As is true with many fast-growing software categories, the market and competitive intelligence tool landscape has become a bit crowded. With varying use cases and similar messaging creating confusion. Gartner is working to add clarity to the space and Wide Narrow was recognized as a Representative Vendor in 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Competitive and Market Intelligence Tools for Technology and Service Providers. Here are some key takeaways from the report.
The Industry is Growing
According to Gartner, "By 2026, 40% of technology and service providers will use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) C&MI tools, up from 10% today." We can attest to this prediction as we continue to see increased demand throughout our customer base and across our digital properties. This demand is evidenced even further by the recent creation of competitive intelligence software categories in highly popular online directories.
Anecdotally our consulting partners are reporting increased inquiries regarding which platforms their clients should consider using. That decision ultimately depends on your use case.
Your Use Case Matters
Our piece of advice is to avoid the high-pressure sales pitch and take time to document your use case. Anchor your core set of needs at the center of your platform research process. Ultimately, the technical features and advanced capabilities don't matter if they don't match your use case and allow for future scalability throughout your organization. To assist in this process, Gartner stated “However, each has different levels of capabilities depending on their core markets and buyer needs. This is reflected across the wider C&MI tool market, effectively segmenting the market (see Figure 2). For example, the definition of exploitation for sales enablement may refer to competitive battle cards, whereas for investment management, it relates to complex data models.” Below is the chart to align your needs to your software priorities:
Playing Well with Others (INTEGRATIONS MATTER)
As Gartner points out in their market analysis section of this report, "In addition to dedicated C&MI tools, our research highlighted that many organizations utilize a variety of other tools as critical components of their C&MI processes. Such tools include insight engines, social media analytics applications, content management, knowledge management, and collaboration platforms. While many of the C&MI tools considered in this Market Guide are able to fulfill many of the functions of these adjacent tools and position themselves as such, these functions are generally not core."
Fortunately, our strategy is all about providing insights where the customer needs them most, and this is accomplished by playing well with others! With over 300 integrations our customers often use Wide Narrow to aggregate information from their quiver of specialist data providers, push insights into their chat platforms, and even embed dynamic insights as live widgets in their intranets. But we take that one step further, having partnered with "competitors" on this list to accomplish data integration projects for our customers.
What They Said About Wide Narrow
As you may have gathered by now, we are pretty excited about our inclusion in this Gartner Market Guide report. We are not trying to be everything to everyone, but have been striving to build the best Enterprise Intelligence platform around. We believe, this relentless mission has been acknowledged by being identified in this Gartner Market Guide. Our intense focus on customer feedback and development of a streamlined intelligence platform has resulted in:
• Giving analysts their time back by building integrations to aggregate relevant information in one place and filtering tools to cut out the noise.
• Breaking down knowledge silos and provides you a place to not only manage your intelligence projects, but co-create insights live with your colleagues.
• Making your insights demand attention with stunning newsletters, reports, and dashboards you can send to your stakeholders with a click.
If this sounds like something that would help take your intelligence program to the next level, it may be worth your time to see Wide Narrow in action. Click here to schedule your demo today.
References
Gartner, “Market Guide for Competitive and Market Intelligence Tools for Technology and Service Providers, Chris Meering, Evan Brown, Peter Havart-Simkin, January 10, 2022.
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