Analysts are quite often accused of naval gazing and pontificating. Some of that criticism is of course warranted but certainly not all the time. It is fair to say that the industry hasn’t necessarily done itself any favours over the years by becoming more detached from clients and more focused on trends and generic research. It is also fair to say that the effect of the generalist movement (role-based is still another segmentation of generalist research) has been especially felt in the markets outside of the US and European home grounds of industry leaders Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and others.

In an attempt to affect change at the analyst practitioner level, there is a phrase that we use frequently with new and prospective clients. It is this: Asia Pacific is not a country. It is a simple but deeply resonant sentence that perfectly encapsulates whatever small or large frustrations that exist within their existing analyst relationships.

But what do we mean by Asia Pacific is not a country? Well what we mean is that the business drivers, adoption cycles, and market economies of the Asia Pacific region are firstly very different from those in the US and Europe, and secondly very different from each other. Talk to an exec in China and one in Australia and you’ll get vastly different perspectives on everything from strategy to technology choices to budgetary drivers and imperatives.

To ground this argument, do Australian clients really care that a US analyst firm has 500 or 1000 analysts worldwide, or that IBM has 10,000 information management consultants around the planet? To be honest some do but in the majority it is becoming less important as a criteria if such robust numbers fail to translate on-the-ground, in region.

To address this challenge Longhaus has developed two key research products that are becomingly increasingly relied upon to focus the discussion of technology strategy and adoption within enterprise organisations in the Australian and near-shore market. In the very least the nature of boutique analyst work through these products is increasingly to compliment the global analyst library services that are still used as a first principles tool for decision making.

The Australian Tech Index is a quantitative cumulative index that coalesces the performance of 13 key indices in the Australian ICT economy. It not only looks at imports and exports (an area for which Australian may have a perennial deficit) but also venture capital investments, stock performance, labour hire, CIO confidence and more. The Longhaus index also provides a 90-day lead indication of the ICT economy’s performance as a bell-weather for project and resources investments for Australia’s IT executive.

As an example of its insights, the Australian Tech Index allowed Longhaus to call-out a decline in the ICT economy a full 12-months ahead of the GFC in 2008, and then an end to the economic restrictions of that global crisis a full quarter ahead of traditional economic reporting in the main stream press. We have even gone as far as predicting when the next peak in the current growth cycle will be reached and at roughly what index value range in which that will occur. These are all valuable insights and more importantly, specific to the ICT market in which our clients operate.

The Pulse was developed on the back of client-demand that highlighted a decreasing importance for Australian end-users as to which vendors make the top quadrant in the Gartner or Forrester tool but instead, the relative importance of these companies to the strength of their channel partners, VARs, supply chain, and direct presence within the market being assessed.

For the US and European based vendors that means that the ability to simply roll out a marketing campaign lifted from another geography is poor form and carries with it a high degree of campaign risk. For Australian end-users it presents a unique filter against the hype such as will be demonstrated at our release of the Longhaus Pulse IaaS Trusted Cloud report and events in February.

The net impact of both these research tools for decision makers whether they be from vendor-land or the end-user realm is an increase in the level of statistical and geographic relevance for ICT research and analysis in Australia. I welcome you to check them both out in 2011.