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Here’s our long (and possibly sordid) history. The
Internet Research Group was a company we sold to Jupiter Research at the
beginning of 2000. At that time there were four IRG partners John, Larry,
Dave and Peter. John Katsaros founded the earliest version of IRG --
Collaborative Marketing -- in 1992. His original concept was to leverage
his experience leading successful sales organizations selling high tech
solutions to early adopters and build on his belief that the Internet would
be really important. John came from the email business which gave him a
whiff of the Internet’s potential. But back in those “pre-browser” days (if
you can even imagine it today) all of that was invisible to almost everyone,
and the marketing and strategy challenges were clear.
John and Larry Gordon (partner #2) had worked together in
the 80’s and, after accidentally bumping into each other in a Los Altos
parking lot in 1993, decided to join forces and quickly grew their
consulting business, primarily doing early adopter market analysis since
adoption of the Internet was still in its infancy.
Larry’s consulting company, Lawrence Gordon Associates,
was focused helping product companies operationalize product-to-service
transformations utilizing the Internet by sharing his experience marketing
new communications services to early adopters.
In 1996, as the business grew, Dave Kaplow (partner #3),
an old friend of Larry’s, joined to help extend the software practice.
Dave, a software industry veteran, built a successful developer tools
practice leveraging the same Internet change that drove the rest of the
business.
In 1997 John saw the potential of building on some of
what the consulting business had discovered in the way of fast growing
Internet markets and started an effort to build a research business serving
multiple clients at once in a particular industry segment. The first focus
was on Internet Caching and Peter Christy (Partner #4) joined to help. Peter
had spent a career in technology and engineering and most recently run
Microdesign Resources, a part of Ziff-Davis that did microprocessor
analysis. John and Peter quickly built the research business to a
significant part of the overall business.
The company continued to grow and in 1999 was named on
the Inc 500 list of fastest growing US private companies. In 2000, we
sold the Internet Research Group to Jupiter Research.
Post Jupiter, in 2001, John and Peter formed NetsEdge
Research Group and went back to doing the research in infrastructure – the
intersection of applications and networks -- while Larry and Dave formed The
FactPoint Group continuing the consulting tradition of IRG
But as they say, “a good name is hard to find,” so, in
2005 when everyone had recovered enough from the dot com crash to say the
word “Internet” without breaking into a cold sweat, John and Peter decided
that it was time to rename their enterprise The Internet Research Group.
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