Office of the Ombuds

Guest post by Jackie Ryan, VP of Content Production, Gartner

Providers sometimes ask why Gartner has rendered their company or product names differently from how the providers represent these names themselves. For example, our style is to change “Verint Systems Inc.” to be “Verint Systems” instead.

Gartner does strive to reproduce company and product names exactly, but we have long shied away from reproducing “textual effects” — such as backward letters, bold or italic type, and varying point sizes and fonts — and we will continue to do so. The foundation of our style remains the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook (see “company names”). However, we have decided to break with AP on the treatment of company and product names in Gartner Research in an effort to ensure that our research represents what our clients see in the marketplace.

What You Will See:

• Company names will be presented in full on first reference, as they appear on the “About the Company” page of the company’s website. Capitalization, spelling, spacing and punctuation will be reproduced exactly (unless the name uses hard-to-render characters, such as backward letters). When this page gives contradictory guidance, we will always go by what is used in the text blurb about the company, rather than the company name as presented in logos, addresses, copyright lines and elsewhere. If there is a mixture of long and short versions of the name in the text blurb, we will favor the long version.
• Product names will be treated the same as company names, and the product landing page will be considered the gold standard for determining the proper presentation.
• Ampersands will be used only if they are part of the company’s formal name, but not otherwise in place of “and.”
• A lowercase “the” will be used unless it is part of the company’s formal name.
• “Inc.,” “Corp.,” “GmbH” and similar abbreviations will be omitted, as will their expanded forms (e.g., “Incorporated”).
• Company and product names will be rendered as current at the time of publication. Gartner will not update published research after company rebranding efforts, mergers, or acquisitions.

Our editors and writers will begin implementing this updated guidance immediately — including content that is already in progress.