forrester

Forrester acquires JupiterResearch for $23 million

Tech analyst heavyweight Forrester Research just got a little bigger.

The Cambridge, Mass., company said Thursday that it acquired smaller rival JupiterResearch and its parent company JUPR Holdings for $23 million. The JupiterResearch brand will begin to serve Forrester's "Marketing and Strategy" client group.

JupiterResearch, considerably smaller than Forrester, had 83 employees and made $14 million in 2007, while Forrester Research, which has more than 1,000 employees, made $212 million.

Forrester also announced its second quarter earnings Thursday. The company had a $8.6 million profit on $63.5 million in revenue for the quarter ending … Read more

Tech analysts embrace Twitter for instant gratification

In a new trend somewhere between direct customer contact and the public facing comments lies Twitter.

I'll start with the obvious joke that 140 characters, or roughly 2 sentences is typically the value that you get from analysts. However, my experience over the last year or so is that the analysts that I've worked with (both paid and unpaid) have been extremely helpful.

The Top 10 Analyst Twitter-ers via Technobabble: 1 Forrester - Jeremiah Owyang 2 Redmonk - James Governor 3 Message - Stowe Boyd 4 Hurwitz & Assoc. - Robin Bloor 5 Greenmonk - Tom Raftery 6 … Read more

Wisdom of the crowd comes to the enterprise

Predictions markets are no longer the province of academic research or consumer services, such as Hubdub and NewsFutures. In a new report from Forrester Research, "Prediction Markets: Wisdom Of The Crowd Comes To The Enterprise" ($279), Oliver Young makes the case that prediction markets are a valuable tool for executive decision-making, lowering the cost of forecasting and increasing accuracy. Many companies have been using prediction markets for years, but Young predicts that collecting the wisdom of the crowd will become more mainstream in enterprises.

Forrester: Europe leads in open-source adoption

France may not have shown up for the Euro 2008 soccer finals, but it continues to demonstrate the most adoption of open-source software, according to a recent report from Forrester Research ("Open Source Adoption: Notes From The Field").

In France, 24 percent of the enterprises surveyed by Forrester are currently using open-source software, with another 15 percent either piloting it or planning to start a pilot within the next year. (I'll wager that the other 61 percent are using open source but simply don't know it).

The United States? It's at 17 percent adoption, with another 11 percent in near-term pilots. Canada is tied with the States, while Germany, along with France, leads.

As noted in the comments to an earlier post, these low numbers suggest that Forrester is talking to the wrong people within enterprises. I'm confident in suggesting that at least 90 percent of these same companies that Forrester surveyed are actively using open source--but the CIO simply doesn't know it.… Read more

Random Sampler: Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Ruby on Rails gets cash, and more

Today has proved to be much busier than expected, but there were a few interesting articles worth exploring:

First, 63 percent of IT departments surveyed by Forrester "expect[] social technologies to impact the business world." The other 37 percent apparently don't realize just how much time their employees are wasting each day on MySpace. :-) Ruby on Rails hosting and optimization company Engine Yard just nabbed a $15 million Series B round of financing from NEA, Amazon.com, and Benchmark. This makes a total of $18.5 million raised so far. Finally, Apple sold over 1 million 3G iPhones in the first weekend … Read more

Forrester calls out Alfresco and Drupal as the top-two open-source WCM systems

Forrester Research just released a great report detailing the open-source web content management market. In it, Forrester analyst Stephen Powers highlights a shift to open source for managing websites:

As organizations embark on next-generation Web content management (WCM) initiatives, they want to avoid the mistakes made in earlier, more costly WCM projects. As a result, information and knowledge management professionals increasingly show an interest in open source WCM as a way of controlling software costs and increasing their access to product-specific expertise in the marketplace.

That's great: Enterprises should move to open-source web content management offerings. But which ones?

Out of the wide pool of open-source web content management projects (There are, quite literally, hundreds), Forrester says there are two to which CIOs and CTOs need to pay particular attention:

Alfresco and Drupal (Acquia).

In answer to the question, "Why these two?" Forrester answers: Relevance. As Powers writes:… Read more

Forrester survey discovers that virtually no one uses open source (?!?)

Forrester just released a new survey, one that begs the question: Who paid for this rubbish?

I generally like Forrester's work, but this survey flies in the face of every piece of research on open source that I've seen in the last five years...including research from Forrester. Also, as the research itself finds, often its survey respondents are using open source even when they don't know it: Nearly half of those surveyed by Forrester who are using open-source frameworks (e.g., Spring) still claim they are not using open source.

Forrester's newest research finds:

Seventy percent of decision-makers responded that they don't have interest or have no plans to adopt open-source software; Only 23 percent of respondents said expanding their use of open-source software was a priority; Security is the main concern around adopting open-source software. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said it was an important or very important concern.

Amazing how open source's greatest strengths are now being used against it. Security? I'm not suggesting that open source is perfect here, but it's one of the primary reasons that people are dumping proprietary software for open source. This is a classic Microsoft spin, and directly contradicts Forrester's own, earlier research that open source offers security advantages, not disadvantages.

Fortunately, if CIOs care to spend even a nanosecond checking Forrester's claims about tepid adoption of open source, there is a wide array of contradictory evidence, including from Forrester:

Earlier this year, Gartner's Mark Driver noted the following: "By 2012, 80 percent or more of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology."… Read more

Random Sampler: Digium's double, Linux desktops, and more

I'm falling behind on the blogging (Hey, it's my end of quarter!) but thought these articles/posts were too good to let slip:

Digium is apparently doubling revenue each year. Given that it was doing $10 million (at least) two years ago, if memory serves, we may be looking at our next open-source IPO. Red Hat received kudos from Gartner and Forrester. In particular, Forrester's report has an awesome statistic: "86 percent of JBoss users are confident that it can handle their largest workloads." I guess presence, not absence, makes the heart grow fonder. Shlomfish … Read more

Book review: How To Make Money With Your Blog

Looking to get started with a blog? More importantly, do you hope to monetize that blog? There are a lot of articles and books on blogging these days, many with limited or inaccurate information, but How To Make Money With Your Blog is one of the most complete and thorough publications on the subject that I've encountered. Authors Duane Forrester (a search engine marketer) and Gavin Powell (a technical writer) have covered all the important bases from identifying the best blogging platforms to covering the ins and outs of blogosphere culture. Oh yeah, and in between, they explain quite … Read more