Well …  I guess that Forrester Research doesn't have to worry about who is going to replace Megan Burns's coverage of Web Analytics, according to Eric T. Peterson in Forrester acquires JupiterResearch. 

It seems to me there's all kind of jobs out there for "Analysts", but, in most cases, most of the money is going to the Analyst Company, not the Analyst.   Anyway, I digress – here's what Eric had to say about the aquisition:

Somewhat ironic that FORR has been actively looking for someone to cover web analytics since Megan Burns (who will be at the upcoming X Change conference) has transitioned to cover customer experience more broadly.  John Lovett, in my humble opinion, will make a great Forrester analyst and was almost certainly the best candidate for the job … <grin>not that Mr. Colony should have paid a $23M bonus to his current employer.</grin>

Ha, ha… well, it seems the whole Analyst thing has some hidden assumptions – that the analyst firms really do know what they're talking about and and the analysts are impartial advice givers that can tell the client "Yes" or "No" and why, to any kind of deployment advice.

It just seem to me the burn out rate on Analysts is very high -too high – which implies that something is wrong with the job description – there needs to be some kind of re-adjustment that's not happening.

But with the higher cost of travel and the high turnover rate of Analysts – an aquisition for Forrester Research of JupiterResearch makes sense. According to Eric:

… Don’t get me wrong, I have a tremendous respect for all involved here — otherwise I would never have advocated for inviting Megan, John, and Bill to keynote the upcoming X Change 2008 conference I’m a partner in.  But I do have some small concern that the market’s view of the vendor landscape will soon be defined by one fewer data points, especially since Gartner has not done a formal Magic Quadrant on the sector recently (although Bill did publish a market note on web analytics on July 3rd that I assume is available to Gartner clients.)

So…. what's happening is we're essentially losing JupiterResearch – we're getting less analysts, less points of view, to make up for the economy that's tanking.

That's what it sounds like, to me.  

Yes, it's going to be an interesting trip to XChange for me … and Search Engine Strategies too …… but more about that later.

I do want to bring up one piece of news for those who follow Webmetricsguru.com – my readers can rest assured that I've secured Webmetricsguru.com from Know More Media and it will soon be moving to a new blog network that I'm forming with Sebastian Wenzel of WebAnalyticsBook.com

We'll move Webmetricsguru.com into WordPress and keep all the content I wrote over the last two and half years plus we're looking for more bloggers to join us – but we're still working out the way we're going to form and run this blog network – more like a community – perhaps focused around Analytics, but not limited to it.

More about this news, soon – but feel free to blog about it or contact me at now dot seo at gmail dot com.