So what happens when an analyst whom you've trusted with confidential information about your company and your customers takes a job with one of your competitors? Howard Dresner, one of the most well-known and influential analysts in the business intelligence space, left Gartner to take a job at BI vendor, Hyperion, a couple of weeks ago. That's a move that has at least one CEO of a major BI company, who asked to remain anonymous, crying foul. "He knows confidential information about my company," he said. "That could hurt me."

Hyperion PR manager, Bob Schettino, says, "It's no secret that Howard was recruited by a number of BI companies, so it is not surprising they are upset and perhaps a bit jealous of his joining Hyperion. It is surprising they might question his integrity though."

Dresner says he has not participated in any NDA briefings since mid-July. He also says that as soon as he announced he was taking a job with Hyperion, Gartner excluded him from client meetings and internal planning discussions. "I'm surprised anyone would raise a stink over this," he said. "I have scrupulous integrity, and I never had a breach in the 13 years I was at Gartner."Â? Dresner says he doesn't hold any NDA information (products and strategies he has been briefed on by various vendors have since become public), "but even if there was something in the deep recesses of my brain I wouldn't reveal it anyway and Hyperion wouldn't ask me to do so."

Mychelle Mollot , senior VP of market strategy and analyst relations at Cognos says she isn't concerned. She says Gartner told clients that Dresner was leaving to join a business intelligence software company--but not which one--several months beforehand, and Dresner removed himself from working with vendor confidential information long before his departure. Cognos even kept Dresner as a speaker at a September customer event. "Gartner is a firm of really high integrity. And (Dresner) is a high-integrity person," she says.

But Mollot acknowledges that due to the Cognos 8 product cycle, the last time the vendor provided detailed product and marketing strategy information to Dresner was in January, and most of that information was public by the time of the company's June user conference. "So for us there was no threat," Mollot says.

Rene Bonvanie, chief marketing officer at Business Objects, considers it a "non-event." Like Cognos, Business Objects execs say Dresner "opted out" of vendor meetings and briefings several months before he left. And Bonvanie says he's confident Dresner will abide by any non-disclosure agreements that apply to information Business Objects supplied to him.

Still, the executive who requested anonymity argued, "I think Gartner is misplacing their customer's trust if they fail to have agreements [that prevent these kinds of moves from happening], he said. "I think Gartner was derelict in not having a waiting period before an analyst entrusted with confidential customer information could join one of the companies the analyst worked with and the competitor of all of the others."

Gartner Ombudsman Nancy Erskine acknowledged that whenever a big-name analyst makes a move like this, a vendor has a right to be nervous, but that the firm is developing a formal policy that will prohibit all external interactions with clients in situations like this. "That way, any influence they have over the market goes away," she said. "The remaining time they spend [at Gartner] is for information transfer." She said that analysts are also reminded that any confidential information they hold must remain with Gartner.

Should Gartner and other analyst firms forbid their analysts from taking jobs with companies they cover in their research efforts? Would that be fair to an analyst who may be seeking greener pastures or a new challenge? Let us know what you think.