- Analyst-press feedback loop
- The self-reinforcing cycle in which an analyst estimate becomes a trade story, the story is cited by other outlets, and the repetition hardens a single figure into apparent consensus, which is then fed back to analysts as the ambient view. Makes echoes look like independent corroboration.
- Bottom-up sizing
- A market-sizing method that builds a total from countable units, shipments, subscriptions, average selling prices, then sums them. Generally more trustworthy for current actuals than top-down because it rests on things actually counted rather than assumed percentages of a large aggregate.
- Franchise (analyst)
- The core revenue business of a research or advisory firm, subscription seats, unit measurement, brokerage transactions, or consulting engagements, that determines which questions it answers well and how its output is tilted. Knowing the franchise is the first step in reading any figure it publishes.
- Magic Quadrant
- Gartner's branded framework that plots vendors on two composite axes, completeness of vision and ability to execute, into four boxes (Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, Niche Players). It is a structured, risk-reduction instrument for a generic enterprise buyer, not a measurement of which product is best for a specific situation.
- Measurement house
- An analyst firm whose franchise is counting, IDC, Synergy Research, Dell'Oro, and similar, producing market sizes, shares, and forecasts built from shipments, revenue, and installed base. Strongest for current-year actuals; bounded by the categories it defines and the vendors that report to it.
- Primary signal
- Raw evidence of activity that has not yet been interpreted by an intermediary, permits, interconnection queues, filings, job postings, shipment records, earnings-call transcripts. Harder to inflate than packaged research and used to test analyst claims against observable reality.
- Top-down sizing
- A market-sizing method that starts from a large aggregate such as total IT spending or GDP and carves out a slice using assumed percentages. Fast and easy but heavily assumption-dependent, and often behind suspiciously round, large total-addressable-market figures.
- Triangulation
- The discipline of building a market read from multiple independent sources of different franchises and tilts, weighting each by its reliability, then reading the pattern. Convergence earns confidence; divergence flags the interesting question. Treats every source as an input, never as gospel.