Gartner Buys Mentis for New Unit

Gartner Group has acquired Mentis Corp., a privately held market research firm in the bank technology field.

Mentis, which is to be the hub of a new financial services division at Gartner, helps fulfill its acquirer's desire to sell information technology research to specific industries.

The Gartner Group, with $700 million of annual revenue, has a 75% share of the worldwide market for general technology industry research.

Mentis publishes lengthy reports on bank technology investment trends for about 200 clients, two-thirds of them vendors and the rest banking companies. It operates a 10-person call center that collects data on bank technology spending and trends.

Gartner offers "drill-down analyses of specific competitors and technologies," said James B. Moore, founder and president of Mentis, who is now Gartner's vice president of financial services. "We have the industry understanding about the business of banking."

Mr. Moore founded Mentis in 1989. Before that, he and his brother had co-founded Transdata, which tracks information on banks' retail and wholesale product offerings. He sold that business in 1985 to Thomson Corp., which owns American Banker, and stayed on as chief executive officer until 1989.

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