Agreed, Mary.  There's still quite a bit of room for diversity in small and midtier organizations.  There's no one model.

One organization I worked for procured and setup configurations for clients.  We were considered an enterprise-level client by the reseller who sold us IT equipment.  But the equipment needs in-house were pretty small.  Everything we needed for internal IT fit into one full-sized (33U) rack.  Outside of individual PC's (laptops, desktops, whatever).  With cloud and virtualization technologies, that might be cut in half.

I just don't believe that the big research firms understand the environment at small and midtier groups.  They're certainly capable of it.  But I don't see that vision currently in effect.

Good points regarding smaller businesses, but the midtier also has sizeable businesses as well, just not enterprise sized. And that's the segment that I am surprised the researchers aren't more interested in.

There are also smaller firms with enormous IT budgets. Some of the entertainment production firms come to mind.

Sure, Mary.  Major firms have software (and hardware) needs that just don't apply, definitely at the low tier.  That's here the majority of my experience lies.  A bit at midtier.  Let me give you an example:

Do you know of a single report out there by any major research group that goes over power and cooling needs for a "datacenter" that's actually little more than a closet?

I signed up for newsletters from APC once.  I worked at a company with 20 employees, three servers, one NAS appliance, all sitting on wire-rack shelves in a side room.  And I put all the smallest answers into the signup sheet.

I *still* get invited to webinars on multi-row datacenter cooling.

That's one simple example.  The midtier just doesn't have the same needs.  I don't see these big research firms even looking at that.  We don't need smaller context.  We need to have our particular concerns addressed.

Given the enormous cost of reports, it doesn't surprise me that the research firms are so cagey about sharing anything with press folk. It is difficult to get input from specific analysts at the big firms.

Yes, the prices of reports are very stiff.  I often turn to a report, thinking it would be useful background, for an article, only to realize it has a stupendous price tag and couldn't possibly be worth it for me.

My question is, robjvargas, why would it be useful to big firms if it isn't to smaller ones? I don't get it.

They probably are getting more common, Mary.  I admit I turn more to community forums and professionally oriented social networking sites than to dedicated research firms like Gartner.  So my experience is significantly limited.

But my experience is that those reports are being reduced in cost by further narrowing their focus.  A smaller piece of of the big picture.  Sort of like the $200 report I linked to in a previous response.

They may be able to cut up their larger research into smaller chunks and create more affordable output that way.  But is the output of any real use to small and midtier groups?  I'm distinctly unconvinced.

Actually, I've noticed that $500 reports are getting more common. Just a couple of years ago, it seemed the prices were much steeper. The amount charged for various kinds of information was just unbelievable.

I suppose that if you wanted market sizing numbers to work with, the information might be useful. Otherwise, to be quite frank, I think most IT pros could get a lot of info from free sources -- not to mention from their vendors.

Mary:

I think it's a question of marketing and economics.  I've worked mainly for small to borderline mid-sized enterprises for most of my career.  Those execs cringe at $500 for a report.

And then, the two or three times that I've convinced my executives to budget for one of these reports, the report itself had little bearing on me or my organization.  They were all oriented towards heavy-usage, high-transaction environments.

A 30 or 40-person organization, unless we're building the next Facebook, isn't ever going to use that kind of horsepower.

And none of my employers were building the next Facebook.  :)

I'm still surprised, given the efforts made by very big IT vendors to attract the midtier.