The Naked Chief Blog

Brisbane, Australia: May 22, 2009: Brisbane based IT research firm, Longhaus, has secured the commercialisation rights to selected Queensland Government technology information, the Minister for Public Works and Information and Communication Technology, Robert Schwarten announced today.  In a first for Australia, the Queensland Government will inform industry of its current and potential technology spending through a range of information products offered by Longhaus. 

At approximately $24 Billion per annum, the Queensland ICT market accounts for almost 25% of Australia's total annual ICT expenditure. Within this market the Queensland Government is the single largest ICT purchaser.
In support of this regional ICT powerhouse, Department of Public Works Director-General and Queensland Government Chief Information Officer Mal Grierson this week signed a 5 year agreement for the commercialisation of data relating to the government's ICT footprint with information regularly collected from across Queensland's budget-funded agencies. Known as the Longhaus Baseline, this new service will bring an endorsed and unprecedented level of insight into both the spending and composition of Queensland Government ICT. 

Downturns are always interesting times for the analyst industry. I’ve lived through a couple but always as staff. Layoffs always happen, as we have seen with Gartner and Forrester culling 2-3% of their respective global research headcount over the last month. Australia hasn't been immune. Management changes will occur as well as the usual chop and change of resources between companies. Further consolidation is inevitable.  

What makes this recession interesting is that it is the first since 2005 when the last big spike in new analyst firms (like us) popped up on the radar. Times have been pretty good since then. However as a business owner I am glad that we started almost four years ago and not in the last 12-months. 

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...

At an analyst relations briefing in November last year a group of Australian-based analyst firms (us, Hydrasight, IBRS, and Forrester) presented to a gathering of 13 international vendor AR managers. It was put to us that we should consolidate into a single provider in order to make it easier for them to spend their research budgets. At the time it seemed a little like Dr Frankenstein telling his monster that he had made a mistake; perhaps creationism wasn't such a good idea. But as in that classic tale, the symbiosis of the analyst and vendor relationship is the strangest of love-affair. Each needs the other as a justification of existence. So how did it get that way?