forrester

Grading the analysts

Sam Lawrence, Jive's chief marketing officer, has issued a report card for two analyst firms with which Jive works. Net net? Forrester is pretty engaged with its clients (and non-clients), and Gartner, apparently, is not.

I've talked about analysts on this blog before, and don't want to spend more cycles denigrating their work. Like Sam, I've found Forrester to be particularly good. Forrester has actively talked with Alfresco despite the fact that we're not clients.

Perhaps Forrester recognizes that there's more to a market than the incumbents (though, as Sam found, no analysts with which we've worked have been all that interested in actually talking to our customers). After all, we're often the ones exerting a big influence but don't want to spend money on buying our way onto an analyst's report. … Read more

Surprising statistics from Forrester report

Forrester Research published a report on the music industry earlier this week entitled "The End of the Music Industry As We Know It," and it offers some conclusions that shouldn't surprise anybody who's been following the music industry for the last few years: as users have shifted their behavior to computer-based digital music, the recording and technology industries have not made it easy enough to discover, share, and buy new music in new media and formats. Hence, the rise of all-digital sales will be too little, too late, to compensate for the fall in CD sales, … Read more

Analyst: Music industry should help people share music

Hey, Mr. Music Executive: scrap your preoccupation with CD sales and start looking for ways to help people share, yes share music; focus more on developing and profiting from artists; and forget about subscription services and ad-supported music.

These are the conclusions of James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, according to a report titled "The End Of The Music Industry As We Know It," issued on Tuesday.

That's a fitting title because the report reads like an obituary. Tower Records, a music mecca for decades, has already closed but McQuivey argues the real deathblow to the industry will … Read more

Web 2.0 won't pay the bills, but collaboration will

Sometimes it's all in how you ask the question. As Dan Farber at ZDNet reports, Forrester asked a wide range of enterprises how much they plan to spend on Web 2.0 technologies (plumbing), and then asked essentially the same question but focused on what that plumbing can create - social collaboration - and found that purchasing interest was much higher:

Collaboration is increasingly a big business. Just ask Microsoft which minted $1 billion on Sharepoint in 2007, making Sharepoint Microsoft's fastest-growing product (measured in terms of revenue) ever.… Read more

CIOs sick of enterprise software pricing, Forrester finds

Forrester just released a report that should be required reading for enterprise software vendors who insist on inflicting the 20th century on their customers. According to Forrester, "software licensing and pricing continues to be marred by complexity, soaring maintenance costs, and a lack of flexibility and alignment with business goals."

In the French version of the synopsis, Forrester gives even more detail. For those of us who compete with these bloatware kings, this isn't news. But for enterprises who haven't been on a buying spree lately, you're in for a rude awakening:… Read more

Tech spending set to plunge

In what should be a boon to commercial open-source software vendors, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that tech spending is set for a big slowdown in 2008. Just as a housing and credit crunch should lead to more prudent consumer spending, so, too, should economic malaise at the corporate level lead to more intelligent IT spending.

In other words, less silly spending on licensed shelfware and more savvy spending on real value: open source and SaaS that focus on actual service, not licenses. Proprietary software's loss can be open source's gain:

Last week, IDC cut its 2008 projection for world-wide tech-spending growth to between 5.5% and 6%, down from a previous forecast of 6.6% and from this year's expected growth of 6.9%.… Read more

Some shoppers will pay more for greener tech

Twelve percent of Americans are willing to pay more for greener electronics, according to a Forrester Research survey of 5,000 people. The study forecast that electronics companies will learn to target this segment of the population, equivalent to 25 million consumers.

The report broke down shoppers into three categories: "bright" green, green, and un-green. Another 41 percent may care about environmental woes, but not enough to pay more for greener gadgets, while green issues were of little or no concern to another 47 percent of people surveyed.

"Bright" green consumers are otherwise known by the … Read more

The business world is changing...Facebook style

My CTO just received word of a bug that had been found by an important customer of ours and resolved earlier today...via Facebook. Another business partner looked up my profile (in Facebook) to figure out how best to interact with me in a contract negotiation. (He stopped short of humming The Smiths but that might have helped his cause.) :-) Also today, an old friend from my master's program sent me a message (on Facebook) to ask about my company's content management solution for his organization.

Perhaps this is why Forrester's Kyle McNabb writes:

Face it, without an ability to dictate what technology their employees use to get their jobs done, organizations have to shift their ECM (enterprise content management) focus from repositories to figuring out how to extend the security and management of content beyond the repository, and onto the content asset. You'll soon have to work on answering questions of 'How do we make sure our people can work in Facebook, but not take contracts in there that may put us at risk?'

… Read more

Beta goes meta: From innovation to trend in a heartbeat

David Armano from Critical Mass will moderate a panel on "Always in Beta: How Big Business Can Benefit from 'Little' Innovation" at the Forrester Consumer Forum (October 10 to 13). Here's a quick synopsis: "Innovation isn't limited to R & rooms anymore. The Web 2.0 movement--powered by start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube, has proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, repeat. Digital experiences seem to be 'always in beta'--learning and evolving along the way."

The fact that the Forrester Consumer Forum dedicates a panel to … Read more