Analyst Relations, How Does it Work (Ep. 24)

Episode 11 · 2016-06-20 · 56:53 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, hello, everybody. It's another episode of Pivotal Conversations with myself and Richard Siroter. We actually have a guest for the first time. And let me tell you, other than the guest being awesome, the reason this came up is I don't think we're going to be able to record next week. So I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to have a guest on. So we've got a little bit of news stuff to go over. But since it's actually recorded in the past, awesome things may have been happening by the time you listen to this that we missed. It's not because we missed them. It's just because we recorded this a while ago. That is at least the week before it was published. I'll publish a timeline so you can sort this out, you know, put it up on your crazy wall. Anyhow, as always, I'm Coté. You want to introduce yourself, Richard, and say hello? Yep, Richard. Good to have you here again, Coté. I'm excited to chat with our guest and put her through the ringer. And first guest effort on at least the new format of Pivotal Conversations. Why don't you introduce yourself? What an honor. I'm Rita Menachi, and I'm the head of analyst relations at Pivotal. Well, as a segue into our news stuff, like, so one thing I wanted to mention is speaking of analysts. So I wrote a column. I have a monthly column at the register on bimodal IT. And like, you know, I'm sure it's fabulous because I wrote it. So I was there. But I mean, you know, I get asked about this question a lot. And so it was a good opportunity to, we'll put a link to it in the show notes, of course. But I wanted to kind of put this sort of middle view that I have about it. And I'm curious, you know, this is, I wanted to bring this up because it's highly related to analyst stuff. You know, I basically wanted to point out that like, I've, because I have access beyond the paywall, and whatnot. Like, I can kind of read both sides of the story, the sort of the Gartner idea of what bimodal is, and then also all the free stuff about the people who kind of don't like bimodal. And I don't know, I mean, the summary, I try to, you tell me if you think it's fair, but I try to summarize both sides of the position and basically have the usual call of like, hey, these people should talk

with each other and sort it out and have like a unimodal voice about this. Yeah, I like that. I mean, it's easy to have caricatures on both sides. Like, hey, here's the bimodal advocates who are just completely out of touch and lunatics. And here's the crazy mode two, or just whatever, the people who think that everybody should run fast and everyone else is dinosaurs. I thought your article hit a good middle ground. I mean, frankly, every Coté article, I'm more excited to read your comments, especially on the register, because they are always all over the place. So, but at the same time, I mean, almost to your point, that is the people that we interface with. And so it's easy to have these opinions, but you have to sometimes road test them, even with your most violent skeptics. So I thought it hit a good ground. As you say, you get to read both sides and, you know, bimodal can feel too simplistic. There may be other things, but I think you hit a good angle there that we have to figure out how we work in this model, creating factions. Is it going to help? Yeah. To add to Richard's comments, I think, I think you did a good job of saying perhaps bimodal is being misunderstood. That's what I got out of it. And I thought that was actually a nice sane way of looking at it. And, and, and I bring this up one, just to glorify myself, to further poke fun at myself in an indirect kind of ironic way. But like, I think it's a good example of, and there's many areas in, especially in working with you over the past seven months, Rita, where you sort of have to mediate and explain what analysts are saying to various constituencies. And, and I find that sort of having been a formal analyst myself, kind of ironically, analysts are not always the best people at explaining what it is they're saying. And, and, and I think, I think in an analyst relations role, uh, and tell me if you think this is wrong, but like you end up, uh, a large part of the job ends up being an explainer to all of the different audiences that, that you have involved. Exactly. Including the analyst sometimes. That's right. That's right. Yeah. No, I, I mean, I think, I think that's, uh, and, and that's,

you know, I, I think, so I think the bimodal thing is a good example of that, right? Like the, there is a lot of material on bimodal it behind Gartner's firewall. And I, even I not even I, but I have to admit, I haven't read it all, but there's actually a pretty good, I forget if I linked to it in, in that piece, but there's a pretty good webcast that's recent, um, that kind of, I think goes over it quite nicely that explains it well. And I don't know, aside from like totally crazy comments that you get at their register, it'll be, it'll be fun to see if there's any conversation. So closing out our news thing, I keep jumping to the analyst thing and then pulling back from it. The other large thing that happened this week is, uh, I was surprised by this, but, uh, someone, someone bought joint. If I was being snarky, I would say finally, but, uh, Samsung of all people bought joint. And as far as I can tell, having, having worked on, uh, M and a stuff, like, like it's, I read these press releases pretty carefully. It was the CTO of the mobile division at Samsung who commented on it. So I guess it's driven by the mobile division. And it seems like the pretty legit deal rationale was, uh, we need some processing for all that stuff on the edge for mobile devices, which, you know, get you some interesting IOT things and stuff like that. But it's, uh, yeah, I mean, the rationale makes sense once you sit down and think about it, but man, I never would have thought of Samsung as an acquirer of, uh, anything, let alone of joint. Right. Yeah, no, it's definitely an interesting purchase for them, but, you know, joint's been known, I think in the industry is having a lot of good and really solid engineering, you know, and while they they're expensive because they've raised, I think it was well over a hundred million dollars. So it was going to be tough to acquire them, but at the same time, some great engineering talent, you know, they really innovate on some interesting things on containers, doing some things with storage. So I mean, it's a smart buy for Samsung, especially if they got a good price, but you know, it's like I tweeted out right afterwards. I think they're the last of the major Gartner recognized public clouds that was independent. There's other ones like Linode

and DigitalOcean and others, but this was kind of the last stand of the, uh, the pure standalone public clouds, which probably tells you something. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I imagine versus DigitalOcean, their joints, probably a bit more affordable. I mean, DigitalOcean's become so huge that, uh, they, they must be pretty pricey, but yeah, that is interesting. Now, you know, you used to work at Sun, right, Rita? You know, some of these joint people. I do. And I remember Brian actually, and I remember him. They worked on D-Trace, I believe. Oh yeah. He's like one of, one of IT's most memorable people. He's, he's great. Yes, exactly. And, uh, there's a couple of other things that I remember from, but that's the most, um, most vivid. Um, and I actually, one of the funny, funny descriptions of, of joint as a sun refugee, refugee camp kind of made me chuckle. So temperatures. Yeah. There's a lot of former some folks there. And my thought was, I'm sure joint probably has a lot of really great technology. Uh, one of our, one of our colleagues mentioned that they don't really get enterprise. So this was, uh, an interesting acquisition indeed. So. Yeah. And to the point, to the point of technology they have, I mean, they've got a lot of, I think they still have all of these things. I, I don't pay super close attention to them like I used to, but they have, they have a lot of like node people there. And they also have, uh, I mean, their, their, their cloud platform is, if I remember, is a variant of Solaris. I mean, it's long ago forked from it, but it has a lot of Solaris heritage to it. And so that brings in all the file system stuff and so forth and so on. So they have pretty solid technology, uh, behind their offerings. They do potentially tough to maintain when it's, it's forked and it's maintained uniquely, but there's no denying there's a lot of horsepower that Samsung just picked up. Yeah, exactly. I think, I think, I think that's the point. I think great technology and, uh, but don't really know how to market it, which was, I believe an issue at sun as well. So we'll see

how that all works out. Go to market's always tricky. So let's welcome our guest. So, so I felt so unwelcome until just now. That's right. I'll, I'll have to, I'll have to make the guest introduction and transition a lot more smoother next time. So we don't bounce all around, but you know, it's good, it's good to, uh, it's good to have someone like yourself to help iron it out, but more, more, more, uh, more seriously. So like, uh, we kind of briefly went over what AR does analyst relations. Um, and like, like, like to build on that, why don't, why don't we start off? Like, I think one of the questions, uh, that one of our colleagues, um, or the several of our colleagues is all often asking you as we, as we bring in people from the, let's say non-vendor side who aren't used to dealing with analysts dealing with, who aren't used to working with analysts is there's often, and tell me if, if, if you think the cycle of learning about analysts is different, but I've noticed that one of the more common things is it's almost like some variation of the, how many stages of grief are there? The final one is like acceptance, but there's one of the first stages of figuring out analysts is like, who are these people and who invited them to the party? And, and like, like, how would you describe like the role that industry analysts to be specific play in, in our industry? Like what, what do they do? Well, ultimately they are supposed to be providing unbiased, um, counsel, if you will, to end user organizations. So our potential customers, that's ultimately what they want to do. That's the value they bring to the party. Um, our, uh, potential customers or existing customers, whatever, go to them and ask them for insight or direction on, um, technology purchase decisions, decision-making, um, architectural paradigms, sometimes even cultural implications of these things. For example, that's a, that's a hot topic

right now, given, uh, digital transformation, DevOps, microservices, you know, we've all talked about, and I'm sure a lot of the listeners know that implementing these things internally require a huge cultural transformation. So they like to get feedback from the analysts on how, how to overcome these things. And if there are, you know, technology, you know, technology purchases they can make to help smooth those things out and to help them kind of, you know, address some of the issues they're having internally with, uh, in this case, let's talk about, you know, in their IT organizations. So they're sort of advisors. Yes. And, but, but it has to be right. Supposedly unbiased. That's the value they bring. Right. Right. So speaking of that, so, I mean, along those lines, I, from your experience, how do analysts keep up? I mean, obviously they're typically segmented by a discipline. You know, I'm, I'm in this area of cloud or I'm in this area of data or what have you, but you know, how is an analyst supposed to stay up on something? So when I'm a company coming to them saying, help me figure out what I should do with this, that they're actually getting the latest and greatest advice from, from what's going on in the market. Right. I think it's a combination of talking with vendors and listening to, listening to what vendors are doing, having insight onto, um, vendors strategies with products. Um, and then also technical briefings. It also is based on the conversations they have with the customers, right? So they can grok from the types of questions they're getting where the market is headed. And that's a value of course to the vendors, right? Cause they can come back and say, Hey, I'm getting a lot of questions on containers and container orchestration. I'm getting a lot of questions on, on-prem paths. So that helps us, right? The vendors, um, they also attend events. Um, that's another way for them to, to, to keep up. Uh, and, uh, I think I assume like the rest of us reading on the interwebs to quick follow up. No, I'll, I'll flip back to you. I just wanted to ask, you mentioned, I think

Hote in your description, uh, unbiased. So, I mean, there's at least the, uh, the occasional snark you see about, Hey, it's pay for play, you know, like, Hey, the only reason you're in a magic quadrant or a wave or pick a geometric shape that's used by an analyst firm. The only reason you're in that is because you've paid your fee and therefore that's why you're in there. Uh, obviously, Hey, analyst firms are in the business of making money and there are subscription costs that vendors and customers all pay for. But I mean, how do you counter that? I mean, from my experience directly dealing with analysts, there's some fairly thorough people. And while they may have more exposure to some versus others versus who they do briefings with, there's a real concerted effort to not be in anyone's pocket there. You know, we get argued with all the time by analysts. They're not just trying to pump anyone's products, but how do you answer those sorts of concerns? So how I like to frame it is as a vendor, we're not buying their opinion. You know, people say you're buying their opinion. No, we're not. We're buying their time, right? That's what most of our spend is, is to have access to these analysts, right? It's buying their time. And then hopefully, um, the time we spend with them leads to, to informing them and hopefully, you know, liking us, but that's not always true. And I've worked with other, with other vendors, for other vendors and who spent a lot more money than we do on analysts. And it did not necessarily mean that they liked us more. So I, in my 10 years of working in analyst relations, I can say that it is not pay for play. There are some, you know, smaller firms that perhaps, you know, may feel that way. Uh, but the, the ones with the reputation to uphold, for sure, I think are unbiased and you cannot buy their opinion. Yeah. I think, I think that's a good categorization that you buy the opportunity to influence them at, at worst, so to speak. Um, and, and, you know, at best, it's what you're saying is just like, you're, you're buying time with them consultative or otherwise, uh, to do things. And, and, and, you know, to add to, to, to be a little bit of the interviewed myself, since I've been an analyst

several times, there are instances where you do hire analysts to do things for you, whether it's, uh, consultative things or straight up, like generating content for you. And it might be, it might be as, um, transactional, so to speak, as having them ghost write something, or it could be a little like, uh, a little, not weird, but a little more direct. Like, like we have some papers that we've licensed from various analysts and I've worked on papers like that before. And generally like, uh, as a consumer of analyst stuff, you have a pretty good sense of sniffing out when an analyst has done the work of, uh, fighting back and yet getting paid. So, so that, so that what they're writing is very genuine and helpful and, and, and words aren't being, um, you know, uh, suggest changes that into their mouths or anything like that. Mm-hmm. But even that practice isn't that prevalent. I mean, generally also like analysts charge a lot of money to like write a paper for you. And so it's a very, it's cost prohibitive to do that a lot. No, that's fair. Do you think that definition of an analyst has changed a bit? I mean, Coté, your, your days and Rita, we deal with, with different ones, but as you say, there's smaller boutique firms, there's people who are bloggers slash analysts that kind of definition of someone who's trying to be unbiased and analyze an industry sometimes differs from the person who works for a firm. How do you read it when you're figuring out who you want to interact with, differentiate between sometimes what almost feels like press versus what feels like independent thinker versus an actual analyst? Do you just stick with the analyst firms, the above the line, bigger ones that we think of? You know, that's a good question. I think it depends on the AR program and I hate to bring it all back to, well, I guess it's all about me anyway. So it depends on what you try and achieve with your analyst relations program, right? If you are needing content and you are needing kind of the more, the more public advocates, like the bloggers, bloggers slash analysts, then

you can invest in those. But if you are looking to raise your visibility or, uh, or impact purchasing decisions, decisions of large enterprises, you're going to be going with the traditional, you know, Gartner and Forrester's of the world, right? Well, there's an Obama and four, five everyone as well. But, uh, I think it depends what you're trying to achieve with the program. Truly. So, so if, if, if you're in sort of like the market to, to work with analysts, let's, let's start with like the, uh, the buy side. So not, not vendors like us enterprises or organizations like, and you haven't really like interacted with analysts before, like, like what would be your advice about how do I, cause you know, analysts aren't cheap unless you talk with them only in Twitter, but like, how do I, how do I kind of like come up with the framing or the requirements or the buyer's guide for like analysts I want to talk with? I mean, I mean kind of narrowed down to the area we care about, like, you know, infrastructure software and development and kind of all that stuff. Like how would I figure out who I would even talk to and what, what kind of, what kind of questions I would ask them and what, what I would expect. Right. So do you mean which firms or do you mean which analysts, which individual analyst at a firm? Uh, well, well both, right? Like, like if, if, if I didn't really know anything, if I was just like, I was told I need to go talk to some analysts, right? Like, and you're, and you're an IT manager. Yeah. And, and, and I, I went to Google and I searched for like cloud strategy industry analysts. Right. And like, that's where I am. Like, like what, like how, what kind of advice could you give people to kind of handhold them to not, I mean, to accelerate having success talking with analysts basically? Right. So if you have, if your company has access or has given you specifically access or one of your close colleagues access to research, I think I would start reading research first. And then based on that, see who, you know, if there's an analyst that comes up

regularly, you would set up an inquiry with that analyst, which are 30 minutes asking them questions. That's basically how I would start. Um, if you don't have access to, uh, research from, you know, Gartner, Forrester, Ovum, IDC, four or five, one, uh, Twitter is a great place, but even there you're going to get limited, right? A lot of the, um, for example, there aren't a lot of Gartner analysts that tweet. That's just how it is. Right. Forrester does a little bit more. Of course there's Red Monk and those folks that I would, that I would go to the Twitter and then follow up from there, either engage in, um, conversations with them there publicly, which isn't ideal. But if you are lucky enough to have that your company has paid for you to be able to talk to the analysts or read their research, then start with reading research and then do inquiries with the analyst who comes up the most in that research that you're reading on the topic you're interested in. And then, and then how, how, how would you frame up like the expectations of what you get like in, in an inquiry? Like, um, like let me back up a little bit too. There's also events. There's also events, right? I know Gartner does a whole few events. Forrester does some of, there's a lot of events as well. Uh, so does the four or five one where you can, and if you don't, and you can go to these events, even if you're not a customer of theirs or a client of theirs, you buy a ticket, it's a couple of grand, you sit in on a bunch of sessions. The sessions are often informative, but, um, you also get accessed one-on-one access to analysts. You could do like 30 minutes. It's almost like, like a speed dating setup is how I like to describe it. And you've been to one of these events with me. So, you know, you get a 30 minute inquiry. So if you are not a customer or client of Forrester or Gartner, go to their events, go to the sessions. That'll also give you a good sense of which analysts are writing about the topics you care about. And then you can also do inquiry with them at the conference or, you know, uh, across them after the session and ask them questions on the fly. Yeah. It's, it's like, uh, if you're not sure what your feelings on like Tex-Mex are, go to a buffet

and you can figure it out. Exactly. So, so that's one thing. So, sorry, I cut you off. Oh, no, no, no, no. So in terms of what's just... I wouldn't have thought of the conference angle, but that's good. That's a good point of like how to get a very, uh, uh, affordable, wide exposure and kind of figure out how to, how to match up. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then, so to your question, what to expect in an inquiry, you know, I always find that if you can, whether you're a vendor and end user, if you can give the analyst three to five questions, you want to go over specific questions that helps them be better prepared. Um, you can expect basically, you know, if you give them those questions, then you can just go right into it. Um, otherwise, you know, just expect them to give you, again, hopefully unbiased, you know, they can also give you, if they've talked into it, if they've talked to enough customers of a particular vendor, uh, they might share some feedback they get on a, on a specific vendor or technology like, Oh yes, you know, uh, I spoke to a company that was in a similar position as yours and they used Pivotal solution to achieve this by doing this. So, uh, that's the kind of stuff you can, you can expect, but as always, you know, the more information you can give them beforehand, the better, then we'll be better prepared to answer your questions. Right. And to summarize the last point, I mean, I, I, I think of analysts a lot as aggregators of anecdotes to some point, which, which sounds demeaning, but it's actually not. It's like they, they talk with so many vendors and as you say, end users or, or people, organizations who run this stuff that they start to pick up on all that undocumented stuff in the sky and they can, and, and once you aggregate anecdotes, use the old joke, that becomes data or data. And, uh, so they can start reporting on like what people, your peers are doing and what, what's working and not working, uh, in, in the kind of area that you're looking for. Exactly. Right. I mean, I was thinking, I don't even think about, I hadn't thought as much about

the stories and the anecdotes. I often think of it just the strategy and the product information, but you're right. That's such an awesome source of information. If I'm just trying to find out does someone look like me, that they must've heard tons of stories that they can relate to that. You know, I like to tell by executives that, uh, customer references are the, um, currency of analyst relations. So, and that you can brief your analysts about your product and your strategy every month for a year and nothing changes. But once you have your customers talking to them and telling them what they've done, what they've achieved, what problems they've overcome, or even problems they still have, you know, it's all roses and chocolate, right? Um, they have a better idea of, of what, of our products. And as they aggregate these anecdotes, they can kind of see where trends are going, right? Right. So that's the value. So sticking with the end user, like what are some other, so there's sort of like inquiries and finding out stuff and kind of what's working, getting the lay land, but what are some of the other services that, that end users or things they could go to analysts for? You know, I hate to bring it down to, uh, brass tacks. I think it helps give them peace of mind, right? That they are making the right decision if it's on a specific vendor or a specific direction, like our architectural direction, like, Hey, is micros, should I care about microservices yet? Right. Or, uh, should I try and build my architecture on containers? And what is that? What are the implications of that? Sort of like a, uh, tastemaker validation, executive security blanket. Exactly. Well, exactly. You know, I, you know, I, so I talked to one of our, one of our customers about how they use Gartner and Forrester and they're like, it's often just, and I've actually asked, I've been at events and I've asked the attendees, what do you use them for? And a lot of them just say, so I can go to my manager and say, Gartner said it was okay. You know, it's like the

whole, no one gets fired for buying IBM. It's, uh, you know, if you could say Gartner, Gartner says it's okay to spend this money on that, or Gartner says this is the better solution or, or, you know, it's kind of like insurance a little bit. But vendors do that too, right? I mean, we might say, Hey, we briefed the vendor before you launch a product or any company may, and then they can go back like, Hey, you know, Gartner, Forrester thought this was an awesome product or Red Monk was totally into it. So if it does crash and burn, you think you have to get out of jail free card. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. To, to, I think to use a technical term, it's third party validation, uh, that, that, that you can have on something, but it's sort of peer review in a non-scientific sense, which makes sense. And good point. I mean, I mean, you know, the, the, the other things I've noticed, uh, analysts doing is like, I, I've, uh, now that I go on sales calls every now and then, every now and then there's been like the weird spooky analysts in the back of the corner, helping evaluate like, like a big gigantic strategic purchase that some large organization is doing. So I, and, and tell me, I don't know what percentage of time analysts do this, but it seems like they get involved, um, in a more active consultative way, or they can get involved in an active consultative way in large strategy and purchasing decisions that, that, that a company's doing. And then, um, I think in addition to that, the other kind of input that they, they can kind of get, I mean, it's basically revolves around that is like, do something that's a little more consultative that builds on the research that you do and give me some pretty active yet third party input on these decisions that we're making. Not just, not just being like a bookshelf of encyclopedias that I'm accessing. Right. You know, well, some of them also publish actual spreadsheets that help you evaluate criteria for, for making purchasing decisions on, on products, uh, or playbooks. You know, I've seen play, you know, Forster does a whole playbook series. Right. So, um, they do offer that as well. And, and there are firms that have a whole consulting arm and as somebody put it, they implement the research that we write, you know? So that's probably the end. That's

probably who you saw in the back of the room is the consultant saying, okay, this is how we would implement this based on Gartner's research, for example. Right. Yeah. I mean, is that common? I mean, cause as you look at it, you know, as you think about all this research, some of it is fairly hyper segmented, like, Hey, here's the best providers in, you know, mobile backend as a service. All right. How does that fit in my actual, you know, ecosystem of things I have here? Is that something you'd expect the analyst to be able to help these customers with? Or is that where these consulting arms come in and say, here's three or four areas that will impact you. Maybe it's research from multiple analysts. Let us help you realize that in an actionable way or do analysts, are they expected to be able to put their discipline in context of something else? You know, I think it's the consultants, honestly. And I believe that the analysts will say that as well. Cause the, the analysts are just aggregating the information and giving, giving the more intellectual, I hate to say the more intellectual perspective, the higher level perspective. And then the consultants are the one who are going to go in there and like, okay, this is how you're going to make it work. Right. So the analysts, yeah. That makes sense. So, so then the hope is as a, as an end user is you have the internal, um, expertise to, to make that, to, to bring to life this, uh, this, to put it into practice. Like, like they won't sit down and like pair program with you, for example, that's, that's another type of industry or, or even pair strategy presentation, PowerPoint deck with you so much, those, how you put it into practice is a bit different. So, so to close out the end user stuff, I mean, I'm estimates like this are always wild, but just to give people a sense. So if I'm like an end user, like how much would I expect to spend with analysts? Like, what's this going to cost me? Like, is this just like a $20 payment on PayPal or take out like a second mortgage on my house? Uh, it's going to be tens of thousands of dollars per seat, I think. So per individual person

that you have, uh, accessing research and who has inquiry access. So, um, sometimes up to a hundred thousand dollars, depending on how much, what the research that they want to read. Right. So, so I would imagine for a very large organizations spending mid to high level six figures is probably not unheard of for, for, for analysts. Now there's not a lot of those organizations around, but you know, if, if you're spanning, you know, hundreds or low thousands of people, you're, you're talking a fair amount of a big chunk of change to get access to, to analysts. Yeah. I mean, and then, but then there's, you know, companies like RedMonk that make it way more accessible for companies to engage, right? They have different price points also. I mean, also for on the vendor side, you know, if you're a startup, you get a special pricing, but also I think they're, they're like their minimum, um, they have like a minimum amount you to engage with them. And then that gives you inquiry access to their analysts. So there's, there's that as well. And those guys are smart and know what's up. So there's, uh, what I say in a hundreds of thousands of dollars is that we're talking about, um, Forrester and Gartner. Right. Really. Um, but they're smaller firms that are, that are a little less expensive than that. Um, they're not, and, and, and who can afford Forrester and Gartner? It's going to be, you know, large enterprises, you know, um, fortune 100, fortune 500 companies. So, so then shifting to the vendor side and, and I'll, I'll do a little awkward segue to that as there's a third category that I discovered back when I worked on strategy. So it is usually a vendor ish side, but I've also noticed that analysts are helpful for, let's call them like investment banker types and not all of the stuff that analysts produce is useful to this, but their traditional definition of an industry analyst is on that first word is they cover and tell you about the state of the industry and how various companies are interacting and competing with each other. And analysts generally do this as well, but a lot of how people think tech industry analysts work is what we've been talking about. They are, uh, expert advisors on how a

technology is used. Not always. I mean, you don't always primarily think of them as covering the companies in that area. Now, again, industry tech industry analysts do this a fair amount as well. But back when I was working on MNA and strategy, we would use analysts a lot in this way. And this is where people like IDC are extremely useful because you get like market sizing and forecasts consistently in, in pivot tables and stuff from them. So there's that other category that we probably won't talk about very much, but it is an interesting aspect to think about analysts being involved in sort of helping inform people like corporate strategists who are interested in how an industry is operating, not so much in acquiring software products and services, but that's another type of input that they can. Exactly. It's true. You're right. Thank you for bringing that up. They do do forecasts, uh, and usually about five years out. So they do that kind of stuff and market sizing. So yes, good point. And I believe Gartner has a Gartner invest group that is, uh, that's more tailored to, uh, investment. Right. And then four, four, five, one has a good specialty in that. Just, uh, I only say, cause I was there, so I know, but they've got an interesting specialty. If you're a, if you're an iBank or an MNA person, they, they, they know how to speak your speak and dry clean their shirts when they talk to them and all that. Actually, yes. I mean, I think, I think the four or five, one, when they came, when they came on board, we're really known as, oh, they're, they're, they're for the VC community. So they do have a reputation there and, and a good, uh, good presence there for sure. Indeed. So then, then as, as the final thing, before we get a little bit to a little bit about like, so what do analysts think about Pivotal and Cloud Foundry and on that? So if, if, if you're on the vendor side as we are, so, so what's, what's your sort of like little pitch on, uh, and by little, I mean, you know, brief introductory what's, what's, what's sort of like your overview of how vendors should best interact with the analyst community and what they should expect and kind of how they deal with them. So I like to think about my analyst program as a, as a continuity of conversation is what I like to

call it, which sounds so fancy. I know, but it's really about an ongoing dialogue and it's, can't just be us talking to them or at them, right? We can't, like I said earlier, you're not going to be briefing your analysts every month and hoping to see something valuable happen. Um, you do, you do, yes, you brief them, you keep them up to date on your, your strategy, what you're doing, get them, talk to them early, get their input right via inquiry. So we get inquiries to get their input via inquiry on our direction, our vision, our strategy, and whether it makes sense. Um, find out what customers are asking them about or for what are customer concerns? Cause the value they bring is our customers and prospects are talking to them sometimes before they're even talking to us or instead of us. So that's, that's what I like to tell my, when, when, when I get pushed back from, from my constituents is, you know what, our customers are talking to them. So we need to be talking to them as well. Right. So that's, that's how I like to look at it. And like I said, it can't just be us talking at the analysts. We have to ask them for input as well. And that's why inquiry is important. And FaceTime is important and going to their events is important and reading their research is important. Right. It's, it's sort of like, this is the R of AR. Right. Yeah. Cause I mean, it sounds like, you know, really you, you've seen probably the opposite of those where people are either just, you know, drive by AR stuff like, Hey, I'm just going to shoot you a note and let you know there's a product update or we sync up every six months or 12 months where the analyst has no chance of remembering anything from six or 12 months ago. So I'm assuming you've seen all ends of the spectrum. Yes. And as a matter of fact, I remember talking to somebody saying, well, how often did you brief them? And he's like, Oh, I know pretty frequently twice a year. Like, no, it is not frequently. And I've also had analysts say, Hey, you know, before you came along, we talked to you guys once a year around the MQ time, which I, my jaw dropped, you know, that's, it can't be that way. And you can't expect them to really, I mean, they talk, they're talking to hundreds of, of, of vendors

and customers. And so you can't expect them to remember everything. So you often have to, you know, sometimes you have to have the same conversation with them, but that's okay. Right. So, um, yeah, I mean, I'm assuming Coté you as well. I mean, I would assume a good portion of an analyst week is spent talking to vendors and doing briefings and maybe they carve out their Friday to write stuff, but I'm assuming if you're constantly inundated with information, it's not like you're keeping it all straight easily. Yep. Yeah. I mean, I mean, speaking as a former analyst. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a, uh, I wouldn't say it's, well, it's one of the primary skills is figuring out how to turn off the fire hose or focus on the little raindrops you care about in it to be all metaphoric. That was silly, but, but it is, I mean, what you point it is, uh, you, uh, after you've been known well enough, you could spend all day on the phone and, and all day getting information and no time producing. Yeah. You know, and I, some of my closest analysts that I work with and who I've worked with for a long time, I've said, you know, I no longer, like I bet they turned off the, uh, ability for any vendor to set up briefings with them, which a lot of them, you know, automated the process. And now they just basically block out swatches time and they're, they're taking back control of their schedule so they can have inquiries and they can, you know, talk to the, to the people they care about. Like your said, your raindrops, you know, maybe, maybe do two vendor briefings a week as opposed to a 17 or some ridiculous number. So I'm assuming, Oh, please go ahead. I was just going to ask me, I'm assuming there's a writing output that's expected from most. So when I read them, those are comprehensive pieces. Like I like writing. And to me, these feel like, you know, I'm spending a week or two on these things. I can't just be on the phone all the time. So I guess there's that balance of, I need to constantly be absorbing information, but I'm getting paid on the fact of, am I also disseminating information back out? Yeah, exactly. There's the writing. There's also, I mean, the fact that they also have to do inquiry. A lot of them are actually reviewed on how much, how much inquiry they take

more so than briefing. So if you think of it from their perspective, right, if they're being judged on internally, if they're being judged on how many inquiries, how much they write, what's the incentive to take a briefing, right? It's, it's, of course, briefings inform those two things, but they really have to be very choosy about the briefings they take. Yeah. You know, you know, as, as you're saying that Richard, it brought to mind, like, I remember, um, uh, I was reading, I was at Forrester. I was reading Lauren's report on the Cloud Foundry summit, which we talked about a few episodes ago and thinking like, Holy crap, this is comprehensive. Like, this is, this is like the lengthiest conference report I think I've ever read, but, but, and, and she, she did a good job at, you know, my opinion of, of pulling in, uh, all of the interesting things, good and bad that happened at that conference. And even in so much as you have in a conference report, a little bit of like, how should you think about this, right? Like as, as a user of, of this technology, what do you make of all this stuff? And, and it is, um, you can, you can kind of detect people who have a skill at, uh, very rapidly typing up well-organized thinking, which is, which is another good skill to have as, as a, uh, as an analyst. Right. That's just what you're making me think of is again, you know, Lauren's piece or others. I mean, you're expecting to get insight. I just don't want a regurgitation of session summaries or, Hey, here's, here's the 20 vendors in the past space. Nobody wants to read that. I want to read where you think it matters or who you think is up and down. And that takes synthesizing a ton of information and actually finding insight in there. I think that's what you pay analysts for as they're trying to take a 50,000 foot view, even though they often stay at a hundred feet, they also have to quick airlift out and say, these are things you should care about or not. But do you see that? I mean, Rita, and obviously Coté, you did this too, but that seems like that's what you really pay for. Yeah. And that's what I, and what I liked about her report is like you said, it's not like, well, they've been on this and this, and these are the, it's, it's about, she wrote a lot about the customer sessions, which I thought was great. And that's what her readers want to read. We want to

hear. They want to know what did somebody who has the same problems that I do, who are trying to accomplish the same things I am, what did they do? What did they have to say? So I think she did a good job of pulling that stuff out. And exactly. And I was talking to, again, I was talking to an analyst contact of mine today about our own event, actually. And, you know, if it's just, and about what research comes out of that, right. And it's, it's balancing the big announcements. You know, someone said to me, well, you know, we're not information week. We don't have a deadline. We don't want to be pre-briefed and then briefed a bunch of times to write something about it. Right. So it's, as you said, it's not about product features and this and that when a lot, I mean, there is that aspect and that's what they can do. Agree. And that's when they can look at some of the more technical write-ups, you know, for example, the Gartner for Technology professionals folks do a lot of deep thinking and deep running on, on, on the technological, technological components. But it's, it's, it's all about how are, how are businesses putting these things into practice and what can I expect and, and how can I achieve my goals? Yeah, no, I think, I think that brings up a good point. Like the, the other thing to, to, to put it, to put into more words, what you're just saying there, Rita, that when people ask me about as a vendor dealing with analysts, the first thing I usually like to tell them is like, they're not press, right? Like, so, so they don't, and, and, and if you, if you think about how you work with analysts of how you think about press, you won't one at best, you won't get the maximum value out of an analyst. And at worst you'll insult them and they'll think poorly of you. Right. So, and, and in general, like there's reason, like small startups, like they have this problem and it's understandable, but like, you can always tell when they're, they hire like an agency and they're basically asking the PR person to also do AR and like, and, and it's a little dodgy and you have to rely on an analyst being very understanding, but

you want to make sure that like, like even, even with pre-briefing is a little weird. I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, it, Rita, but it's almost like you want to be, uh, mindful of the analyst's time. And like, you don't really need, like they need to have the facts straight, but you don't have to work with them like reporters to like get them the facts and all this stuff. Like, it's more like the analyst is interesting, interested, uh, as, as we were talking about in, I only need as much information either as I have time and entertainment value for, but I only need enough information to form an opinion about this and, and, and therefore state that opinion. Well, the fact is they should already know what's going to, what you're going to be announcing months before, right? If you are doing a good job, right? Like they know where your product is headed or what your strategy is. They know what you want to be introducing or what's going to change or partnerships or whatever. They know this stuff. So they don't have to, you know, I will do just reminder emails, refresher emails. Okay. We talked to you about this. Just FYI. Let me know if you want a refresher, right? But it's not like, okay. And I work, I come from a PR background and I have had to do AR and PR and it was a two weeks before, Hey, can we pre-review on this thing we're announcing in two weeks? You know, and now I just like shudder at the thought of, of doing that. Right. No. And that brings up another good point about how, how vendors work with analyst is, uh, I don't know, this isn't entirely accurate, but it's almost like having them on retainer as the peanut gallery to your long-term strategy. Right. And, and, and have, having them come in and do, do strategy days with you or, you know, every analyst shop has their own name for this, but it's essentially under, under NDA and that, that, and analysts are generally pretty, even beyond pretty. They're generally very good at keeping secrets. It's as, as we used to say at Red Monk, we would go out of business if we couldn't keep secrets. Uh, but generally you, you have them, as you were saying, Rita, like months, if not quarters,

ahead of time involved in what you're thinking and what you're doing. And in the same way that on the end user side, on the buy side, people want input into what they should be doing. If you, if as a vendor, you establish a good relationship with an analyst, you can get long-term input and product direction and all sorts of stuff from analysts. Exactly. Can I riff on that a little bit though? Cause I mean, at the same time, you know, let's not kid ourselves. Our job at Pivotal is to help influence analyst thinking or not. It's not altruistic here. I'm not trying to help them understand, you know, Hey, everybody's awesome. We want them to also believe that Pivotal is doing the right things, right. And our customers are doing impactful things. So, you know, is there that balance between look, our job and Pivotal, like many companies employs smart people to try to keep track of the industry and have very strong opinions about where the trends are going. So, I mean, analysts know that I would think when they deal with any vendor is that vendor's job is to make them think they're awesome and that they're going to write about them and they're going to name drop them and every other related sort of piece. How does an analyst balance that when they know they're being pitched, even though we're trying to have conversations and talk about strategy and I'm not trying to, you know, mind, you know, do a Jedi mind trick on them, but at the same time, you know, our job is to help them see that Pivotal is doing transformational stuff. Right. I think it's a combination of some of these guys have put them on the block. Right. So they've seen, they know when a vendor is BSing them. Am I allowed to swear on this podcast? I don't know. They can tell. BS is fine, but don't expand it out. Great. So they have, they can tell. I think they can tell. But the critical, back to like why customers are important, that's where it comes down to, right? If they're, if we're telling them we have tons of customers, we're doing great work and they're getting no inquiries from customers on our products or solutions or us, then there's a disconnect and they see that. And I've grown into that kind of situation of previous companies where they're like, sure, you're telling us you're doing all this stuff, but we get zero inquiries about this solution.

Yeah. So, um, that's, that's, that's how they figure out what's, what's real and what's not. So, or I had one customer, one analyst say, you know, we don't want to not, not at Pivotal. I won't say that at Pivotal. We are not running into any of your customers in the wild, you know, as in like, they're not getting, you know, um, unsolicited inquiries about, about that solution. So. Yeah. And, and, and I, and I think playing my further gonzo thing of the interviewer becoming the interviewee, like, I think, uh, to answer your question, Richard, like, uh, sure. I mean, I mean, in, in my interaction, uh, with analysts at a vendor, whether I was at Dell or here, like I am always trying to influence them and, and, but, but the influencing is not so much like I was talking about earlier, putting words in their mouth. It's more having them understand the worldview that I'm representing. Right. So this is a good transition into the last thing I wanted to ask Rita about. And like, for example, at Pivotal, right? Like we, we have a certain view about how, if you're an organization and you're writing your own software and running it, we have this view that some of our Cloud Foundry friend, most of our Cloud Foundry ecosystem friends share, but like, this is how you should think about designing, writing, and running your software. And this is how you should manage the process. And so if an analyst doesn't already think like that, I'm going to do a lot of work. In addition to just telling them the facts and all this kind of stuff we've been talking about, about trying to persuade them that this is a better way of doing software in this context. And, you know, to a certain extent, I don't like bulldog them and argue them and use all those methods of rhetoric to like make them see things my way, but I'll definitely like just get on them to kind of be like, well, I think this is the best way of doing it. What do you think? And just kind of go over it with them. So there is that amount as a vendor, definitely trying to influence them to, to put it in the soft pedaliest way as possible, make them understand and at least mildly agree with like, Oh, the problem you're solving is legit. And the way you're going about

solving, it seems like a good idea. Mm-hmm. Well, it seems like evidence matters there. I mean, Rita, you can chime in, but just like you said, influencing without the backing evidence is worthless. If they're not getting inquiries, if we're not showing customer evidence, if we're not showing that we're enlightening them with some idea they hadn't thought of before, you know, then we're just talking heads. We're not helping. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it's, it's, it's, we have to have the evidence to back it up and the evidence is customers. Yeah, exactly. And that, that's what, you know, that's why, uh, we're, we're, uh, not to be all horn tootie, but like, I, I always, if people have seen the way that I do presentations, I always have lots of footnotes because as, as a former analyst, like that's where I spent a lot of my time is actually chasing down all these claims, right? So it's all, it's all, it's always important to have, make it really easy to access that evidence to back up all of the, uh, the wonderful claims that are all true, of course, that we at Pivotal make, but all, all the, all the wonderful claims that we have. So, so to that end, um, you know, with the, the, the time that we have left, so how, so, I mean, what's your take Rita? And, and we were thinking about like having you back every month or quarter or something to kind of, um, uh, give us a check-in on what's going on in the analyst world and what they're thinking about, like cloud native and platform and all the stuff that people that listen to this would care about. But to kind of start that process out, like what in aggregate, and then if you want to be specific to different firms, like, what do they think about like Cloud Foundry and a platform as a service and kind of like cloud native and DevOps, like where, where's the analyst community at the moment on all of that stuff? I think they're quite bullish, especially on Cloud Foundry. Uh, you mentioned Lauren's report and there was, uh, also an IVC report and, uh, uh, Fenton Ryan of Brandon Monk also wrote a piece on the Cloud Foundry summit from last month. Um, it's, it's, they're really seeing a lot of momentum

and customer momentum there. Uh, and this is becoming a popular open source project and a popular community. So they're, they're quite bullish on that. I think that, uh, some firms are really perhaps looking a little too far ahead and thinking only about, or were only thinking about public paths, but from conversations I've had with them, they're getting a lot more inquiries and questions from customers on on-prem, um, paths, right? Like people at Cloud Foundry. And so they're figuring out what research to be writing that'll help answer a lot of those questions. So a lot of times, and this is something I've sort of brought up a lot of times what they try and do with their research is answer the questions that you're going to have during inquiry. Sometimes they bring up more questions and that's fine, but they like to answer the big questions you might have. And then you can get into kind of the more specific ones during inquiry. So that's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing there's a lot more interest in on-prem paths. Uh, and, uh, a lot of the folks focus specifically on Cloud Foundry. Um, I've heard that from a couple of different firms. So that's been pretty cool. Uh, in terms of DevOps, um, you know, the one thing that I noticed was interesting is when you talk about DevOps, agile microservices, all this stuff is whether you go the route of, uh, um, a paths, um, or building your own using containers and container orchestration, there's a cultural shift that needs to happen. And a lot of organizations struggle with that more than just buying a thing to get them, the DevOps if you will right you have to change mindsets and that's something companies are struggling with so those are some of the trends that i'm noticing there and of course there's a lot of you know a lot of writing on the containers but we'll see how that pans out yeah that's that's an interesting topic that or distinction that you bring up there like do you uh you know you know of of the analysts that you and and we we share a lot of the same favorite analysts and stuff but

do you think they're handling balancing let's say culture and technology well like how's that kind of playing out because stereotypically and i say that as in this is not really very accurate but stereotypically like analysts cover like a category of technologies um but a lot of the kind of stuff that we're dealing with nowadays is sort of like more horizontal than vertical and so like how are you finding the analyst community is kind of like going multi-vertical like like how how's that panning out for them so do you mean talking about like the human component right what they're trying to achieve or specific yeah exactly specifically like what you're saying is like well you can you can't really like install the DevOps right it doesn't come on it doesn't come on five dvds and there's a wizard to use to put it on your server right like there's like a lot of other stuff that comes with it and so are you are you finding i don't know maybe i'm making a false distinction here but are analysts is that something that like analysts have to add in or they've always covered that kind of stuff or how does that figure into they haven't their stuff they have they're having this is a new thing for them as well and i think it's challenging for some of them actually i think are really excited about it some of them actually we've been thinking about it for a while i know uh jeffrey haban of forrester has been writing about application development and culture of such for a long time and um he's had a couple of reports uh he he's published some and he has more coming out you know how to build really good teams right good development teams how to get the most out of your developers and they're not and you know i don't mean that in a you know make them work till they're sweating blood for you but how to get the most out of your developers right that makes everybody happy it's not like a spice miner in dune that works to the last minute to extract all the spice before the world yeah exactly so i think you know i think some of them um have been probably the guys uh who

cover and the gals who cover who covered app uh application development programs and things like that but it's becoming more of an issue right uh and more analysts who have only been focusing on technology and platforms and purchasing purchasing the the thing um are having to think about oh wow you know these customers can't just buy this this path and install it and everything is is great you know people have to change the way they work and how do we advise our clients and how to do that yeah that makes sense well before we wrap up do you have anything else uh i mean we'll definitely uh have you back to kind of go over uh field notes from analyst land yeah that'd be great but but is there anything else that like if for people who wanted to figure out like whether they're vendors or end users or wherever like when it comes to like what analysts do and how to best work with them that you would want to go over no i think we said it all i think it's think of it as a think of your the relations part of what we do right think of the the long-term implications um they and think of them as they're they're they're humans on the other end of that phone call or either the side of that table who you know like it's not like okay so here's this thing now go tell everybody how wonderful my thing is in the world so um it's it's it's really about a long-term conversation and a dialogue and you have to be willing to listen to them as well that's right that's thus far siri cortana and alexa can't really uh give you good advice about enterprise architecture at least at least that i've encountered yet i don't i don't know what google's version is maybe google has it it'll be you remember when uh i think i'm remembering this correctly but like some facebook ai people said they'd finally solved like the go like not the go language of playing the game go and then like a couple days later some google research person was like oh yeah we figured that out a few years ago we just didn't really think we needed to tell anyone but so i don't know who knows what's going on over there in the uh the chocolate factory as our uk press friends like to call it maybe they got it sorted out well uh if anyone wanted

to uh follow up with you i don't know what do you got uh you got a twitter handle there or something it's rita m as in mary at yeah that's my twitter handle right there rita m go there perfect i was on i was on early i was on twitter early well just as a small admin note i think we've mentioned this previously but we we got ourselves all transitioned and set up in soundcloud uh if you go to find the show notes which i'll tell you you can get a url to it but if you go to soundcloud.com slash you might want to get a pencil and write this down Pivotal conversations just all one word you can find the direct uh soundcloud thing that we have now that said all of the full show notes and the kind of like official stuff as always is posted at uh pivotal.io slash podcast and you know we we put pretty extensive show notes in there and links to things and you can find those as well and we're also now i finally did the legwork of putting us in itunes so you can just search for Pivotal or Pivotal conversations in itunes and find us and subscribe there and if you want to like uh leave a review or something that would make me feel good but the the best way to uh if you're interested in this topics other than talking with rita at the twitter name that she gave is as always you can email us at podcast at pivotal.io or you can reach me in twitter and i'm just Coté c-o-t-e and how how would people find you richard yep i'm just r seroder s-e-r-o-t-e-r i'm not as as cool as Coté i'm not as short as rita m well we've got to cover the spectrum there's just a full gradient of awesomeness that we have we don't want to limit ourselves to any particular type of excellence so that's true to that end uh this has been another episode of Pivotal conversations and thanks for listening we'll see everyone next time

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