Grand Valley State University’s department of information technology announced on March 1 that university affiliates will now have access to Gartner Research via GVSU’s library database.

Per their mission statement, Gartner Research defines itself as the world’s leading research and advisory company.

The organization states that their goal is to “equip business leaders with indispensable insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities today and build the successful organizations of tomorrow.” 

Access to this technology can be beneficial for faculty, staff and students. 

Alongside the obvious uses, such as research papers or presentations, Gartner Research’s unique database supplies GVSU community members with unique academic advancement opportunities. 

Via the database, users are able to view credible research regarding emerging technologies, industry trends and new educational technologies.

“Let’s say you’re looking for the latest on any type of technology,” said Emil Delgado, GVSU’s Associate Vice President of information technology. “You can go in here and research what’s going on, such as who’re the top competitors. Gartner is known for its ‘Magic Quadrant’ and being able to be an unbiased source of research.” 

The Magic Quadrant is a notable feature of the Gartner Research database and provides users with a unique visual of various markets’ long term players based on a cumulation of market specific research gathered from throughout the database. 

To accomplish this, Gartner applies a graphical treatment and a uniform assessment of criteria to determine how well technology based businesses are executing their expressed goals in comparison to Gartner’s market view data collected from other companies within the database. 

In turn, Gartner Research determines the x-axis of the Magic Quadrant to be completeness of vision and the y-axis as the ability to execute vision. From there, the graph is divided into four quadrants, niche players, visionaries, challengers and leaders.

Here, users can easily see the characteristics of market leaders and followers in comparison to the technology providers of interest via its interactive features. 

“The vendors or companies go to them (Gartner) and tell them what’s going on and they aggregate everything and put it into ‘here’s what’s good’ and ‘here’s what’s bad,’” Delgado said. “If you’re working on something and doing your research … you can come in here and get that instead of having to google and do multiple searches, and decide what’s misinformation and what’s not.”

Gartner Research also offers over 1,900 global technology analysts, allowing the database to engage students in all fields of study. 

With an increasingly tech-dependent society, understanding which technologies dominate the field may put students ahead of the curve upon graduation. 

Keeping up to date on tech industries via objective information is a new arsenal of information available to the GVSU community.