InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
November 17, 1997
The Patriarch: Gideon Gartner, Giga Information Group
By Claire Tristram
In a fundamental way, she's right: Gartner's vision for the Gartner Group, the company he founded in 1979, was so successful that it redefined the rules of the game. Every advisory firm today has borrowed something from Gartner's original vision-whether it be the brevity of published research, the focus on business implications over raw technology, or the use of outside capital to fund growth. Almost anything you say about today's consulting industry, you could argue that Gartner did first.
Now 62, Gartner is trying to redefine the rules of the game once more-much to the annoyance of his competitors, who all wish he'd stay in Aspen and retire. In 1995, two years after he left Gartner Group and the company went public, Gartner founded Giga Information Group. It has not yet become a large firm. By Gartner's estimates, Giga will end the year with revenue of $20 million.
Why did he leave Gartner Group? "The whole structure of the computer industry was changing, and Gartner Group stayed the same," Gartner says. "We were organized by sector. But the views when you look at the industry by sector are self-limiting.
"Customers were facing issues that transcended these sectors," he continues, "and were being asked to buy more and more services all the time. The oldmodel just wasn't appropriate for the user constituency anymore."
New Model
Just as daunting has been the effort to accumulate enough capital to make Gartner's new vision a reality. To provide industrywide coverage in a single service, Giga had to hire exp
ertise in all areas at once, rather than build up slowly. To fund that vision without requiring any more outside capital than it has spent already, Giga has built a sales force of more than 100 people-roughly three salespeople for every analyst.
"It's a difficult model to implement," Gartner admits. "The cost structure coming out of the box was exceedingly high. That's implicit in the model we chose. We had to provide coverage over the entire industry before we signed up a single customer. We need to ramp up very quickly to reach a break-even point."
How far does Gartner plan to go? He wants Giga to reach revenue of $25 million next year, and to turn a profit by early 1999. Still, he harbors no illusions about catching up with his former company, which last year reported revenue of nearly $395 million. "We can't be bigger than Gartner Group," he says. "But we can be better."
Gartner pauses, then adds, "But you never know. Maybe we can buy them someday. There are cases where the fish has swallowed the
whale."
e's the father of the research industry," says one colleague when asked what she thinks of Gideon Gartner.
Unlike Gartner Group, the Giga model offers users a single, integrated service for a single price. It's a simple concept, but one that has proved difficult to execute. "We're the first company not to be organized by technology topic," says David Gilmour, Giga's senior VP of research. "It's what customers want. But it's quite challenging to provide."
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