Gartner Forrester Merger

Published on April Fools Day 2011

US regulators announced today they have approved a merger between analyst giants Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) and Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR).

The merger, backed by capital from the US Treasury department will enable both companies to better serve and grow existing markets for their products, as well as create new products to meet growing global demand in the analysis industries. As part of the merger, Dinah Soares, who most recently was vice president of the analyst firm will become chief executive of the combined companies.

In his first public comment since the deal was announced:

The main reason for the merger is to enable prediction growth.
In the BPM industry, for example, Gartner have predicted a $2.6B market value. Forrester have predicted a $6.3B market value.
The merger will enable us to predict a combined total value of $8.9B. This is a positive sign for the BPM market.

US regulators approved Gartner’s pending merger with Forester, the final approval needed to complete the analyst merger, the companies said.

Geri Attrick, Gartner’s chief analyst officer, said the two companies need to negotiate further on methodology issues, while at the same time preserving the economic benefits of the friendly $7-billion transaction.

The merger will be beneficial to both companies. It will enable us to learn marketing skills from Forrester’s team, and will enable them to learn from us how to create real analyst reports.

Walter Melon, Forrester’s top analyst agreed that the merger has mutual business benefits

Gartner have been living in an ivory tower for the last few years, while we have been talking to people in the field. The merger will allow us to combine knowledge that might for useful to both our customers. We have already started our work on the next analyst report that will be call “Quadrant Wave” and will embed more colors and dots. We are also looking to change the Quadrant from a two-by-two standard graph into a three-by-three graphic analysis.

In a related announcement, Forrester share prices have been predicted to rise by $39 per share, and predicted dividends are to given to each employee of the company (an estimated $1.32M for each Forrester employee). No options or dividends were offered to Gartner analysts due to their lower predictions this year.