My friend and colleague Steve Duplessie at ESG just blogged about an interesting court case happening in the USA on The Bigger Truth.

“An e-mail archiving company, ZL Technologies, Inc., has sued, been dismissed, and re-sued Gartner – basically claiming that ZL’s placement in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” has caused the company damage – namely, that since Gartner places ZL in the “niche” spot, large customers don’t consider them, although the company contends their offerings are superior to those listed in a more prominent spot. Gartner counter claims that the suit is without merit because the MQ represents opinion, and therefore there is no legal leg for ZL to stand on.”

Here’s my take, nobody who knows anything about IT would pay any attention to Gartner anyway, the Magic Quadrant is uni-dimentional focussed on solving a particular silo of technology problem. Enterprise IT guys have a completely different focus – on Business issues and business problems. CIOs look for three key measures when considering technology: – Business Risk, Business Agility (Cycle Time) and Business Cost.

In my career I probably spent a few more billions of dollars on IT than the average and I can honestly say that I never paid any attention at all. Magic Quadrants just don’t help with any of that so are more important to vendors as bragging rights than useful to buyers.