HFS Upgrades from Horizon to Stars

Tech markets and sourcing advisory firm HFS Research is retiring its Horizons reporting series after four years, and replacing it with a new offering, SaS Stars, 'built entirely on the experience of enterprise clients running live engagements' and promising to disrupt the business of provider ratings.

HFS works for major enterprises, tech firms and service providers, helping them face business challenges, innovate and 'make bold moves'. The firm says its analysts are distinguished by their 'deep, real-world experience in the subjects they cover', Four weeks ago it launched an MCP interface, allowing clients to bring its research and data directly into conversations in Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.

Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst Phil Fersht says analyst firms have for many years told enterprises who the 'leaders' are, noting: 'Providers brief the analysts. They wine and dine the analysts. They respond to RFIs. They supply their favorite customer references. Many spend significant money to access their content. Then, analysts score them.' The new HFS approach aims to improve significantly on this 'arbitrary judgement... based on a decades-old dog and pony show.'

The new evaluation works on the basis that enterprise clients living with providers' work 'every day at the coal face' are the people who know best which providers are the leaders: therefore the new SaS Stars is built entirely on the experience of enterprise clients running live engagements. HFS designs the methodology, tests the evidence, and provides the market context, but there will be no vendor influence on the ratings, and no analyst-assigned scores - the verdict will come 100% from the clients.

According to Fersht, 'Who's the best provider? is the wrong question. Who's best for what I need? is the one that matters.' Therefore in the SaS Stars setup, enterprises can re-weight the criteria that matter most to them, and instantly re-rank the provider field to build a shortlist around their own priorities.

The first of these new studies looked at Agentic Application Management Services, and is based on more than 400 enterprise client evaluations across 34 providers, and expose 'a pretty significant gap between AI ambition and production reality,' according to the firm.

Horizons replaced a previous product, HFS Top 10s, which had itself served for around four years.

The firm is on the web at www.hfsresearch.com .