I take my hat off to everyone in the Analyst Relations side of the ICT industry. Having spent the last few weeks traveling I am reminded that our industry is accentuated by a series of 1-hour briefings and multi-day events. To give an idea of scale, in previous organisations it was common to see up to 80 or more briefings of some shape or form each week...

Conservatively let's say that's 3,500 briefings a year being organised, facilitated and staged by the IET vendor community inclusive of all teleconferences, multi-day conferences, events and speaking engagements. And with that kind of scale it's also easy to see why there is plenty of room for the number of analyst houses that dot the globe.

The thing that strikes me the most apart from the shear volume of information to be processed is that despite the leaps ahead taken in Analyst Relations over the past few years I wouldn't know where I could get my hands on a consolidated list of major regional events for the purposes of maximising the alignment between our research agenda and the must-attend briefings over the year.

While we have our own events schedule, and work closely with the internal AR teams of the major vendors, I'm sure there is a better way. As such, scheduling the quarter or even year ahead can be extremely difficult and is often left to last minute scheduling or reshuffling – the case whether or not you have 4 or 400 analysts.

With the next year's strategy and planning completed and future trends published by December the only piece most regularly missing from the strategy map is vendor briefings for the coming 12-months.

We do know roughly in which month the major briefings will fall but each year is slightly different due to venues, product launches, availability of key executives and even holidays. AR firms or even forums (such as Inner Circle in Asia Pacific) could do us a great service by starting to share and co-ordinate a confidential schedule of the big annual AR briefings and highlight which ones will be exclusive invitation-only events and which will be one-to-many affairs.

Also, we are certainly noticing growing support for the "local" analyst firms. So in further support of the value of a regional schedule I'd like to note some key points from a November blog the US-based HP Analyst Relations team published which highlighted some factors by which they will be measuring analyst value this year.

• "Talking to analysts at “events,” and not just formal inquiries, played a large role [in end-user influence].
• "There was little difference between customer behaviour in EMEA versus the US, for either SMB or Enterprise customers, but all favored “local” analysts. For us, this validates analyst firms’ decisions to place analysts outside of the firms’ home countries."
• HP will be utilising "blog influence" as an analyst value measurement in 2008.