When AI Commoditizes Your Product, You Build a Platform

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:41:05 +0000

In June, at Info-Tech LIVE in Las Vegas, I sat in a media roundtable with Infotech CEO Tom Zehren and founder Joel McLean while they talked about where the research and advisory industry was headed. One observation from the room that morning stuck with me: "AI collapsed access to research. That's no longer the valuable piece. The value now is the advisory piece — here's what you do, here's what it means, here's the step."

Today, Infotech answered that observation with a product.

The company — formerly Info-Tech Research Group, now operating as Infotech — announced the global launch of CIO Analytics, an API-driven advisory platform that connects members' operational IT data with the firm's research, benchmarks, AI-assisted services, and analyst expertise. Alongside the launch, Infotech disclosed its first acquisition in 30 years: Zluri, a SaaS management and identity governance and administration provider founded in 2020.

Three announcements landed simultaneously: a new platform, a first acquisition, and a new name. Sufyan Al-Hassan, Infotech's Global PR Director, put it plainly on LinkedIn: "They're not three stories. They're one."

The Platform Argument

The strategic case behind CIO Analytics is direct. When AI makes generic research and best-practice guidance widely available, the value shifts to context — advice grounded in your organization's specific data, not generic frameworks applied to a problem the advisor doesn't fully understand.

"AI and analytics are nothing without the right data, and the right data is hard to act on without benchmarks and industry-leading insight that show what 'good' looks like," said Zehren. "CIO Analytics brings real-time operational data into the advisory process, providing a current view of the systems, resources, and business priorities that shape where IT leaders need to focus."

That's the problem CIO Analytics solves. Through API connections into the tools IT teams already use, the platform reduces the manual discovery work that typically slows the advisory engagement — the intake process where an IT leader spends the first few sessions explaining their environment before any real advice starts. Instead, analysts arrive with current data already in hand and can spend time on interpretation, prioritization, and action planning.

For developers and architects, the architecture matters: this is an API-first platform, not a portal or a report. The connections are live, not static snapshots.

Three Modules, One Architecture

CIO Analytics launches with three initial modules, each targeting a different area of IT visibility.

Service Desk Analytics connects to ITSM platforms and surfaces performance data across customer satisfaction, efficiency, cost, workload, and service quality. The module feeds directly into Infotech's analyst advisory process — the same approach Rob Garmaise, Infotech's VP of Product, described when I interviewed him at LIVE in June. "Each client's data tells a very specific story," he said at the time. "What infrastructure has been successful. What infrastructure has been less successful. Where are the challenges. Which users are causing the most problems." Service Desk Analytics is the productized version of that conversation.

Application Discovery and Identity Governance and Administration come directly from the Zluri acquisition. For organizations managing sprawling SaaS portfolios — an increasingly common problem as the average enterprise runs hundreds of applications — application discovery provides visibility into what's actually in use, what's being paid for, and what access exists. Identity governance and administration sits on top of that: who has access to what, whether that access is appropriate, and how to manage it as the application portfolio changes.

For security engineers, the IGA capability is the most immediately relevant piece. Shadow IT, over-provisioned access, and orphaned accounts are persistent problems in enterprise environments. Bringing application discovery and identity governance into the same advisory framework — connected to the same operational data as service desk and infrastructure analytics — addresses a gap that currently requires stitching together multiple point solutions.

The Acquisition Context

Zluri is Infotech's first acquisition in 30 years. That's not a small footnote. It signals that the firm is moving from a purely research-and-advisory model toward something closer to a software-enabled platform business.

"The next era of IT won't be won by software or by legacy advisory alone. It will be won by bringing them together," said Ritish Reddy, Zluri's co-founder and CEO. "Zluri gives leaders real-time control over identities and access across increasingly complex environments, and Infotech gives them the insight to know where to focus and how to act with that information."

The combined value proposition is essentially a data layer for IT advisory — one that connects operational reality to analyst guidance in a way that neither pure software nor pure research can do alone.

What This Means

When Zehren challenged the 95% AI failure stat in his LIVE keynote this past June, his argument was that organizations weren't failing because of the models. They were failing because the gap between business workflow knowledge and technical implementation wasn't being bridged. "That thinking and that knowledge sits in two very different heads," he said.

CIO Analytics is Infotech's answer to that gap — a platform designed to pull those two heads closer together by grounding advisory in the data that reflects what's actually happening inside an organization.

Whether that answer is complete remains to be seen. Three modules is a starting point, not a finished platform. Liam Nediger, Infotech's CTO and executive lead for CIO Analytics, acknowledged as much: "The next wave of modules will extend the same model into other areas where CIOs need a clearer basis for setting priorities, managing risk, and achieving measurable results."

But the direction is clear. The research and advisory industry is being forced to reinvent itself, and Infotech is moving faster than most toward what comes next.

After 30 years as Info-Tech Research Group, the name change to Infotech is the least interesting thing that happened today.

Coder Legion - Recent posts tagged cioanalytics

When AI Commoditizes Your Product, You Build a Platform

The Platform Argument

Three Modules, One Architecture

The Acquisition Context

What This Means