaboration with CIOs and professionals across all enterprise technology functions, gives us a very deep understanding of the challenges they face as well as what budgets they allocate to solve them. Global IT spending is projected to reach $5 trillion in 2024, and we have our finger on the pulse of where that money gets allocated and why.

Bottom line: we know technology end-users extremely well.

Next: Gartner’s High-Tech Business

As you can imagine, this depth of insight is very valuable to tech founders/CEOs and their C-Level peers. They are building products/services for and selling to these same end-users. We are decades long trusted advisors to their (potential) customers. Navigating the enterprise technology buyer market as a vendor is tough. Tech CEOs and their management teams work with us daily to understand how to better position themselves towards their end customers. Our Analysts advise them how to differentiate/optimize their products/capabilities, improve messaging, pricing, and overall go-to-market. We also work closely with privately held vendors and help them think through strategic M&A and/or exit strategies.

A critical part of what vendors do, is to regularly brief our Analysts on their latest products/roadmaps (which they don’t need to be clients for, it’s free). We call these ‘Vendor Briefings’. Vendor Briefings are an opportunity for vendors to talk to our Analysts about their products, and they allow our Analysts to stay abreast of the latest developments within the vendor organization. It’s important to continuously brief Analysts because they are talking to the vendor’s end customers daily. Last year we conducted over 25k of these vendors briefings, monitoring closely innovations coming to market as well as changes in existing vendor products/roadmaps.

Today, we work closely with founders and management teams at thousands of vendor organizations (pre-revenue to public). This part of our business is called ‘Gartner for High-Tech’ and it drives over $1bn in revenues for us. If you want to double click, this unprompted testimonial is one of the better ones I’ve read and explains, through the lens of a vendor, how to leverage Gartner’s ecosystem to build better business: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-achieved-huge-value-from-gartner-liad-churchill/?trackingId=HLH9vpDXAMAe93OeoPy3Iw%3D%3D

So, what is Gartner Invest?

You can see how the flywheel starts taking shape. Smart technology investors and bankers understand how difficult (yet important) it is to understand intricacies between vendors, their products, markets/submarkets, and the end-users they serve. Getting immediate and objective insight into the mindshare of enterprise technology buyers is key too, and hard to get. Navigating the large enterprise technology taxonomy is complex and tricky to get accurate. Everything is constantly in flux too, which doesn’t help.

Our division advises the investment community directly to find ways to tap into and take advantage of the gigantic knowledge ecosystem of technology buyers (end-users) and vendors in which Gartner holds a central position. We sit at the intersection of the market and take advantage of our scale, which is more critical to investors than any other client type we work with.

More datapoints = higher accuracy.

This is crucial when making decisions about putting money to work. We take everything we learn from our end-user and vendor clients and turn it into actionable advice for investors and bankers across several dimensions (more on this in the next paragraph). Today we count private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, asset managers, and various other divisions within the investment banks as our Invest clients.

What does my team do exactly?

I was lucky and felt hugely privileged to move from London (where I was working alongside private equity investors) to New York City to set up and run a newly established team focused on building our investment banking channel. My team primarily works with senior technology M&A bankers, and investors within some of the larger banks. Over the last 2,5 years we worked hard to establish our channel and build advisory service propositions that we believe are extremely valuable to dealmakers looking to make a dent in tech markets. Today, we are proudly the largest team within Gartner Invest and serve clients not only in-around NYC, but also globally.

We help investors develop investment theses, identify interesting vendors to potentially invest in, conduct deal due diligence, and work with their portfolio companies to leverage Gartner’s ecosystem and expertise to grow their businesses meaningfully and work towards exit events. Smart M&A bankers come to us for help to find new clients, generate deal ideas, think through alignments between potential buyers and sellers, as well as help to prepare for management meetings and top-notch pitch decks. Public Equity Investors and Equity Researchers want to know everything and anything that might impact the positioning of the publicly listed technology stocks they cover. Credit desks come to us for help to figure out a vendor’s longevity, their product stickiness, and what we see in terms of end-user adoption. The scope of work is fascinating. The intersection of technology supply and demand in which we sit is unique and the space is as dynamic as it’s ever been.

The Analysts, Our Heroes. The ‘How’.

Aside from scale, our moat and key differentiator are the Analysts we employ. They are our heroes and are fundamental to the unique business model we operate. Our Analysts have ~15-25 years’ experience as top practitioners in a specific enterprise technology niche. Typically, it’s a space in which they successfully operated most of their career. After earning their stripes as practitioners and thought leaders within their niche, they might qualify to come work for Gartner as one of our Analysts. Today, we employ ~2,5k Analysts full time and their job is to (within their area of specialty):

·         Advise current practitioners (end-users)

·         Advise Founders/CEOs/CMOs/CROs of enterprise technology vendors

·         Advise the investment community

·         Conduct and publish new research

At Gartner Invest, depending on the type of deal or transaction, we assemble a team of Analysts to help think through key questions and put together strategies.

Last year we delivered just shy of 500k advisory sessions between tech buyers and sellers, extracting knowledge from each and every interaction. The compounding effect of this continuous engagement with enterprise tech buyers and sellers is wild.

In Conclusion

As per Michael Ovitz- scale is information, information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. We have positional power in this space and if you are a dealmaker in the enterprise technology market there is no other place where you’ll find equal breadth and depth of advice. We marry Gartner’s longstanding and reputable end-user business with the ever-changing vendor landscape in a very elegant way to create Gartner Invest, a (today) small but extremely exciting part of Gartner and the investment community.

If you are a tech dealmaker interested to work with us, or simply want to chat and learn more, get in touch with me.

Enrique