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Northern Light’s Analyst Direct Provides Individual Users with Superior Search, but at a Cost
By Ned May
August 27, 2007
Important Details: Northern Light has unveiled an individual subscription version of its hosted market research portal. The new product, Analyst Direct, is focused primarily on the realm of IT analyst research, although it also includes access to a wide variety of business news, trade journals, and magazine articles. The new product allows a user to search across the full content of most leading IT research firms, including Gartner, IDC, and Forrester, and returns the results ranked by relevance. Users can click through to gain immediate access to their existing subscriptions or be taken to the report page of the individual analyst firm’s site should they not have access. Additional capabilities like meaning extraction and sentiment monitoring are also included. The product is priced on an annual subscription basis at $1,500 for one seat; $5,000 for five seats and $50,000 for an enterprise-wide license. Northern Light is currently offering free trials from its website.
Implications: The winners in this announcement are threefold. First, the smaller tier IT research firms will now gain visibility for their research alongside the big firms. Second, corporate market research and strategy professionals will be able to search and monitor a broad spectrum of research without having to visit each individual vendor and perform a unique search. And finally, Northern Light will gain increased awareness for its deep expertise in accessing, searching, and organizing this content. In short, the new offering from Northern Light brings a great product to the masses that was previously only available through a costly enterprise implementation of its SinglePoint offering.
Northern Light has opted to charge users for this service rather than deploy an ad-supported revenue model or a supplier-supported model that charges for leads or actual sales. The company has done so in keeping with its stance that it maintain neutrality in its role as a go-between for enterprise users and research firms, as it believes this stance is a critical element in its ability to gain access to the full text content of most of the leading IT analyst firms. And that access and the subsequent full text indexing it allows is an important element in the quality of Northern Light’s results.
However, the $1,500 entry fee will likely create significant friction for market adoption as the product is targeted toward individual corporate users who do not typically have significant research budgets. Further, Outsell’s research indicates corporate self-seekers of information start their research with an internet search engine over 57% of the time. Quite simply, today’s information seekers are accustomed to learning of available content via free search. Convincing them to pay for search - regardless of its superior coverage and capability - will be a challenge. Conversely, Outsell believes IT research firms would welcome the improved visibility and new sales channel this product creates. It is not a far stretch to get them support it via a commission on each sale.