GigaOm Redesigns Its Radar Around Executive Decision-Makers

GigaOm has overhauled its Radar reports, the vendor evaluation tools used by enterprise technology buyers, to better reflect how real purchase decisions are made. The new design moves away from blended scores and introduces a quadrant model that weights innovation, operational efficiency, and risk & compliance as separate, equally important lenses.

Each lens is now mapped directly to the executive who typically cares about it most: the CTO’s focus on breakthrough capabilities, the CIO’s attention to cost and operational fit, and the CISO’s insistence on security and compliance. Vendors are scored through these three distinct perspectives, which means a solution can shine in one area while showing more moderate strength in another – exactly how internal trade-offs get debated in the boardroom.

GigaOm says the goal is to move beyond simple rankings and help vendors genuinely understand what matters to the people who sign off. By making each lens visible in a single quadrant, the reports turn the same data into board-ready narratives for multiple stakeholders.

Why Executive-First Evaluation Changes the Game for Vendors

The Shift from Blended Scores to Executive-First Design

Until now, many vendor evaluation frameworks lumped cost, innovation and security into a single composite rating, often burying a product’s real strengths and weaknesses. By isolating these dimensions, GigaOm is responding to a reality in enterprise buying: a CIO’s obsession with total cost of ownership has nothing to do with a CTO’s hunger for a roadmap that leaps ahead of rivals. The updated Radar acknowledges that separate conversations need separate evidence.

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Why Innovation, Efficiency and Risk Now Stand Alone

For the first time in the report’s history, innovation gets its own dedicated lens, weighted equally against efficiency and risk. That means a vendor whose product is solid but slow-moving will no longer hide behind a generic “ease of use” score when an innovation-focused CTO is asking tough questions. Conversely, a cutting-edge solution with a higher cost profile can be presented with a documented, independently scored total cost of ownership rationale, rather than starting from scratch in a sales deck.

The change also raises the bar for transparency in risk and compliance. GigaOm now applies two structured fact-check rounds before scoring the risk lens, offering a result that is closer to an audit than a self-attestation. For vendors, this is a chance to replace vague security promises with a defensible position that CISOs can examine directly.

What the New Radar Means for Enterprise Tech Sellers

  • For vendors: align your product story with the three new lenses. Prepare a clear TCO model that speaks to the CIO’s efficiency lens, a concrete innovation roadmap that addresses the CTO’s lens, and third-party security attestations (or the results of independent assessments) that give the CISO confidence. A Radar report alone won’t close a deal, but structuring your evidence this way puts you in the conversation with materials every executive can use.
  • For buyers: use the report’s lens separation to run more focused internal trade-off discussions. Instead of a single score, ask whether the innovation score justifies a higher TCO, or whether a low-risk score truly satisfies your compliance demands. The quadrant design makes that conversation explicit.