Larry Greenemeier over at CMP takes the stand that “a new breed of IT analysts is sharing insights over the Internet, leaving traditional research firms trying to catch up using the same methods.” I disagree. Lots of things are shaking up the IT industry research business. Let’s set our standards a little higher than whether an analyst can blog.

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James McGovern, an outspoken enterprise IT blogger, recently outlined his latest frustration with software vendor sales tactics. His candid post offers an example of how good industry research can go bad in the hands of some vendors. Let’s take his beef with security software vendors.

Mr. McGovern is frustrated with security software vendors pitching SOX compliance as a reason to buy. To him, it’s cliche. Fair enough. Yet, I’ve seen several research studies linking enterprise security with compliance, and IM security with compliance, and so on…

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Yankee Group public relations boarded a roller coaster last week. On the upside, their *former* PR agency of record won an award — for facilitating 1,400 mentions of Yankee and/or its analysts in the business press. On the downside, Yankee issued a press release on operating system reliability that was sure to fan flames among its Linux detractors. Imagine their glee — the detractors’ glee, that is — on discovering factual errors in the release.

To get a sense of the tallies here, the press release on Yankee’s OS reliability study resulted in more than 700 derogatory reader comments at Slashdot in less than 24 hours. And, that was just on Slashdot…

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