Omdia continues to fill out its senior positions with the appointment of Roy Illsley as Chief Analyst for the 50-strong Enterprise team. Spanning cloud, data center, cybersecurity, AI & intelligent automation, enterprise IT, and IoT technology, Illsley’s new remit is to put into practice Omdia’s mission to “connect the dots across the entire tech ecosystem” initially for the cloud and data center practice, but then extending this to cover all of the Enterprise team.

Illsley reports to Cliff Grossner, Senior Research Director, Cloud & Data Center, who in turn reports to former IHS Markit head Bill Morelli, who is now Research VP for the Enterprise IT team. Illsley plans to leverage combined insights from the old Ovum forecasts into IT spending with the bottom-up vendor-sourced data from IHS Markit.

With this combined data, Roy plans to explore planned IT spending over the next 3-4 years around enterprise data center technology, as well as service desk plus IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in his new Intelligence Service IT ecosystem & operations that launches in May – and eventually working with London-based Maxine Holt, Senior Research Director, Cybersecurity on the wider topics of cloud cybersecurity – and to help enterprises to determine where they should be looking at placing technology investments.

Supporting a longer-term focus on increasing revenue from end-user buyers is also on Illsley’s roadmap – starting by showing them the value of Omdia’s consolidated top-down and bottom-up view of the market by working with Dan Mayo, Senior Research Director, Enterprise IT. “We think the end-user buyer market is an untapped market for us, but it’s managing that in a way that is balanced … making sure the services we offer are going to match what the end users are looking for. In many ways, we will be picking up on the roots of what Butler Group used to do with end-user subscriptions.”

In terms of goals, Illsley aspires to help Omdia be the strategic voice, combined with a reputation which “justifies why people should listen”. He adds: “This is a pivotal role to drive forward how we learn to connect these dots, getting out to hear the voice of the customer, bringing that into the trackers and making sure we answer customers’ questions.”

Illsley also wants to help AR professionals in navigating through the new Omdia organization – offering to help them find the right analyst for any specific topic.

Our take:

  • There’s a lot riding on the new Omdia for parent company Informa, after years of false starts and frustrations with Ovum.
  • It makes a lot of sense to try and combine top-down analyst insights with bottom-up data from IHS Markit – and the result is something that should appeal to technology buyers as well as vendors.
  • With the percentage of Omdia’s business from end-users currently around the 15% mark, there’s certainly potential for growth.
  • Fellow AR professionals will confirm that Roy is easy to work with – and I’m sure will also welcome his generous offer – not only will it help in navigating through the new organization, but will also help drive synergies between analysts from the “old” Ovum and IHS Markit.