Executive Summary

  • This article is for vendors who reach out to us to give us demos or who see Brightwork as a possible way to promote their software.

Introduction

We cover in the article The Brightwork Research & Analysis Rating of IT Analysts Like Gartner, Forrester, and More that nearly all of the IT analysts in the enterprise software space are paid directly by software vendors to produce marketing collateral. The vast majority of what is called “research” by IT analysts is just marketing collateral.

A Confusion Around How Brightwork Functions

We publish many articles on enterprise software. This makes vendors think that we have an interest in potentially covering or promoting their applications.

Here are a few things to know.

  1. We don’t serve as a funnel in any way.
  2. There are no “innocent demos” with software vendors. Having meetings with vendors for free and then discussing the next steps for how Brightwork can help promote the application/vendor is not what we do.

The Brightwork Business Model

We provide advisory and perform research for software buyers. We are not interested in becoming a partner with a software vendor or consulting firm.

Things to For Software Vendors Note

  1. The upshot is that we are not a free service or public utility or the recipient of a government grant to promote software vendors.
  2. We also do not merely begin writing articles because vendors show us demos.
  3. We are not a source to provide references to customers.

How to Play the Enterprise Software Game

Vendors that want coverage and promotion can do the following.

Option #1: Pay Enormous Sums to Gartner

You will need to compete with vendors that have major funding behind them, as we cover in the article The Problem with How Gartner Makes its Money.

Option #2: Pay a Smaller Sum to G2Crowd

You can also pay off G2Crowd, and they will serve as lead generation and will have their reviews disproportionately filled out by consultants who want to promote the software they are reviewing as we cover in the article Why Doesn’t the SAP Cloud Platform Have Any Reviews on G2Crowd?

Option #3: Engage in a Relationship with a Corrupt Consulting Partner

This consulting partner will degrade each of the implementations for the vendor and greatly lengthen implementation durations.

However, consulting partners are reliable. As soon as they have a revenue stream from your software, they will publish and say anything to keep that revenue stream going.

Option #4: Invest Years In Developing Your Website Content to Obtain Inbound

You can try to bypass the major IT entities by developing your own website content that attracts visitors. It is a long road, and the payoff is generally small for inbound.

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Conclusion

These are the options for getting third parties to promote your software.

That is how the game is rigged in enterprise software.

We did not create this system.