About The Knowledge Engineers

Try to find out how many European companies actually use a CRM. You will land on a statistics page citing a second statistics page citing a vendor blog post citing a survey that is either unnamed, unpublished or a decade old. The number gets repeated until it sounds like a fact. Nobody can check it, and by then nobody tries.

That is a solvable problem, and the solution is boring: go to the primary source, say which one it was, say when it was measured, and publish the method next to the finding. Every report on this site is generated from a named dataset by a script that lives in the same repository as the site, so a figure can be traced back to the row it came from. If we cannot source it, we do not publish it.

• Industry reports. Long-form data reports with numbered data points, each carrying its source, reference period and a confidence label. 8 of them so far, covering 306 figures.
• The market data index. Every figure we have published, in one table, downloadable as CSV and JSON, free to quote with attribution.
• Software guides. Ranked category guides to 117 products, written for the point in a buying process where the shortlist has to become a decision.

• Primary sources only. If a figure comes from a statistics office, a regulator or a company filing, we cite that. We do not cite an article citing it.
• Reproducible by construction. The reports are built by scripts that query the source and write the page, so a reader can rerun the query and land on our number.
• The period is part of the fact. A figure without a reference period is not a figure, it is a rumour, so the year travels with every number we print.
• Confidence is stated, not implied. Verified, directional or single source. We would rather label a number honestly than round it into confidence it has not earned.
• Corrections are public. When we get something wrong we fix it and say so on the page rather than editing quietly.

The full method is on the how we work page.

Research that hides its funding is marketing. Ours works four ways, all of them stated on the services page and disclosed wherever they touch a page you are reading:

• Commissioned and syndicated reports. Paid research, published with the commissioner named on the page, permanently.
• Data licensing. Access to series and cuts beyond the free index.
• Ranked placement. Positions one to six in a category ranking can be bought. It moves the order and nothing else — not the verdict, not the drawbacks, not who is listed. There is a notice above every ranked list saying exactly that.
• Commission on some outbound links. Marked sponsored nofollow, and worth nothing to the vendor editorially.

What none of it buys is the wording of a page, sight of a report before publication, or the removal of a competitor. Read the disclosure for the long version.

5 people write, edit and fact-check everything here, each taking a different role on every page, so nobody both writes and signs off the same work. Which role falls to whom is fixed per page, so a page keeps the same names when it is rebuilt.

If a figure on this site is wrong, we want to know, and it does not matter whether you are a reader, a competitor or the vendor being criticised. Send the page, the claim and the evidence to business@gcas-digital.com. Factual errors are corrected and the correction is noted on the page. Disagreements about our judgement are answered honestly and usually not resolved, which is what judgement means.

The Knowledge Engineers is published by G-Cas Digital B.V. Reach us at business@gcas-digital.com or through the contact form.