Despite their critics, analysts at their best can bridge a significant gap between vendors and software users. Vendor marketers who create information for prospective customers are understandably sales-driven and rarely grasp how their products are deployed.

The result tends to be material strong on superlatives and weak on substance. Certain features are emphasized while the processes involved in implementation are largely ignored, even though these may be more significant and costly than the software itself.

Users, on the other hand, have a deep understanding of their own problems but cannot always put it into a wider perspective. They have difficulty seeing the direction technology is taking, a direction influenced by a complex mixture of technical and commercial factors.

This gap leaves an opening for analysts, who should be relatively neutral about the success or failure of products or vendors, to stand back and form a view of the trends.

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