Ovum integrates Butler Group and Data monitor IT research

Stuart Corner
Monday, 10 August 2009 07:59

IT Industry - Strategy

Market research firm Ovum is integrating its three technology businesses - Butler Group, Datamonitor Technology and Ovum - under the Ovum brand and launching two new research services However the existing Ovum Telecoms research service and all other Datamonitor business research services will not be affected (Ovum is subsidiary of Datamonitor, which in turn is part of the Informa group).

David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT research at Ovum, claimed that: "For years the analyst industry has been fixated with technology, and has paid little attention to the needs of the businesses. Instead it has focused on technology minutiae. We're aiming to change that model. We've developed an approach that we're calling Collaborative Intelligence. It allows us to harness the insight of 350+ business analysts in Datamonitor and combine this with 150+ ICT analysts to produce research that really tackles the problem of the business value of IT."

The two new research services - Ovum Technology and Industries Knowledge Centre and Ovum Enterprise IT Knowledge Centre - will be based around Ovum's Knowledge Centre platform, an interactive online portal that enables clients to search across available Ovum research and download it for inclusion into documents in various formats: World, Excel, PDF, and PowerPoint. The new centres join Ovum's existing IT Knowledge Centres.

According to Mark Meek, CEO of Datamonitor Group, "The two new Knowledge Centres will be at the centre of a new generation of Ovum research. It will be more influential than ever and offer unparalleled insight into the business value of technology. When combined with the Ovum Telecoms and the Orbys Black Book of Sourcing Knowledge Centres the ICT industry capabilities of the Datamonitor Group are tremendous."

The Enterprise IT Knowledge Centre will bring together existing Ovum and Butler Group research, and will "leverage the business research of the wider Datamonitor Group." The Technology and Industries Knowledge Centre "provides research which helps ICT suppliers identify and address new market opportunities, to solve the real business problems of their clients."

Having brought all its technology services under the Ovum brand, Ovum says it is also increasing its focus on customer service and support. "Customers in the ICT vendor community will have streamlined and more efficient ways to ensure that they can brief Ovum, when they are bringing new products or services to market. Enterprise customers will have improved analyst access, ensuring they can tap into the much wider expertise and resource base that Ovum now offers."
 
The changes come into effect on 1 September. Datamonitor services not affected are Consumer Markets & Retail, Energy & Utilities, Financial Services, Automotive & Logistics and Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals.

Ovum floated on the London Stock Exchange in March 2006 and in October was acquired by Datamonitor for £41.8m, a price described at the time as "eye-watering" in that it valued Ovum at 27 times earning and represented a 50 percent share price premium.

Datamonitor, however was no stranger to acquisitions: it had bought six companies since 2002 – Computerwire, MIS, eBenchmarkers, Butler Research Group, Verdict and Life Science Analytics. Within six months of the Ovum acquisition, Datamonitor was itself acquired by the Informa group for £502m, a price to earning multiple similar to what Datamonitor had paid for Ovum, but a negligible premium on Datamonitor's share price.