Office of the Ombudsman

I have received some questions recently about a law suit filed against Gartner regarding our Magic Quadrant. I want to provide those following the situation with an update.
Yesterday, the judge granted Gartner’s motion to dismiss the case for failing to state a legal claim. While the plaintiff has a limited right to amend and re-file [...]

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It almost sounds like a joke, except we’ve heard it more than once. Here it is: a number of vendors have told their prospects that Gartner charges vendors to be covered in its research. I’ve even heard specific amounts of up to $100,000 being claimed. Quite simply, if this were true Gartner would not be [...]

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Prepare and have a sense of urgency. Do these and you’ll be on your way to mounting a successful escalation about Gartner Research. But there’s more — lots more. Check out the updated Research Issue Escalation Process for Vendors (http://tinyurl.com/mz6vs6).
Also included in the process document is an FAQ that answers questions you may have about whether an escalation [...]

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You might know we’re in the middle of “Hype Cycle season,” where we publish 80 or so Hype Cycle documents in a short period of time. Clients often ask if they can share the graphics and/or quote from the content externally – for example, paste the graphic on their web site, quote from the document [...]

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I’ve noticed lately that a number of vendors have taken draft documents they were sent during the Fact Check process and shared them (sometimes liberally) with people inside and outside of their organizations. We don’t allow this and push back strongly when we find out about these – I think for good reason.
A draft is just [...]

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Gartner published research is copyrighted material. The Gartner Copyright and Quote Policy exists to protect this material when referenced in the public domain. We don’t allow indiscriminate, unauthorized distribution of research, and we also do our best to prevent anyone from misrepresenting or misusing Gartner opinions by taking them out of context. For example, we [...]

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Yesterday a vendor tweeted, “New Question, how many Software Vendors in the Wave and Quadrant are not clients of Gartner and Forrester?”
We can’t speak for anyone else, but Gartner’s answer is that usually most, but not all, vendors in Magic Quadrants are Gartner clients in one way or another – such as exhibiting at our [...]

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Recently, a vendor questioned the integrity of a piece of research, claiming that Gartner hired one of the contributing analysts from his competitor. We investigated the issue and didn’t find any evidence of bias, but it is reasonable to ask, “How does Gartner ensure that a new analyst hired from a vendor is not biased?” [...]

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A vendor asked if we had a formal procedure that analysts follow to check user references provided by vendors and was specifically interested in whether analysts are obligated to contact the companies that the vendors provide as references.
Analysts are not obligated to ask for references when creating any type of document, but they often do [...]

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An analyst called the other day and told us that a vendor client called her asking some questions about a specific end-user client — did she know the CIO, was she aware of their IT strategy, did she know whose equipment they had installed. Immediately this analyst became suspicious that the vendor was fishing for [...]

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