I hope this will be a multi part post over the next month as I’m in the middle of a comparison by one of the big three analyst firms regarding our partner programs. As it is with Dragnet, the names are changed (or not mentioned) to protect the innocent. I also don’t want to affect the outcome by being too public, but since it is an analyst relations event that we all go through….. just the facts ma’am.

We received the questionnaire a week late from the original time line, but weren’t given an extension. Normally, this wouldn’t have been an issue as I’ve been working with a delta force team in ISV and Developer Relations (IDR) and I’ve “trained” them on the drill. Two things have changed. First, we’ve never done a report on our group with this firm so the unofficial rules of engagement are an unknown. I believe that while you need to follow rules, nuances are the make or break when there is an issue near the line where an answer or rating could go either way.

Second and this is the big issue, is my whole team turned over with the exception of me, so no one had ever dealt with an analyst and some are relatively new to the IDR program. This was a problem. We had to assemble a whole new team and get them to understand that not everything we do is important to an analyst. This discernment is a big issue when answering the questions properly. Overpowering a question with information is not the same as answering it properly. Conversely, we have to get them to understand what is important and answer the question asked.

Our ability to do well in this was in part governed by the questions asked for the rating. The analyst firm was very fair in giving all participating vendors the guidelines and asking our input beforehand, and asked if anyissues were not relevant or did they leave out something that was meaningful. This was one of our points to influence the report so we took the view of the reader (partner/ISV) and answered as to how they would read it and it appears that was of value to analyst.

I’ll give the analyst firm credit, they took the time to read our input and considered it, more than some have done for me in the past.

So I’m coaching a team of rookies that are playing in the big leagues (the competition in this one add up to hundreds of billions of revenue, no small potato’s) and this is the playoffs.

I’ll write further as the process goes forward and once over, I’ll reveal the results and perhaps the analyst firm . Normally, I’m quite confident in these as our programs are solid, but for this one, there are too many unknowns. If I had to guess, we’re a top 2 or 3, but again, there is no way of predicting.

The test of the quality of most things is by fire. So while it shouldn’t matter that we have all new people, the program should be capable and we should be able to do the normal good job we do. That discounts the human element of this, one incomplete or mis-interpreted answer could deal us a bad card. As they say in “The Gambler” every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser….

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Analyst Relations, analyst. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.