Peer review site G2 is enhancing its business offerings by extending its core research team to look much more like an industry analyst firm. Spearheaded by Chief Research Officer Michael Fauscette (ex-IDC), VP Applications Research Robert Mahowald (ex-451 and IDC) and VP Cloud and Technology Research Tom Pringle (ex-Ovum), the firm is adding new thought leaders and tools to its flagship customer review-based products.
G2’s Robert Mahowald
G2 has renamed its researchers as analysts – and is hiring 11 new analysts to be located at its HQ in Chicago. With a team currently made up of about 35 analysts with traditional tech market and product coverage, including seven data scientists and data analysts, it is currently hiring to fill 10 open analyst roles in its Chicago office. At this size, G2’s analyst team will be around the industry’s 30th biggest in terms of analyst numbers, with level pegging to firms like Navigant, Novarica, EIG, NPD, TBR, ABI Research, Aite, KLAS and Celent, according to leading AR database provider AR Insights. G2’s analysts are based mostly in Chicago.
As well as offering paid engagement in vendor advisory through its Research Insights subscription, and publishing 4,000+ quarterly market research reports to support technology buyers, expect to see more G2-branded analyst research in the near future. The G2 analyst team is expanding its attendance at vendor and industry events – meaning that AR professionals should consider G2 when pulling together target analyst lists for briefings and events. For example, the firm will have eight analysts on-site at Oracle Open World this week, Fauscette, Mahowald and Pringle. It will also be at other vendor events this fall including AWS Reinvent and Salesforce’s Dreamforce.
G2’s analysts are backed by a research operations team and a targeted review outreach team of about 45 project managers, publishing experts, quality assurance professionals and outreach experts. In total, the firm claims a research team numbering more than 80. Mahowald says this means his team of analysts are free to focus on their core role of helping technology buyers make more informed, data-driven purchase decisions and advising vendors on the voice of the customer, while the outreach team focuses on growing its stockpiles of user data from more than 870,000 user reviews across SMB and the enterprise.
“Our mission is to provide technology buyers with tools and information to make the best technology decisions, and to work with vendors to leverage the data we have, to better understand what their buyers want. This feeds into multiple areas including market and competitive intelligence, product management and product marketing,” says Mahowald. “For vendors, G2 has fantastic data around buyer intent, pricing, value and detailed win/loss insights.”
Our take: This is a bold move from G2, one of the leading players in the fast-growing market for enterprise peer advisory, as profiled in Destrier’s Enterprise Peer Reviews: A Playbook for Vendors. G2 has a massive treasure trove of customer data and sentiment, with nearly 900,000 verified unique reviews covering 94,000-plus B2B products in 1760 categories, and producing more than 4,000 market reports each quarter in 690+ categories.
G2 was founded to change the way technology is bought while disrupting the analyst industry, and has done so indirectly so far as one of the leading enterprise peer review sites. This further expansion of its research team puts it head-to-head with the traditional analyst firms it aims to disrupt.
