June 7th, 2017 | by Richard Cho, GM for Peer Insights & Peer Connect

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What’s the right way to interpret customer reviews? Are the best companies the ones with the highest average score, or the ones with the most reviews? We all have questions like this when using review sites like TripAdvisor to plan our vacations or Yelp to find a new restaurant. These questions take on more weight when using reviews to inform the purchase of a multi-million dollar software package that’s critical for your company’s success. The Gartner Peer Insights Customer Choice Awards are designed to help you navigate these questions to make faster decisions with more confidence.

Since starting Peer Insights in October of 2015, we have collected more than 25,000 reviews across over 160 markets. In a growing number of these markets, we believe we’ve collected enough data to help you understand which vendors are the most valued by their customers. We’ve done the hard math so you don’t have to. But don’t just take our word for it – you can see the complete details of our award methodology here.

We know that we’re not the only ones to give awards in the technology space. Our clients have told us through the years that many of these awards have the reputation of being pay-to-play, and as we’ve seen some of the criteria, we’d be inclined to agree. You can rest assured that at Gartner we stand behind our methodology and process, and you can trust us to do the right thing – our brand depends on it.

We’re launching the first of these awards on June 12th at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Maryland. This first award will recognize the top vendors in the Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) market, which is one of our deepest markets for reviews. Assuming all goes to plan, we’ll follow up with more awards in the coming months. Stay tuned for more.

You can learn more about Gartner Peer Insights by visiting us at https://www.gartner.com/reviews