Ask HN: Gartner and Forrester alternatives in use

In my day-to-day work across major enterprise software majors (oo), I see extremely heavy affinity to Gartner & Forrester (G&F).

They: * follow G&F cues for building annual strategy * spend serious amount of effort in managing "waves" & "quadrants" * use G&F reports/"waves"/"quadrants" as indicator of their success * use G&F as credibility enhancer (look Gartner improved us from laggard to leader!)

I tend to marvel at the dilbert-y idiocy of this, and am awestruck at G&F business model. But, the question I have is this.

How are "non enterprise software" technology businesses handling this? What external entities/metrics they use to assess and build their strategies and north stars?

(oo) enterprise software majors like IBM, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce..