Executive Summary

• We offer unique information on enterprise software with unmatched accuracy and accuracy measurements.
• Our model is based upon complete independence as well as first-hand experience.

Introduction

Have you noticed how difficult it is to get accurate information on enterprise software? There is significant censorship in enterprise software. We publish information that cannot be published anywhere else in many cases. While most other information sources are strongly tilted toward the more significant software vendors, we treat every vendor the same regardless of their size. This is because vendors are not our customers, and there is no way for a vendor to exercise control over what we write.

Observe our disclaimer that we use on articles (in this case, Gartner.)

How We Came To Our Conclusions

After decades of working in IT and then performing research in IT, we concluded that the quality of information offered by vendors, consulting firms, IT media, and IT analysts is of inferior quality. The reality is that none of these entities care about what is accurate and publish information entirely around allowing them to sell their products.

Let us review each entity category, describe the information they offer, and provide evidence for our observation through an article link.

Entity #1: Software Vendors

We got our start in critiquing the marketing messaging of software firms.

• We developed the most accurate set of predictions over 12 years on the software vendor SAP, which you can see in the following article. Study on SAP’s Accuracy
• It is impossible for us to deal with software firms because a software vendor intends to capture any IT analysis firm, and all of their interactions with us are designed to capture us. This is why we stopped having relationships with software vendors, as you can see in the following article. Why Brightwork Research & Analysis Has No Relationships With Vendors

The upshot is that information from software vendors is unreliable. But what about consulting firms? Is the information from consulting companies a reason to be optimistic?

Entity #2: Consulting Firms

IT consulting is dominated by enormous multinational firms, with some of them having several hundred thousand employees. What is the nature of the information provided by consulting firms to their clients?

• Any software vendor of any size has consulting partners. Consulting companies are curious. They pretend to be trusted advisors, but in reality, they only focus on maximizing their profits. They will say anything their selected software vendor partners say is accurate and function as parrots.
• Consulting firms are not fiduciaries, as is covered in the article How Consulting and Advisory Firms Sell Out The Interests of Their Clients.
• Consulting companies follow no research rules, have people with fake research titles, as is covered in the article Why PWC Research Fellows Are Fake and Pretend to be Academic, and are promoters globally of large amounts of false information published.

The upshot is that information from software vendors is unreliable. But what about IT media? Is the information from IT media a reason to be optimistic?

Entity #3: IT Media

Have you noticed how limp and marginalized IT media has become? When was the last time you read anything interesting in ComputerWorld or CIO and that did not seem like it rolled off of the assembly line of the marketing/PR department at a software vendor or consulting firm? The reason for this is that due to the Internet, IT lost its subscriber base and had nowhere else to turn for income than the IT industry.

• Most of the IT media entities that look independent and have separate branding are nearly all owned by just two media conglomerates, as is covered in Computer Weekly as a Marketing Automation Front. These IT media entities have financial biases, which they never disclose, as is covered in the article The Problem With IDG’s Media Conflict of Interests.
• Forbes, which sometimes covers IT, was purchased by a Chinese company and rents out its website to whoever wants to pay to have their article published, as is covered in the article How Accurate Was Forbes on Oracle Replacing SAP as #1 in the Cloud?
• The output from IT media is what cheese whiz is to food. Articles are not written by an independent mind but extruded from a factory. The areas of the websites that market to IT companies brag about how they can target ads at the precise time when a reader is ready to make a purchasing decision, and the ads are coordinated with the content. TechTarget surveils its readers and then sends potential purchasing triggers to its “partners.” TechTarget publications have no ads because the articles are the ads.
• IT media will do anything not to offend those that pay it, as is covered in the article Why Media Entities Must Defend or Not Critique Word Salad article Why Most IT Media Will Prefer AI Authors For Their Corporate Friendly IT Articles.

The Impact of Big Tech on Media

Google and Big Tech have been significant factors in degrading the quality of all media. Google and Facebook now receive a large percentage of the overall media advertising dollars, even though they produce no media.
The ultimate outcome of Big Tech is for it to undermine independent media and strip away its advertising money for itself, as is covered in this article. How to Understand Big Tech’s Degradation of Media. Big Tech has extended beyond degrading media and is now moving into censorship. They will censor those that contradict powerful entities, including anyone who points out accurate financial biases and call things they don’t like “misinformation.” How Elites Use the Term Misinformation as a Form of Censorship
The upshot is that information from IT media is unreliable. But what about IT analysts? Is the information from IT analysts a reason to be optimistic?

Entity #4: IT Analyst Firms

• Like consulting firms and IT media, IT analyst firms are experts and never disclose their financial biases. This is covered in the article The Problem With How Gartner Makes Its Money.
• Buyers pay big money to Gartner for things like their Magic Quadrants when the evidence is clear that one can buy one’s ranking in the MQ, as is covered in this article, A Machine Learning Study of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Bias.
• IT analysts are constantly taking money from vendors to publish articles and studies designed to make the vendor look good. An excellent example of this is in How to Understand Forrester’s S/4HANA TCO Study.
• We performed an analysis of some of the most prominent IT analysts. We found that all of them were subordinate to vendor financial interests, covered in the article Analysis of IT Analysts Like Gartner, Forrester, and Others.

The upshot is that information from all of these entities is unreliable.
And what we have is a lot of entities with business models based upon deceiving their clients or customers, and the employees of these entities have internalized the fact that their only way of meeting their career objectives is to participate in the deception-based business model.
For this reason, it is tough to access quality information, as no advocacy entity is anywhere to be found on significant investments in software.