A Peek Behind the Gartner Magic eDiscovery Curtain
Expect a barrage of press release headlines claiming triumph from Gartner’s new “Critical Capabilities for E-Discovery Software” ranking report. FTI is happy to furnish you a copy in exchange for your contact info rather than pay the $1,995 list price. The eDiscovery market has always been too broad to be realistically covered in one ‘Magic Diagram’ by either of the traditional analyst firms. That is why eDJ Group decided to focus on detailed market analysis of actual buying categories instead of over-simplified scatter graphs from the earliest days. Gartner’s new report ranks qualified providers (read analyst clients) in three eDiscovery usage cases by different weightings of rankings in six ‘critical capabilities’. Surprisingly, Gartner has actually published the raw and calculated scores along with the provider qualification criteria. My time as a ‘market analyst’ made me a serious skeptic of most analyst reports and ranking diagrams. It is nice to see a big firm make small steps towards the ideal of transparent, granular analysis aligned with consumer purchasing requirements.