Are All Analysts Marketing-Execs-In-Training?

Thomas Ptacek | November 28th, 2006 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry, Uncategorized

Richard Steinnon, formerly of Gartner, then of Webroot, then of “indie analyst” IT-Harvest, is now the VP of Marketing at mainstream “UTM” appliance vendor Fortinet.

Amrit Williams, also formerly of Gartner covering security management, is now the CTO of patch and systems management up-and-comer BigFix.

We wish both of them luck, but note affectionately that there’s a pattern here: the “escape hatch” from analyst firms to high-level marketing positions at vendors. It’s hard to avoid the impression that analyst shops are farm teams (or, more generously, bullpens) for product marketing.

This is a conflict of interest. How does one render objective judgement on companies while at the same time keeping their options open for future employment at them?

I invite our analyst readership to comment, or, even better, make their position clear.

For my part: Matasano makes no claims to objectivity.

Viewing 22 Comments

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    Thomas - to be fair to Amrit, I don't know if a CTO position is exactly a "marketing" gig. However, bigger picture your right, todays analyst, could be tomorrows competitor. What do you tell them NDA or not? I am interested in what Amrit and Richard and gang have to say on it.
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    I agree. I've received some very nasty conspiracy theories in my inbox regarding the timing of these events. I'm not sure they are fair or accurate...if someone offered me the choice between hunting for a paycheck versus a steady one with lots of options, I'd prolly go for the latter too...

    But, you should discount my opinion (seriously) because I have a conflict of interest as Fortinet is in the same market as Crossbeam.

    http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/blog/2006/1...

    Objectivity? Homie don't play dat.


    Hoff
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    As an analyst, it's really a tough issue, but not one worthy of conspiracy theories.

    We're exposed to very sensitive information every day. It's a core part of the job, and there's no way around it. Some vendors try and use us as marketing tools, but the smart ones stop manipulating us (mostly, it's always hanging out there) and tend to open up and use us for advice.

    As analysts we're supposed to be the authority in our coverage areas. That leaves 3 career options- stay an analyst forever, work for an end user (in a CSO role or similar for us security guys), or work for a vendor. Guess who pays the best? And it's not like a vendor outside an analyst's coverage area will consider them interesting.

    Amrit and Richard are highly ethical- both are good friends (so I'm biased), but neither would use any NDA knowledge for competitive advantage. As analysts we do make a considerable effort to segregate the knowledge in our head. Sure, there's no way to completely forget everything we've been told, but only a really unethical individual would use NDA knowledge for competitive advantage.

    Another thing to keep in mind is that markets move fast- most of what we're told under NDA is public within 3 months, or general knowledge anyway. If you tell your clients your plans in sales situations it doesn't stay secret for long. Also, a lot of vendors don't realize that smart people in other organizations already have most of the same ideas. There's a reason most products start to look alike over time.

    And any analyst who spends their day "keeping their options open" shouldn't be in the job. Objectivity is a religion where I work, far more than most outsiders realize. If I ever move on, and my new employer expects me to spill the beans and start handing over confidential materials (which I'd have deleted by then anyway), they'll be sorely disappointed. Do that once and your career in the industry is probably over.
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    Alan, regarding vendors disclosing intel to future competitors posing as analysts: the game's the game, yo. No sympathy, no concern.

    My issue is that, much like the relationship between congressional staffers and lobbyists, there's a perception that "analyst jobs" are thinly-veiled career pitstops for future marketing execs.

    CTO, by the way, is totally a marketing role. Counterexample? Product strategy is a marketing function.
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    Chris: let me be totally clear: I don't think Amrit or Richard did anything wrong. The pattern doesn't start here. Brendan Hannigan at Q1Labs did the same thing; so did Ted Julian (now at AppSec). I'm sure there are other examples.
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    Mogull these are all great points and I'm glad you wrote them.

    But they're not addressing my argument. I'm not worried that people are misusing information they got under NDA. That's silly. I've briefed analysts and I know what kind of info they get, and if your competitors can't source that kind of stuff from someone less visible than an analyst, you have weak competitors.

    I'm worried that there's no objectivity in ANY analyst that has an eye towards taking a role at a company in the same space as they cover.
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    Yeah, I often learn more from competitors than the company themselves.

    I think it's possible to stay objective- and the rule of thumb is if you hit a certain point, you withdraw from certain activities. It's been done before.

    If you're just using the job to farm yourself people will pick up on it. That's hard to hide. If your advice isn't objective, it will also be picked up on.

    I'm not saying it can't happen, but it's not something you should worry about in your day to day analyst interactions unless you have some sort of specific knowledge. My employer, for example, takes these potential conflicts very seriously.
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    Just to be clear, I was discounting those conspiracy theories...sorry if my post read otherwise, I should have noted explicitly that I don't subscribe to them.

    Funny as hell, though.

    I like Richard a lot and I really enjoy his perspective even if we don't always agree. In fact, we hired him for our WW sales meeting last year as a presenter! ;)

    Chris
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    Questioning objectivity is the same as questioning our integrity. Tom, I have worked with you in the past and will work with you in the future. I know that you are not implying that my integrity is in question.

    I appreciate your concerns but I would counter that we would not have been succesful if we were not objective, personally once I began discussions I notifed the boss and removed myself from talking with any vendor or situation that would be/could be viewed as putting my integrity or objectivity, oir the my employers, at risk. I did not join Gartner as a launching pad to a "marketing" gig, nor was I looking to leave when the opportunity arose. Analysts firms are like any other company they need to put packages in place to attract and retain talent, even with those are in place there will always be folks who pursue other opportunities.

    Also I would note that a move from one vendor to another, such as an executive moving from IBM/Tivoli to CA, or a lead engineer moving from McAfee to Symantec is far more questionable than an analyst moving to a vendor and that happens all the time.

    The world has changed since the last generation, the technology industry rarely supports long term, multi-decade careers at a single company. Everytime I go to RSA I see the same people I have known and worked with for years, but they are always wearing a different jersey. This is life today.

    There are people who do questionable or unethical things all the time, I am not one of them though and in general all of the people, including analysts, I have worked with are ethical, as Rich pointed out those who are not objective or ethical are easy to spot and it will always come back to bite them.
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    Hating the game doesn't mean hating the player. Of course I'm not questioning your objectivity, Amrit.

    I'm not sure how there's any conflict of interest involved in moving from one vendor to another. Everybody in that scenario knows the score; nobody's objective, nobody's supposed to be.

    My comment is this:

    There's a pattern of people moving from analyst jobs to high-level marketing jobs.

    If this is an open secret, and I assume it is, then I have a question:

    How do you do the best possible job of being an objective analyst when a significant chunk of your career options belong to vendors you might need to piss off?

    I'm not even talking about writing reports about the systems/patch management space after opening up talks with BigFix. I'm talking about all the little judgement calls you make prior to knowing which vendor you're going to jump to.
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    Easy- you just don't care. If someone doesn't like my objective opinions as an analyst, they sure won't like them as an employee.

    The future career of an analyst is based totally on the quality of their work, and that quality is directly tied to objectivity. It doesn't matter if we want to retire as an analyst, work for a vendor, or work for an end user.

    If I worry about pissing anyone off I can't do my job, I won't be good at it, and no one will want to hire me anyway.

    An analyst best secures their future through objectivity and quality of analysis. Take a look and Amrit and Richard, or even Rothman- all can barely pick up their mail without pissing someone off, and all have held (or hold) those high level positions.

    There are always exceptions, but if you equivocate or allow yourself to be influenced you seriously risk your future.
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    I weighed in as well on my own blog.

    http://securityincite.com/blog/mike-rothman/the...

    This has been a point of discussion since the first vendor hired the first analyst. And no I don't know when that happened, but it was surely before my time.

    Now I don't buy the fact that you can shut your brain off and that you aren't going to use everything you've got, learned, and done in the past to be successful in the future. But markets to move fast, so you've got an unfair advantage for maybe 3 months MAX.

    And I still don't understand the objectivity thing. Ethical folks do the best job they can for whoever is paying their freight. I guess there are scum that don't behave ethically, but as Rich says - what goes around comes around. And it does come around.
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    I have a question that is underscored by Mike's query.

    Can someone within the context of this discussion please define "objectivity?" I don't believe that most analysts are objective at all. Not from an ethical perspective but rather from an ideological one.

    Let's not be naieve and try to forget the fact that most analysts don't work for free and that ultimately it's still a pay-for-play world...this may not make its way down to the individual analyst level, but the G-People certainly are not a 503(c), either.

    What I mean is that most analysts have some VERY strong opinions. Some of these opinions can create markets, destroy companies and shape trends. Richard has had this effect in his prior life as an analyst.

    Is Richard objective when he says NAC is a waste of time and he dislikes Cisco? No, he's stating his subjective opinion based upon his analysis.

    Wall street analysts are supposed to be "objective" too, but I know many of them who have a dislike for a particular company or technology that they cover and it makes its way into their body of work.

    I think the objectivity issue really did get equated with integrity here, and it's clouding some of the very valid points people here are making.

    There's room for everyone in the vendor cesspool! Come on in, the water's fine, just check your credibility with the lifeguard at the deep end. ;)

    Hoff
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    What a great discussion. Most of the points on objectivity have been addressed. Just as in any career you have to protect your own integrity above all else. From my experience vendors very carefully set up every call with analysts. While they reveal NDA info about upcoming M&A and perhaps some strategy discussion for the most part they pretty much cloak themselves from analysts.
    So next time you hire an industry analyst for an in depth strategy review ask yourself if you are going to get immediate value from that session. Immediate input on messaging, product pricing, strategy whatever. And, is that value worth the risk that the analyst gets approached by a competitor the next day and in three weeks is heading up strategy for them?
    If you don't see the value go ahead and try to subject the poor analyst to a day of slideware and slime and avoid the risk.

    There is a similar situation in the public accounting business. The career path for an auditor is up the ladder to partner or out to a client as controller or CFO. The big four love this because the CFO invariably hires her alma mater to do her audits.

    There is one more situation that I have witnessed that is kind of ugly. This *could* go on in the analyst sphere but I have never seen it. In the automotive supplier business it was not uncommon to hire away the people at GM, Ford, or Chrysler that were preventing you from getting more business. If there was a particular engineering manager that favored your competitor you would hire him for some high paying VP level job and then give him some make-work task until he quit. But, in the meantime you improved your shot at the next $100 million supply job.
    There really is no way to address your concerns other than to make sure your expectations line up with reality. Analysts are not gods on a pedestal. Successful ones *do* maintain unusually high ethical standards. But they probably stumbled into the analyst job in the first place and have dreams and aspirations that might not include the grueling schedule and horrendous daily pressure of being an analyst. My theory is that everyone has a lifetime limit on the number of Power Point slides they can be subjected to. As analysts get close to that limit they bail!
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    I just want to pin down why I think you might be getting more of the unvarnished truth from Rothman, and maybe less from some random anonymous G-man with his eyes set on the VP/M spot at Arbor. Amrit, Richard, and Mogull aren't anonymous --- but doesn't it help to know that, friendly or not, we're still keeping tabs on them? ;)

    Great comment, Richard. Thanks!
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    Heck, it's just nice to know someone cares :)
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    "Also I would note that a move from one vendor to another, such as an executive moving from IBM/Tivoli to CA, or a lead engineer moving from McAfee to Symantec is far more questionable than an analyst moving to a vendor and that happens all the time."

    No. Not at all. Us folk who are the clients of both analysts and vendors make assumptions which of the two will be more biased. Analysts are actually anonymous to most clients. Fact is most of us will never ever meet them online or off.
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    Geez, I comment in the morning, come back at night and look at all of this! Thomas, after thinking on this today, I have to say that I have wrapped my head around it and don't think there is anything wrong with analysts moving to vendors or to other analysts shops for that matter. I don't subscribe to the "good analysts are angels" theory, but like Rothman says, at best you have a 3 month edge, not worth hiring one for. At the end of the day they are entitled to do what is best for them and their families as well. As Hoff would say, we have all been on the tuna boat before and we should not be naive enough that we don't expect this stuff to happen. I was actually talking to Amrit tonight about this subject, and one of the things I said I would love to see is a "dealing with analysts for dummies" book. Who knows what to tell them, when to market, when to ask advice, etc. It is very much a learning process that varies from one to the next. Anyway, good luck to Amrit and Richard. Lets see who the next one to go is.
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    I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what Amrit and Richard did, just that there's a pattern, and someone hoping for Consumer-Reports-style reportorial independence might be disappointing to realize that.
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    There are 650 or so analysts where I work, with over 20 on the security team alone. In the past 4 years, I think only Amrit and Richard made the move we're talking about (and one guy about 5 years ago). Kind of hard to call that a big pattern.

    It happens. It will happen more. But I seriously doubt it affects research quality enough for anyone to care relative to the value of the product in the first place.
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    Integrity is a very well-defined and an easy to evaluate metric. Objectivity, however, is very often in the eye of the beholder.

    There are observations and analyses based on breadths of perspectives and then there are those based on narrower perspectives.

    I similarly think that the much-used "taint of commercial interests" applies to a broader set than merely "us marketing types"...
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    Heck, if I were a vendor I'd want to hire an analyst that'd pissed me off - if they proved right and I were proved wrong! I'd want that insight on my team.

    Objectivity may be in the eye of the beholder, but there are many "beholders" at Gartner - all research is subject to peer review & it would be very hard to get "I-think-you're-great-so-give-me-a-job-when-I-bail" research published.

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