Gartner has parted company with Richard Cho, the executive who oversaw its peer reviews division’s rapid expansion.
Cho was responsible for the enormous expansion of Gartner Peer Insights – the company’s enterprise peer reviews brand. As Group Vice President & General Manager for Peer Insights and Peer Connect at Gartner, Cho drove the company’s expansion into the fast-growing market segment.
Over the last 18 months, Cho has overseen a transformation of Peer Insights – introducing changes to make the site’s reviews more trustworthy – as well as helping drive a massive expansion in inventory. Gartner has been adding more than 15,000 new reviews a month, taking its total inventory for enterprise reviews close to that of market leader G2, at around 400,000.
Peer Connect promises “unbiased products and vendor references” in a “trusted private community for business leaders to connect and learn from each other’s experience.” The forum is also 100% vendor-free. Buyers are encouraged to share their experiences with one another. Gartner analysts have access to the site, which is also differentiated from Peer Insights in that every user has a public profile, showing their name and job title.
Yesterday Cho confirmed: “It is with heavy heart and mixed emotions that I am announcing that I am no longer with Gartner.”
He added: “On the Peer Insights initiative it’s great to see the way you are disrupting the tech industry by bringing trust in the form of enterprise-grade reviews and ratings. I firmly believe we are at an inflection point.”
Cho’s departure appears to leave Ari Bilici in charge of Peer Insights. The Managing Vice President “leads product, operations and account management teams to scale another multi-sided platform and disrupt the traditional enterprise software purchase journey”.
Until now, Peer Insights has been run separately from Gartner Digital Markets – home to its three mid-market and SMB peer reviews brands: Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice. These three share a common back end, but Peer Insights is separate. There’s more in Destrier’s Enterprise Peer Reviews; A Playbook for Marketers.
Our take: As the top executive in charge of Peer Insights, Cho made sure that vendors could no longer try and ignore Peer Insights. His enormous energy in driving the business forward and a sometimes-combative approach – for example, his use of colorful language (Notably, last year he told a room full of AR professionals that Gartner would “punish” any vendor who was thought to be discounting in exchange for reviews) have helped him to become a well-known industry figure. We wish him well.
