Videos

Steve: I came from industry. I had a job, I had a slew of jobs, and the one thing that struck me was analysts, at least in that time, were academics, they were theoretical. They didn't actually have real jobs, so it was really difficult for me to get my arms around how are they going to possibly help me.

And so, when we became what we became, the objective really was to make sure that no matter who we had, A, they had real practical experience, and B, they tried to help. We like to hire people that have sat in the chairs of the people that they talk to. So, along the way and through the course of 20 years, we've always tried to innovate.

We were the first-ever analyst firm to succeed in hands-on technical validation and testing where we could prove that a vendor's claims were actually legitimate and that's something that an end user should care about and why they should care, and that's been wildly successful. I think we were the first to ever embrace video in this space as a learning and educational and marketing tool.

And now, we've been the first to practice what we preached to everyone, and living in the new world, all our content is now dynamic HTML5, and it works on your phone and on your tablet and wherever it is you want to consume things from. And so, we're constantly looking to evolve and to innovate wherever it is we can.

John: When we started, the commercial internet was still in its infancy, the iPhone hadn't been invented yet, and most companies still owned and operated their own applications and data centers. Now, that's clearly not the world we live in today, so our coverage has evolved over time to focus more on areas like cloud, cybersecurity, analytics, mobility, AI, and we'll constantly look to evolve over time to make sure we're always covering what matters most to the industry and to our clients.

Steve: There are a lot of analyst firms out there. It doesn't take much to print a business card. But, it's very hard for big guys to get down to our level of expertise and of caring because they run big businesses. And it's really hard for little guys who don't have the capital typically and/or the broad depth of expertise to be able to get into as many places to help as we can.

I think what's made us special for the last 20 years and will continue to make us special over the next 20 years, is that we are big enough to matter but we're small enough to care.