TL;DR: there are 7 key channels for open-source analyst influence. Just as Linux distributions, now the de-facto standard in data centres, weren’t counted in analyst market shares during their early days as they were ‘free’ open source licences, analyst content and advice reaches buyer audiences via many channels that are hard to measure because they’re not monetised, packaged into other vehicles or free to buyers –yet what we call ‘open source influence’ is extraordinarily influential. Technology vendors should not ignore those influence channels and balance their analyst relations outreach programmes accordingly.
THE 7 CHANNELS FOR OPEN SOURCE ANALYST INFLUENCE.
| # | Channel. | Impact. |
| 1 | LLMs and GenAI. | Analysts enjoy high domain authority and credibility which allow their research to shape AI results via open access research. |
| 2 | Research reprints. | Enable independent research firms to scale beyond subscriber base through vendors buying distribution rights for reports and marketing them to buyer audiences. |
| 3 | Open access research. | Organic views can be significant in some niches and alternative vendor evaluative research methodologies challenge the Gartner Magic Quadrant and contribute to create categories. |
| 4 | Sourcing advisory. | Not open source but challenger firms directly impacts billions of outsourcing and technology deals. |
| 5 | Owned, industry and vendor events. | Analyst benefit from significant exposure at trade shows and other events, analogue and thus hard to measure but very impactful with live audiences. |
| 6 | Earned media traction. | Analyst commentary is sought and widely referenced in mainstream business media as well as specialist publications with a high correlation between analyst sentiment and articles overall bias. |
| 7 | Social media and podcasts. | LinkedIn, newsletters and podcasts are force multipliers for independent analysts who can nurture direct relationships with their communities. |
Analyst influence is bigger than the FIGs can measure.
The market is repeating the Linux mistake. Years ago, IDC (and others) struggled to include Linux distributions in its market shares trackers because no-one could count shipments for something that was often free at the point of use. The result was a clear measurement gap. We now see the same error in analyst relations when people use subscriber numbers, inquiry volumes or even listed-company stock prices as a proxy to assign market impact.
That shortcut flatters the FIGs and obscures how influence actually works. Gartner, IDC and Forrester still matter enormously and Gartner in particular remains powerful in validation and late-stage enterprise buying as evidenced by many win-loss analyses conducted by large vendors over the last decades. But that does not mean the FIGs are the whole story, or even the right starting point for every outcomes-based analyst relations programme.
Free-to-read research carries real weight.
In the age of GenAI, subscriber counts are a weak proxy for attention. If the average subscriber downloads less than 3 reports a month, then seat count tells you little about actual readership. By contrast, research that is free at the point of consumption can travel through vendor sites, media, social feeds, events, podcasts and now AI interfaces. In fact, 89% of B2B buyers describe generative AI as one of their top sources of self-guided info in their buying processes. Industry analyst content carries authority and fares very well not only in search engines and LLMs (SEO and GEO). That is why analyst relations pros need to look at open-source analyst research as a serious layer of influence. Freemium also counts, for instance according to Mark Smith / ISG: “[ISG] does not wait for a vendor to license the research, we make the top level quadrant ratings and rankings available at no cost.”
Reports licencing and distribution by vendors make that point impossible to ignore. Everest Group claims that 40% of its research is redistributed by vendors in the form of reprints or other licensing arrangements –so for free. And Anish Krishnan / QKS Group says that over 200 unique vendors license their reports every year. This breaks the lazy assumption that influence sits neatly inside a subscription model. Gartner may still have the largest installed base, but once research is republished, it competes in the public arena. The content that shapes the market is certainly not just what sits on the analyst firm’s own website.
The search footprint of evaluative research tells the same story: collectively, independent firms challenge Gartner’s visibility. Google search data shows that that Gartner Magic Quadrant still leads in visible web footprint, with 1.4m search results outside Gartner’s own site in 2025. But the IDC MarketScape showed 1.1m, the Forrester Wave 1.1m, Everest Group Peak Matrix 242k and QKS SPARK Matrix at 59.8k and several other methodologies also visible at meaningful scale. The point is not that Gartner has lost dominance, but that evaluative influence now has many public carriers.
Gartner isn’t the only company with direct sales influence –sourcing advisors, domain specialists, regional players can all have considerable impact at the end of the buying process. During our interviews for this blog post, Jan-Erik Aase / Partner and Global Head ISG Provider Lens confirmed ISG influences over USD 20b of total contract value. Late-stage influence is broader than many AR teams admit.
Buyer influence forms long before a CIO asks Gartner.
The biggest flaw in traditional AR and marketing funnel measurement logic is overindexing on the last touch of the buying process –conversion. Bill Reed / NarrativeWorx argues that evaluative reports matter mainly to the small share of buyers already in market, while most buyers are earlier in the journey and asking different questions. Jon Collins / GigaOM agrees: ”Analyst influence is still often focused on the senior budget holder at the point of procurement; however, enterprise reality is that the buying cycle constitutes multiple stages, with a variety of stakeholders. At GigaOm for example, we also focus on the engineering leader who often champions an acquisition and needs tools to help sell the idea to technology leadership. Meanwhile, it is well known that many sales are won or lost before the RFP is even sent out, when buying organisations set out their key decision criteria.” We agree with them. In a buying environment engulfed by the sales spaghetti monster, where large groups shape requirements before a purchase order even appears, influence starts with problem framing, category language and solution architecture.
This is where specialist and open-access firms often punch above their weight. IT-Harvest is a specialist security analyst firm that provided full analysis of 378 security vendors in 2025 but covers >4k vendors throughout its portfolio. Last year, Omdia published over 600 open pieces alongside its subscriber-only research. Alan Pelz-Sharpe / Deep Analysis said around 80% of the firm’s research is open access, with free blogs, episodes and selected reports designed to travel widely. He also pointed to their model of free enterprise counselling sessions that gives the firm direct contact with real buyer problems.
Boutique analyst firm HyperFRAME research explicitly pushes for “Frictionless AR”, advocating for the “Death of the Paywall Fortress”. The 7 FTE team lead by Steven Dickens quotes impressive numbers for its “Weaponized Social Influence”: in the first 12 months its website registered 70K views from 42K unique visitors diving into over 500 Research Notes and over 100+ press and media citations from a variety of different media outlets in 2025. That is not FIG-scale, but it is still meaningful reach for a highly focused firm.
Public channels are strategic distribution for analysts, not side-shows.
The public layer of analyst influence is larger than many AR teams admit. Once you include independent firms, community-led analysts and open research publishers, the audience for analyst thinking extends far beyond seat counts. Firms such as Diginomica, GigaOm, RedMonk and others may not look dominant through subscription metrics, yet SimilarWeb data confirms that they are part of a much broader pool of publicly consumed analysis.
Some firms have a disproportionate impact on media or social media compared to their size. We have checked with independent media measurement sources (Cision and Muckrack) and found that IDC and Omdia are neck and neck in research media mentions with Gartner, despite being less than a 10th in size. The Futurum Group sustains enough interest to create a monthly media mentions roundup on LinkedIn. Some analysts also feature regularly on prime-time television, the notable example there being Ray Wang / Constellation Research.
Social platforms amplify firms that know how to use them. Whilst the top websites average less than 300-500k views per month, social media allows some independents to punch above their weight. Analysts such as Phil Fersht / HFS or Mark Smith / ISG hover between 6 to 12 million views on LinkedIn every year. This is precisely why old assumptions about scale no longer hold. Influence is now distributed across media, social and owned channels, not only through paid subscriptions.
Podcasts and newsletters add another layer of practical influence. HFS says its “From the Horses Mouth” podcast series captures 5,000 listeners per session. The firm also claims 130k subscribers to its “Horses for Sources” newsletter. Those channels directly reach practitioners, not just procurement teams or senior IT buyers. They are part of the wider community conversation where shortlists, categories and vendor narratives begin to take shape. That makes them strategically relevant even when they do not look like classic analyst outputs.
The distribution paradigm shift: GenAI will reward what can be seen.
Generative AI makes public analyst content more valuable, not less. If gated research is less visible to AI systems, then public exposure becomes strategically more important for firms and vendors alike. Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse work points to roughly 2/3 of LLM citations coming from corporate and media sources. That is a structural shift in discovery.
Jonny Bentwood / Golin argues this has created an inflection point for analyst firms. “The licensing play, selling content to train AI models, is already happening in media and analysts are next. But the bigger shift is the partnership model: tech companies working hand-in-hand with analysts to create content specifically designed to appear in AI-generated responses. That’s not just a revenue stream, it’s a fundamentally different relationship between analysis and distribution.” This is a new distribution layer.
We call this open-source research, even if the label is deliberately imperfect. It is not truly open source in the collaborative sense. It is free at the point of consumption, widely reused and still hard to measure. Yet it is already influencing awareness, category formation and buyer discovery at scale.
The hidden analyst influence multiplier: live events.
Analysts are very present at owned and industry events. Everest Group for instance claims 25k attendees to its analyst firm events, quite a feat and certainly qualified audiences, IDC on their side host 23k end-users whilst Omdia still enjoys live audiences on par with Gartner’s largest destination events (Gartner Symposium / ITxpo) through its mother company Informa, the organiser of Black Hat (45k attendees). That is not trivial reach. It is concentrated reach among people who often sit closer to the operational reality of buying than the senior executive who signs the paper later. Some audiences are extremely engaged, for instance developers at Redmonk’s events. The same logic applies to firms with strong media ecosystems, practitioner communities and event franchises.
Events and communities close the gap between insight and action. Live audiences have bounced back since Covid as in-person interactions are conducive to business –and sponsorship dollars have followed. Although those interactions are hard to measure, they’re critical for vendors to shape their solutions and drive awareness. In the last couple of weeks alone we had clients at NVIDIA GTC, Kubecon and MWC with many analysts in presence, each reporting dozens of meetings, using those events as live broadcasting platforms. Analyst influence is not just digital and vendors still under-index events badly.
Call to action for analyst relations: diversify your industry analyst portfolio to account for open-source influence.
That should change how you build your analyst portfolio. Understand that different firms influence different audiences, at different stages and through different mechanisms. Keep the FIGs where their strengths are obvious, particularly in enterprise validation, but stop assuming the eleventh Gartner seat is always a better investment than 4 or 5 boutique firms with stronger subject expertise, more accessible analysts and content that actually travels.
The right question is no longer who is biggest but rather where influence compounds for your market. If your goal is category creation, builder credibility, partner education or sustained narrative presence, open-source analysts and media-savvy firms can outperform their size. If your goal is late-stage validation with risk-averse enterprise buyers, the FIGs still matter a great deal. The mistake is treating those as competing truths instead of complementary ones.
This is why we have long argued for a more balanced analyst firm portfolio. There is a long list of analyst firms beyond the FIGs, and many of them shape awareness, insight and influence in ways that classic AR metrics barely register. That is not a reason to walk away from Gartner. It is a reason to stop confusing what is bigger with what might actually be better for your business needs.
Acknowledgements.
Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe / Deep Analysis, Katrina Menzigian and Nitish Mittal / Everest Group, Dan O’Brien / The Futurum Group, Jon Collins / GigaOm, Jonny Bentwood / Golin, Phil Fersht and Melissa Fersht / HFS, Steve Dickens / HyperFRAME Research, Kini Schoop / IDC, Jan-Erik Aase and Mark Smith / ISG, Richard Stiennon / IT Harvest, Bill Reed / Narrative Worx, Rachel Lashford / Omdia and Anish Krishnan / QKS Group for their time and feedback on this blog post.
Read the latest Starsight Transmissions.
- The 7 channels of open source analyst influence.
- The fatal analyst relations mistake startups make.
- The real reason US tech start-ups win shortlists before European ones.
