Please join us on Friday June 12, 2026 for Super Cyber Friday.
Our topic of discussion will be “Hacking the Analyst Firms: An hour of critical thinking about how vendor rankings get made and who they’re really for.”
In preparation for our discussion, think about the following:
- How often do CISOs use analyst rankings to validate a decision they’ve already made, versus to make a decision they haven’t?
- If you buy from the top right of the Magic Quadrant and it fails, you get to say “we followed best practice.” If you buy something innovative and it fails, you own it. How much of analyst firm influence is actually about personal liability management?
- When boards and CFOs ask “what does our analyst say about this vendor,” is that a legitimate procurement signal or a way to avoid having a real security conversation?
- What would it mean for the industry if security leaders stopped citing analyst rankings in board presentations?
- Analyst firm criteria tend to favor scale: global support, enterprise integrations, large install base. What happens to specialized, best-of-breed tools that solve the actual problem but don’t check those boxes?
- If you’re a mid-market security team that doesn’t run enterprise-scale environments, how much of analyst firm research is even relevant to you?
- Analyst firms don’t fully disclose their criteria weighting, their customer interview selection, or how much vendor-supplied data factors into rankings. Should security leaders treat these as research or as opinions?
- How effective are analyst platforms that crowdsource practitioner voices in their rankings?
- What’s the most useful thing an analyst firm has ever done for you — and did it require them to be objective, or just knowledgeable?
It all starts at 1 PM Eastern/10 AM Pacific. At the end of the hour [2 PM Eastern/11 AM Pacific] we’ll switch gears to our meetup where everyone will get a chance to chat face to face.
Help us get the word out! Share next week’s Super Cyber Friday registration link on LinkedIn, tag me (David Spark) and CISO Series, and you’ll be entered for a chance to win an item from our prize store. We’ll randomly pick one winner from everyone who shares.
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