Ah. The Gartner Magic (read: tragic) Quadrant. Staple butt of my ridicule and chagrin to a great many vendors. But there shines a glimmer of hope at the end of the longest running tunnel in enterprise history. VendorStack has emerged from a private beta and promises to open up vendor peer reviews and offer transparency in a market where there is very little unless you have a fat wallet.
Like a strange cross between Gartner, Yelp and Quora, VendorStack will let users rate and review vendors, with the growing VendorStack community asking and answering questions about a vendor or its products. David Cheng the Founder said they have also used Mechanical Turk to scrape vendor customer lists and the company will correlate the data from these different sources and analyse it to provide additional services, such as analytics or market research reports.
VendorStack is looking to offer premium tools that vendors can use to set up their own profiles on the site.
I think this is a long overdue move in a market where the traditional and plodding analyst firms have had vendors by the short and curlies for far too long.
I was asked me what I’d consider absurd in ten years that exists today. I told them Gartner.
IT :: redux 
Having had a look at the site, it seems fine for things like tools and fixed product vendors – but how would it rate companies like mine, sap and oracle. The point of the Analysts is to do the deep dive measurements that require time and efforts from expensive resources.
It seems to almost invite ridicule for the big systems vendors, but as much as you slate their GUI, implementation time and even cost – they value is really only felt by a select few in senior management – which is what Garter rate and what people pay for.
The problem with that site is the people who rate the vendors are not the ones who look like they spend money with them. If it was to be something to beat vendors up with, then there are already enough forums to accomplish that – and with real problem use cases to reference.
That makes these guys just another web site which ultimately no one would care about as it influences nothing. Fine for the small stuff, but would you really make a million dollar decision based on the feedback on a social media web site.
Yeah yeah yeah. Why does it have to be limited to just small vendors ? It’s a startup Alan, it has to begin somewhere. Or are you happy to feed the lion while he chews on your leg…..
Typical large vendor mentality.
I make films and belong to DVXuser.
Here you can pretty much find out anything about anything, ask questions /get answers.
I rarely buy anything without getting 3-4 opinions from different people working in the field plus industry experts who often respond as well.
DVXUSER has 98,000 members and close to 300,000 threads.
No reason why we cannot have a similar forum for BPM products.
It’s not just for BPM remember, VendorStack is agnostic of industry.