I've got some experience on both sides of the fence -- working with people who made enterprise purchasing decisions, and working on devices aimed at them. It's

I've got some experience on both sides of the fence -- working with people who made enterprise purchasing decisions, and working on devices aimed at them. It's not that much experience, mind you, so it's not invulnerable to sampling bias. Take it with a grain of salt. In my experience, these things work largely as a barrier of entry thing. No one will buy something just because Gartner endorsed it, unless they're really clueless, or trying to sabotage their companies while maintaining plausible deniability. However, getting this kind of endorsement requires some level of organizational stability, business connections and money. The fact that you have one is an indication that people can do business with you without jeopardizing their bonuses. That won't convince anyone to make the purchase, but it will get you through the door. The endorsements and studies themselves don't mean much. I personally know of at least one such study that was highly effective, and cost an unspeakable amount of money to conduct and market, and was absolutely bollocks. It showed that one company's implementation of a failsafe feature was "at least as efficient" as the industry standard. It was a 20-page-ish whitepaper, with graphs and benchmarks and whatnot. What it didn't even test for, let alone mention, was that exposing that feature to the kind of conditions it was meant to protect against caused it to fail, and then crash the whole system.