Yankee Group

» see yankeegroup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Howard Anderson founded the Yankee Group in Boston in 1970 to do market analysis for communications companies, and it billed itself afterward as the industry's first research and advisory firm. Every research firm says something along those lines about itself, but the date holds up and the business underneath it was real: subscription reports sold to carriers and equipment makers who needed somebody to tell them what the market was going to do next.

Nobody reading this ever bought one. Yankee Group reports cost what enterprise research costs, which is more than a person spends on anything. The public saw the numbers and never the reports. An analyst would forecast something and a journalist would quote it. The number then traveled for years with the firm's name attached. In August 2001 one of its analysts predicted 887,600 fixed wireless subscribers by 2006 and that sentence outlived most of the companies it was about.

The scale is worth pinning down because it moved so much. There were around 60 employees and $8m of sales in 1996, and roughly 200 people by 2001. Seventy analysts were still on the books in 2006. At the final sale in January 2013 a former employee counted about thirty full-time staff, while Anderson himself remembered a peak above two hundred.

~ the record ~

~ five owners in seventeen years ~

Anderson got out in August 1996, selling to Primark for $34m in cash plus performance payments that could have added another $31m. Primark sold it to Reuters in 2000 for $72.5m, the largest sum anyone ever paid for the firm and roughly double what the founder had taken four years before.

Reuters sold it again in May 2004 for around $30m, to a Monitor Clipper Partners vehicle called Decision Matrix Group, which is why two different buyer names circulate for the same transaction. The plan was to merge Yankee Group with META Group. That never happened and Gartner bought META instead. In November 2005 the firm went to Alta Communications under a new chief executive, Emily Nagle Green, and in April 2010 Alta put in another $10m of growth capital intended to double the headcount.

It did not double. Layoffs were reported three times between 2008 and 2011 and the conferences business was sold off. By 2012 the firm was carrying debt through a fourth consecutive year of falling revenue. One analyst-industry writer covering the eventual sale said plainly that without it the company would probably have closed.

~ the anywhere revolution ~

The last decade of Yankee Group's research had a brand of its own. Green called it the Anywhere Revolution, a thesis about connectivity reaching everything, and the firm put a number on it: almost a trillion dollars by 2013. When The 451 Group announced the acquisition it quoted a figure of a three trillion dollar mobility opportunity by 2016. The product line selling into that was called MAPS, for Mobile Advisory and Planning Services.

Connectivity did reach everything, roughly on the schedule the firm had been selling. The company that spent forty years charging for that opinion stopped existing before the deadline on its own forecast.

~ August 2015 ~

The 451 Group's press release on 3 January 2013 said Yankee Group would operate as an independent division, with Terry Waters staying on as chief executive and the Boston office kept open. Eighteen months later 451's own site described the arrangement in the past tense: as of July 2014, Yankee Group's analysts and products were the driving power behind 451 Research's mobility team. No announcement marked the end of the brand, so the domain has to date it. On 2 August 2015 yankeegroup.com was still answering with its own front page under the title the global connectivity experts. By 25 August it was a redirect to 451research.com, and it stayed one for years. The registration lapsed eventually and the address now belongs to a people-search operation, which runs a disclaimer of its own denying any link to the research firm or to anyone who used to own it.

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