Marcus Barber: Gartner Explains the Process for Creating a Magic Quadrant

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Gartner Explains the Process for Creating a Magic Quadrant

Responding to the Quora conversation we covered last week, Gartner Research Director Lydia Leong published a blog post detailing the process of creating a Magic Quadrant report. " We lay this process out formally in the initiation letters sent to vendors when we start MQ research, so I'm not giving away any secrets here, just exposing a process that's probably not well known to people outside of analyst relations roles," she wrote.

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Here's a summary of the process:

Step 1: Define a market and inclusion criteria.
Step 2: Get approval from chief analysts.
Step 3: Decide evaluation criteria and weights.
Step 4: Send the evaluation criteria and weights to vendors.
Step 5: Do hour long briefings with vendors.
Step 6: Contact three to five reference customers provided by the vendor (however, Gartner mostly relies on the experiences of its clients).
Step 7: Enter the numeric scores into the tool that generates the Magic Quadrant graph.
Step 8: Write-up all the text.
Step 9: Peer review.
Step 10: Alter text and numeric scores accordingly.
Step 11: Send the vendors a copy of the graphic and text written about them for fact-checking.
Step 12: Finally, it goes on to editing and review.

The whole process generally takes four months, and Leong went into quite a bit more detail in her post.

And here's a particularly relevant bit:

Client status and whatnot doesn't make any difference whatsoever on the MQ. (Gartner gets 80% of its revenue from IT buyers who rely on us to be neutral evaluators. Nothing a vendor could pay us would ever be worth risking that revenue stream.)

Hopefully this will help make the Magic Quadrants less mysterious and more understandable.

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