Gleanster provides all the tools you need to make smart decisions about business technology.

We benchmark best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives, delivering actionable insights that allow companies to make smart business decisions and match their needs with vendor solutions. Our research methodology relies on ongoing survey responses from tens of thousands of industry practitioners. Our thought leaders include a team of seasoned research analysts as well as outside contributors with subject matter expertise. As the first market research firm to "go open," we also aggregate thought leadership in the form of white papers, case studies and research reports from third-party sources, including solution providers — who, for their part, can create and maintain their own Vendor and Solution Showcases on Gleanster to help further educate the marketplace. 

Our Approach

What we do is predicated on five guiding principles: specificity, brevity, clarity, objectivity and openness.

Specificity

Our research focuses on technology-enabled business initiatives that require specialized solutions, capabilities and resources to successfully execute. When it comes to benchmarking best practices, we strive to go a mile deep.

Brevity

Today's busy executives have neither the time nor inclination to wade through long, dense research reports in the hope of stumbling upon a few useful nuggets of insight. Our mantra is quality over quantity. Be concise. Cut to the chase. Cut out the fat.

Clarity

We strive to present research findings in a clear, consistent, contextualized and compelling manner. Call it the 4 Cs. That means no convoluted acronyms to state the obvious. No charts with indecipherable X and Y axis labels. Our charts show the relative importance or usage of different elements in a simple, straightforward and intuitive way. The elements are then discussed reason-by-reason, metric-by-metric and challenge-by-challenge.

Objectivity

Industry pundits often bat around phrases like "pay for play" and "whitepapers for hire" to describe some of the existing business practices in IT market research. The sponsored research model, in particular, which allows vendors to place their logos on the cover of a research report — and, in some cases, influence the content that appears inside — is often perceived to compromise the integrity of the research. At Gleanster, integrity matters. We're committed to a business model that mitigates analyst bias and embraces research objectivity.

Openness

Actionable insights can come from any number of sources, not the least of which are industry practitioners with first-hand experience implementing technology-enabled business initiatives. That’s why Gleanster uses a survey-based research methodology for identifying best practices. It’s also why we aggregate real-world success stories, white papers, and even others' research reports in the Open Resource Library while enabling solution providers to create and maintain their own Vendor and Solution Showcases.

Founded in 2010, Gleanster is backed by two private equity investment partners: Synetro Capital, based in Chicago, Illinois, and 1in10 Ventures, based in the Silicon Valley, California. The company is headquartered in Evanston, Illinois.

As a proud member of the 1% for the Planet alliance, Gleanster is committed to donating at least 1% of annual sales revenue to nonprofit organizations focused on environmental sustainability.