Ovum launches Collaborative Intelligence model to mend the ‘broken ICT advisory business’

Melbourne, 11th December 2009 – Ovum, the ICT advisory firm and a Datamonitor company, today announced its ‘Collaborative Intelligence’ model that fundamentally changes the ICT industry advisory market place. While existing IT advisory firms focus on technology the new Ovum sees over 350 business analysts from the wider Datamonitor Group working collaboratively with more than 150 Ovum ICT analysts to advise on industry issues and the relevant technologies and services to specific business and market challenges.

According to Ovum, the traditional ICT advisory model is broken as existing firms focus almost entirely on technology fulfilment and fail to take into account business and market dynamics, as well as consumer demand. Jonathan Yarmis, Research Fellow based in USA said, “The IT analyst industry, overall, has been approximately flat for a decade due to failure meeting these needs”. “The growth figures were mainly reflected due to its consolidation and increased pricing power”

Therefore, without the collaboration between business and ICT analysts that Ovum’s Collaborative Intelligence brings to businesses the result is advice that only supports an IT fulfilment agenda. Analyst firms without an extensive business analysis community will always produce research that is narrow, technically focused and lacking genuine business alignment.

Ovum’s Collaborative Intelligence harness vertical market expertise including retail, utilities, pharmaceuticals, FMCG, financial services, media and broadcasting, public sector and manufacturing with expertise in software, IT services, enterprise IT management and telecoms. Industry commentators including Gideon Gartner, the founder of the ICT advisory business, and Analyst of Analysts SageCircle believe that Ovum is now well placed to aggressively compete against the two largest analyst firms and indeed become the number two in the market in the near future.

At the launch event of Collaborative Intelligence in London and New York, Gideon explained that “The technology industry has changed and business people are now more deeply involved and that research and advice which addresses the needs of business management will be increasingly valuable. Integrating technology and business is not a simple matter, and others have attempted this but with so-so results. Therefore, the union of Datamonitor market research and Ovum technology may provide a real edge, and the company seems committed to act on making its products more relevant to organizations than its competition.”

Mark Meek, managing director of Ovum and CEO of Datamonitor, said, “The three brands of Butler Group, Datamonitor Technology and Ovum all had great reputations, but we knew that they would be better together. Now under the Ovum brand and part of the Datamonitor Group, we can offer clients a new and more powerful advisory and research service that combines industry insight with deep technology know-how. The old technology-centric model of ICT advisory services is broken and a new, more collaborative model is what clients are demanding. We are now the only global advisory firm that can deliver on this new paradigm.”