Ready to Win?
We’ll soon know what Gartner received for selling Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp. Big news this week in our fast-changing A!-driven world. LinkedIn is abuzz. If you’ve been tracking Gartner’s trajectory it’s a natural outcome to several realities in the GenAI era ahead. Ready to win? Read on.
First, a little braggadocio: Outsell clients, and CEO Members in particular, have experienced amazing exits over the years. Most of them I can’t name nor share the valuations they received. Some of their stories are public; they are myriad and varied. One of our favorites: yup, you guessed it — from the founder of Capterra. The leaders who have passed through our doors have earned staggering amounts over the years — in total tens or hundreds of billions. We are proud of that.
Second, it’s hard to mix business models. Gartner purchased these assets because they wanted to help small/medium enterprises make better tech decisions a la the support they’d been providing the enterprise CIO. The only problem was that their traditional (expensive) big-enterprise subscription model didn’t play well in the SMB market.
Enter a business model funded by software providers to serve buyers (aka a marketing/media/advertising model) and where the information was free to the end-user who also participated in content creation. A 180 for Gartner if there was one but perfect for the aspiration to serve IT enterprises of all sizes. Overlay the acquisition of CEB two years later to serve the tech needs of all major functions in an enterprise, and the story was compelling and complete.
Except it only lasted until GenAI came onto the scene. Gartner has to manage a legacy business model, fewer logos, and a (re)focus on its core. Big disruptive cycles almost always force focus.
Which brings us to a third reality. Scaling vertical content is critically important to owning a space in the GenAI era. That moat is just about the only moat that makes for a compelling and differentiated experience and gives key brands the permission and opportunity to deliver the LLM-goods for that vertical. (Keep in mind communities are not moats. More on that another day.)
We have been saying that big tech will deliver the broad horizontal solutions and the ‘generic’ LLMs just as they did in search, SaaS, and every tech cycle before. Then market evolution “goes vertical” and when it does, other players win off the backs of big tech who has conditioned the market.
This is playing out now in GenAI; the vertical winners will be the ones who hold the keys to big sets of vertically relevant content. Just read the G2 press release. It is a playbook for how to win in a B2B business model.
Another great playbook for how to win on the subscription side of things is CAS’s recent announcement about owning the platform layer in the R&D functions it serves. Our analysis on that big move is coming out shortly. It’s a don’t miss. Contact me if you’d like a copy. It is another press release as playbook for how to win in the era now upon us. The business models are different but where CAS and G2 point is a roadmap for success.
Which brings us to a fourth reality. This is all going to drive more M&A again (finally!) a motion that makes this industry grow. Look at Lightcast’s acquisition of Rhetorik. AI is now a diligence category. Are you ready? Take the Outsell Accelerate A! Assessment™ in beta now.
It’s not just about M&A though. You’ll see more unique data and content licensing partnership’s that are already taking off. (Wiley and IQVIA are a playbook example.) We’re going to see ‘more like this’ and are actually helping clients find their partners today.
This fourth reality and these announcements point to a reshuffling underway. The folks who own the customer and/or the data and technical layers that enables AI in key functions and verticals are tomorrow’s winners.
Expect to see more buying and selling to get there and more data partnerships where one firm’s access is another’s channel; that access almost always needs more content. It is a win-win. Content owners have a runway in which to maneuver. But time is passing and it’s happening fast. Ready to win?
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