There has been an ongoing debate in analyst relations (AR) circles (i.e. among the people who manage industry analyst relations on behalf of IT vendors) about what exactly constitutes an analyst. The emergence of expert bloggers has particularly confused things—people who investigate like analysts, think like analysts, write like analysts, but don’t actually call themselves analysts.

This is something that SAP has caught onto with its ‘blogger relations’ programme, which AFAIK, was the first of its kind in the industry from a major vendor. AR thought leaders like Barbara French, Jonny Bentwood and David Rossiter have also acknowledged that boundaries are becoming a bit fuzzy, which has led to tentative talk of ideas such as ‘Influencer Relations’.

Those who know us at Freeform Dynamics will be aware that we actively challenge boundaries and ‘labels’ ourselves as part of what we do, which is one of the reasons for the ‘Freeform’ part of our name. All of our analysts maintain a broad perspective and indeed much of our work is at the points where traditional boundaries are looking less and less relevant over time.

And by the same token, if you want to call us analysts, market researchers, consultants, misfits or anything else, we don’t really care that much. We even do some stuff which on occasions looks a bit like journalism. The important thing from our perspective is driving understanding, objectivity and harmony into the dealings between IT professionals and business people, IT vendors and their customers, and generally people and technology, based on solid market intelligence and a down to earth approach to figuring out what it all means in practical terms. We’ll continue to use whatever means are most effective to achieve this.

Which brings me on to the latest addition to the Freeform family. Against the above background, we are really chuffed to have one of the most well respected commentators and forward thinkers on the IT industry come to join us—David Tebbutt.

Some may know David as a journalist, others as a trainer, yet more as software publisher or enterprise consultant. Those with an interest in the enterprise aspects of social computing might know him for his expertise in this area in particular, where he has been operating at the forefront of activity for a number of years now with a pragmatic approach that is very akin to the way we do things at Freeform. Beyond this, his behind-the-scenes work on sustainable development with a major public body, which predated the current hysteria on the subject, places him in a position of authority with respect to the important 'greening of IT' agenda.

Truth is, much of what David has been doing over his career, particularly in recent times, can best be described as industry analysis if you use the generally accepted view of what that means. And what’s really interesting is that when we sat down to work through what David would be doing with us, it was pretty clear that not much would change in terms of his approach to investigating the market, writing style, consulting style and so on. In fact, we are looking forward to David helping us to change and develop ourselves in some areas, such as the delivery of training services (watch this space) and the increasing use of social media to improve the way we communicate even further.

So, after working as a ‘closet analyst’ for so long, David is coming out, and the whole team here, Jon, Helen, Martin, Joyce, Tony and myself, are looking forward to welcoming him into the fold.