It's official: we are now cool

We are pleased to announce that we have been selected as a Gartner “Cool Vendor in Web-Scale Platforms” for 2015. This is an accomplishment for us and it goes beyond simply getting a vote of confidence from an influential IT reporting organization.

Danny Cohen, Director of Product Development at Particular Software, accepts Cool Vendor recognition from Gartner associates

If you walk through the halls of a sufficiently large enterprise and hang around the IT building long enough, you’ll hear someone say, almost without irony, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” This was an extremely effective marketing campaign in the 1980s for convincing companies to buy IBM hardware – so effective, in fact, that technical executives know and invoke it in 2015 when purchasing software. In recent years, Gartner has risen to be a trusted advisor to these sorts of technical executives, counseling them on which technologies are worth considering. These days, no one would get fired for buying based on Gartner’s recommendations.

Unless you have lived the culture of a large enterprise, this might seem pretty strange. But the scale at which these companies make decisions creates stakes that are uniquely massive in terms of careers, influence, and budgets. To put yourself in their shoes, imagine running an organization filled with hundreds or even thousands of developers, all of whom are discovering new technologies daily and clamoring to use them. It is up to you to decide which of these tools to adopt, which to monitor, and which to ignore, in addition, of course, to actually running this humongous organization.

Furnishing information to these time-pressed decision makers is Gartner’s specialty. They keep their keen eye on up and comers so that their readers can keep pace with the constantly evolving technical landscape. As such, Gartner is often the vehicle by which enterprises become aware of emerging technology options. So we were pleasantly surprised when we learned that Gartner featured us in response to their readers hearing about NServiceBus from their own developers and wanting to know more. Gartner had certainly been aware of us, but so too, it turns out, had people in the organizations that buy their reports.

Being mentioned by Gartner is an honor, of course. But earning mindshare from time-pressed technology executives is a real milestone for us. It reaffirms that our software, our architectural philosophies, and our approach are fit for organizations of all shapes, sizes, and risk profiles, and that we have been fit for quite some time now. And that is truly cool.