Jason Stamper's Blog

The most obvious point to make is that EMC is one of the clear market leaders if not the market leader in midrange disk thanks to its Clariion (first engineered by Tom West -- brains behind Data General’s servers and storage -- and which Dell successfully resells by the truck-load) and Celerra product lines.

So why does it need Gartner, indeed any analyst’s visual market mapping marketing to reassure customers that it is a heavy hitter? To me this is like saying, “Nike in ‘leaders’ quadrant for casual or sports-specific athletic shoes.”

To make matters worse, thanks to the ‘litigation-happy’ nature of corporate America, Gartner feels the need to include a disclaimer at the end of any press releases that discuss its Magic Quadrants, which includes the line: “The Magic Quadrant… depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that Marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the ‘Leaders’ quadrant.”

If you take that disclaimer literally – and don’t take this personally EMC – being in the leaders quadrant ‘doesn’t mean shit’ (as I’ve heard characters on CSI and the like exclaim). You shouldn’t only buy from players in that quadrant, Gartner says, so what should you do? Do your own due diligence based on your specific wants and needs of course, or get Gartner or another analyst or consultancy firm to do it for you.

But if that’s the case, why trumpet the fact you are in the leaders quadrant in the first place, if you are already clearly among the market share leaders? Surely the only vendors who would want to trumpet the fact they are in the leaders quadrant would be smaller players chuffed to be put in that top right-hand corner of the chart, despite the fact they are currently losing out to rivals whose names should have been in the leaders quadrant in their place?

Don’t get me wrong – all analysis methodologies have their drawbacks. I’m just surprised EMC saw the value in the release. Then again, it is a rather slow news day being just one working day before Christmas for most of us, so you never know which journalists might have enough time on their hands to write it up. Damn – they got me.

Digg this