What is your overall role in the general IT landscape in Portugal?

GABRIEL COIMBRA There are many challenges for firms in Portugal and around the world. The expansion of the sector at the macroeconomic level signals a new digital transformation (DX) economy. Enterprises must facilitate DX through their use of third platform technologies to create value and competitive advantage through new offerings, business models, and relationships. In order to achieve these goals, businesses should focus on using third platform tools to transform their decision-making and experience delivery. In this context, businesses need a thorough understanding of third platform technologies to capitalize on improved decision-making and deliver enhanced customized experiences to stakeholders. The rapid acceleration of this technology adoption means that organizations need to actively looking at ways to deliver this transformation.

RUBÉN BARREIROS I opened Gartner operations in Portugal in December 2005, after ending a distributor contract in Iberia with Profit. Gartner took an important step in deciding to go straight to all global markets, thus opening operations directly in Iberia. Since then, Portugal has been part of the Iberia region reporting to Madrid, where we now have more than 80 people. Gartner has been seeing double-digit growth worldwide for the last 30 quarters, and Gartner Portugal has also been growing. We have acquired companies along the way, such as Meta Group in 2005, AMR & Burton Group, Inc. in 2009, IDEAS International in 2012, Marketvisio in 2014, Nubera in 2015, Machina Research in 2016 and, more recently, CEB. With the addition of the latter, we are uniquely positioned to accelerate our growth. Our comprehensive services align to the needs of virtually every functional business leader, including information technology, supply chain, marketing, human resources, sales, finance, and legal. As a result, Gartner is one of the largest advisory companies worldwide, and our strategy is to grow via acquisition as well as organic growth.

EDUARDO MASTRANZA We provide executive management support for decision-making, but also have other services for other company functions, such as HR. That said, the most developed part of our business is IT and digitalization, while we also have other services for managers and technical teams. This helps everyone in the company, not only those at the C level.

How do you utilize new technologies to help your clients?

GC IDC helps ICT companies understand market trends and opportunities. For other sectors, such as banking, retail, manufacturing, and public administration, we help them navigate the digital transformation era with a portfolio of decision-making methodologies that enable them to make more informed strategic decisions and better understand technological trends, business requirements, and technology options. But we are also a data-centric research company. We crunch a great deal of data on IT and digital markets and analyze it using advanced techniques such as machine learning and advanced statistics to understand trends in technology and build test models to help companies understand how technology changes the entire economy. We also advise companies on how to monetize data, build information architecture, security and privacy strategies, as well as new business strategies around data.

EM Research is what we do, so we invest all of it in this area. We do not do applications but have our own tools, such as deploying AI-aided agents that help clients access the most valuable content. As part of our offering, we have a portal with all our research content. This significantly improves the value our members receive from their subscription. We also do all sorts of media and try to go to market with different aspects. Apart from events, we also have podcasts and webcasts; we cover the entire spectrum to deliver content.

RB We also do surveys such as the CEO and CIO surveys, where we ask them about their mission critical priorities, and gain extensive insight into what will be the key investments for the following years.