In today’s complex digital landscape, IT leaders across every industry face a critical challenge: making informed software purchasing decisions. We are constantly bombarded with reports, reviews, and recommendations, all promising to guide us to the “best” solution. However, a significant portion of this guidance, particularly in highly specialized fields like Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)—deserves a far more critical eye.

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room: reports based entirely on market share, and those influenced by a “pay-to-play” model. These common pitfalls can lead you astray, causing you to overlook truly innovative and mature solutions that might be the perfect fit for your unique organizational needs.

The Peril of Popularity: When Market Share Misleads

Market share, while seemingly a straightforward metric, is often a poor proxy for product quality, suitability, or long-term value. A vendor might dominate market share for several reasons:

• Legacy Footprint: They’ve been around for decades and acquired an early market share—even if their current offerings are outdated.
• Broad Generalization: Their product tries to serve every vertical, but master’s none—diluting its ability to solve specialized problems.
• Marketing Budget: They simply outspend competitors on advertising and analyst relations, creating an illusion of superiority through sheer visibility.

When you base your decision purely on market share, you risk adopting a solution that’s “good enough” for everyone, but “great” for no one. In identity domains, “good enough” solutions often lack the depth required for effective lifecycle management, policy-based automation, or compliance assurance. Over time, this can result in security gaps, inefficiencies, and cost overruns—hidden beneath the illusion of mainstream adoption.

The “Pay-to-Play” Problem: A Hidden Cost to Innovation

Another concern is the financial model behind many industry reports. Some of the best-known analyst firms rely heavily on vendor subscriptions—sometimes costing hundreds of thousands annually—to influence coverage and placement.

This creates a quiet but powerful filter. Vendors that can’t—or won’t—pay the price are either excluded or buried in the rankings. That exclusion has nothing to do with the product’s value or maturity—it’s about business strategy.

Consider the implications:

• Exclusion of Niche Expertise: Mature niche vendors (especially in IAM/IGA) often focus resources on customer success and innovation—not analyst fees. These vendors may have decades of specialized experience solving complex challenges in higher education, healthcare, or public sector environments.
• Disqualification by Revenue or Privacy: Some analyst firms disqualify companies based on revenue minimums or a refusal to share sensitive balance sheet data—common among privately held firms. Justifiable privacy becomes a liability in the inclusion process.
• Customer Cost Impacts: Vendors paying high premiums for visibility often pass those costs along to customers, inflating pricing without adding actual product value.

The “Experts” Who Aren’t: Misrepresentation and AI-Generated Content

Increasingly, industry reports are written by analysts without direct IAM/IGA experience—or worse, generated by AI systems trained in generic market language.

• Conceptual Misrepresentation: Core IAM concepts are often misconstrued or oversimplified.
• Inaccurate Comparisons: When done without hands-on knowledge, side-by-side product comparisons miss critical differentiators.
• Shallow Insight: Reports that lean heavily on buzzwords like “digital transformation” often lack the technical substance IT leaders need.

Your Best Defense: Due Diligence and Direct Engagement

Here’s what informed IT leaders do:

• Talk to customers. Ask for direct references. Learn what implementation and ongoing support actually look like.
• Review the vendor’s content. Good vendors publish technical blogs, webinars, and whitepapers that demonstrate deep thinking.
• Ask hard questions. Don’t settle for slide decks—get live demos with your use cases.
• Engage with consultants. Reach out to your normal trusted advisors, perhaps those that specialize in your industry.

Why Fischer Identity Isn’t Loud, But Leads the Way

At Fischer Identity, we understand these dynamics because we’ve been navigating them for decades. We’re not always the loudest name in the room, but we’re often the one quietly solving the hardest problems.

We don’t pay to be placed in quadrants. That’s by choice. Instead, we invest where it counts: product development, implementation success, and customer satisfaction. With a 97% customer retention rate and 99% implementation success over 20 years, the results speak for themselves.

Fischer Identity is purpose-built to handle complex IAM and IGA challenges across higher education, K-12, healthcare, and state/local governments, some of the most demanding environments in IT.

We may not be the loudest. But we’re built to last, built to solve, and built to lead.

Explore how our Strategic IAM Advisory Services can help you cut through the noise and chart a clear, confident path forward.