Ah. The Gartner Magic (read: tragic) Quadrant. Staple butt of my ridicule and chagrin to a great many vendors. But there shines a glimmer of hope at the end of the longest running tunnel in enterprise history. VendorStack has emerged from a private beta and promises to open up vendor peer reviews and offer transparency in a market where there is very little unless you have a fat wallet.
Like a strange cross between Gartner, Yelp and Quora, VendorStack will let users rate and review vendors, with the growing VendorStack community asking and answering questions about a vendor or its products. David Cheng the Founder said they have also used Mechanical Turk to scrape vendor customer lists and the company will correlate the data from these different sources and analyse it to provide additional services, such as analytics or market research reports.
VendorStack is looking to offer premium tools that vendors can use to set up their own profiles on the site.
I think this is a long overdue move in a market where the traditional and plodding analyst firms have had vendors by the short and curlies for far too long.
The Thiel Foundation asked me what I’d consider absurd in ten years that exists today. I told them Gartner.
