A reminder about Yankee and the next IIAR meeting

As so many of my fellow AR bloggers have already said, we're delighted to have Yankee Group presenting at next week's IIAR Forum.

Camille Mendler, vice president of the Enterprise Research group, and Ajay Sule, senior regional vice president for international sales, will join us for the meeting which is taking place at Hill & Knowlton's offices in London on 26 July (thank you Dom).

It should be an interesting session. Yankee is best known in Europe for its work in the telecoms space but outside of that arena doesn't really have a profile. There are continued rumours flying around about it expanding into other areas over here or retrenching back into telecoms in the US.

I for one am looking forward to hearing how the company is planning to develop itself. With the continued trend towards consolidation, where and how does Yankee see itself fitting into the market in the future?

The meeting is open to all IIAR members. We also have a few places available for guests - please contact IIAR secretary Hannah Kirkman for more information.

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Note: For anyone not familar with us, the IIAR (Institute of Industry Analyst Relations) is an organisation dedicated to raising industry awareness of the value of analyst relations, promoting and sharing best practice in AR, enhancing communications between vendors and analyst firms, and providing opportunities for AR professionals to meet and network with their industry peers.

The IIAR draws its membership from a broad spectrum of AR practitioners including vendors, AR consultants and training providers.

I am a board member along with Duncan Chapple, David Taylor, Ludovic Leforestier and Susanne Huebner.

And it's official - Informa does indeed acquire Datamonitor

See here or here for the official announcement.

The chief exec at Informa, David Gilbertson, is quoted as saying: "Datamonitor is a model example of a company that slots neatly into Informa...Both companies provide customers with data and analysis that is essential and unique - information they cannot do without. As part of the Informa group we believe Datamonitor will be able to market to our 20 million-strong contact database, take part in our 10,000+ events each year and use our global sales infrastructure across 43 countries. Combining the businesses will enhance growth prospects and margins."

Still no mention of why this acquisition is a good thing for the customer. Perhaps that's taken for granted.

Informa and Datamonitor - will the acquisition go through?

The Informa offer closes at 1pm today (13 July 2007) so we'll find out soon enough but to me it's starting to look like a done deal.

There were some doubts creeping in last month though. Back on 25 June, Informa had valid acceptances from just 22.1 per cent of the Datamonitor shares - but that's when the Datamonitor share price was sitting way above the offer price, hitting a peak of 680.50p. Investors were either looking for Informa to boost its bid or hoping to see a third-party enter the fray.

Now with the Datamonitor share price sitting at 642.50p this morning (9.55am BST), that 650p offer from Informa has got to be looking a lot more attractive.

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Note: In no way am I offering any financial investment advice!

There's something annoying about analyst firms that...

There's something annoying about analyst firms that insist you fill in a briefing request form because they want to capture lots of information for their sales force to use.

An example we saw today asked for all this detail (alongside the normal stuff I expect):

Company Overview:
- Core competence:
- Value proposition:
- Organizational structure:
- Financial performance:

Market Position:
- Market environment:
- Drivers & Business issues:
- Target markets:
- Profile installed base:
- Competitive differentiation:

Capabilities:
- Products & Services:
- Sales Channel:
- Customer benefits:
- Success stories:

Vision for the Future:

What are the top three issues the company is facing:


Does the analyst really need to know all this before deciding whether or not to take a briefing? I'd suggest not.

Compare it with what Gartner and Forrester ask for - that's much more reasonable and sensible.