Forrester Research
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Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent technology and market research company that provides its clients with advice about technology's impact on business and consumers.
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Corporate Facts
- Founded: 1983 by George F. Colony
- Headquarters: 400 Technology Square Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
- Employees: 649 (as of June 30, 2005), 227 of whom are research professionals
- Number of client companies: 1,906 (as of June 30, 2005)
- Ranked: In the top 75 on Forbes' 200 Best Small Companies list for seven consecutive years
Forrester Locations:
Australia | Brazil | Canada | Denmark | France | Germany | Hong Kong | India | Israel | Japan | Korea | Poland | The Netherlands | Switzerland | United Kingdom | United States
History
Forrester Research was founded in July 1983 by George Forrester Colony, now chairman of the board and chief executive officer, in the basement of his home in Cambridge, Mass. The company’s first report, “The Professional Automation Report,” was published in November 1983. Forrester continues to focus on technology as it enters and is accepted into the market.
Forrester focuses on helping large companies through the complex and difficult technology decisions they make every day — to minimize waste and maximize their efficiency in the use of technology.
These choices require that companies have the right information, long- and short-term perspective, knowledge of best practices, and the vision to ensure that technology investments are aligned with their business needs.
Until the early 1990s, technology was the sole province of the IT staff. Then the Internet took off, and the world of business changed dramatically. This created a new and powerful connection between companies and their customers. To stay competitive, executives discovered that IT and business planning and marketing would all have to work together and create a powerful, unified technology strategy if they were to move their companies forward successfully.
Since the mid-1990s, Forrester has created research for and provided guidance to IT, marketing, and business — the three most important constituencies and motivating forces within large corporations.
Recognizing that technology remains a primary driver in the world economy, Forrester is now reaching out with research that’s relevant to large corporations and governments around the globe. The company has a growing presence in Asia Pacific, in addition to its research centers in Europe and the US.
Today, Forrester sees its role as helping companies improve the quality of their decisions across organizations, a wide range of problems, and also across expanding geographies.
Products
From businesses investing in new, enterprise-wide software systems, to consumers shopping online or taking pictures with cell phones, technology is changing everything — the way we do business, interact, educate, entertain ourselves, and much more.
To help companies adjust to this technological transformation, Forrester offers a selection of products and services, the foundation of which is its WholeView 2™ Research.
Forrester’s design with WholeView 2 is to present clients with a whole view of their business environment and deliver guidance on strategy, technology investments, implementation changes, and customer demands.
Forrester’s core written work is often a client’s starting point. Clients also have the opportunity to have one-to-one discussions with the analysts who write the research. Questions and feedback can influence future topics for research reports.
Integral to WholeView 2 is The Forrester Wave™ — Forrester’s call on a particular market or technology. The Wave’s intent is to help Forrester clients evaluate and select vendor products and services, making it easier for them to make well-informed decisions.
Forrester’s Consumer and Business Technographics® is the largest and longest-running offering of its kind in the world. The company can document that it has completed millions of surveys reflecting technology behavior and demand in the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Forrester has specialists who can help clients customize and segment the data, giving them a more detailed look into their specific issues.
The intent of Forrester’s Ultimate Consumer Panel is to leverage technology to passively and continuously capture a vast amount of offline and online consumer behavior. The panel currently comprises more than 11,000 US consumers. Forrester’s analysts then deliver highly customized reports and analytics that address their clients’ specific needs.
Forrester’s Custom Consumer Research leverages the company’s years of experience and vast amounts of data from Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® research. Analysts work with Forrester clients to develop appropriate research and sample design, along with survey instruments. Forrester analysts then interpret the results and identify the insights that they feel can be applied to the clients’ needs.
Consulting experts at Forrester tap into the objectivity of WholeView 2 Research to help clients combine the right technology with the right people and processes. Methodologies like Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI)™ process are designed to give companies a better understanding of the economic impact of technology investments.
In its Community programs, Forrester presents high-level marketing and IT executives with opportunities to meet with their peers, connect with Forrester’s senior analysts, and take advantage of customized research. The Groups, Councils, Boot Camps and Workshops, and Forrester Events are designed to foster connections and shared insights among top-level executives.
Industry-Specific Research
Forrester analysts talk to technology users and vendors on a daily basis — across the wide range of industries Forrester covers — to keep themselves up-to-the-minute on the latest trends, emerging technologies, new products on the market, and product differences. These industries include:
Automotive | Consumer Products | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare & Life Sciences | High-Tech | Manufacturing | Marketing & Advertising | Media & Entertainment | Mobile Communications | Professional Services | Retail | Telecommunications | Transportation & Logistics | Travel
Technology-Specific Research
Forrester's analysts cover the following technologies:
Application Development | Business Intelligence | Computing Systems | Consumer Devices & Access | Content & Collaboration | Customer Experience | Enterprise Applications | Enterprise Mobility | IT Management | IT Services & Outsourcing | IT Spending | Networking | Portals & Site Technology | Security | Software Infrastructure | Tech Sector Economics
Forecasts and Predictions
Forrester’s objective is to make the call before the impact of technology change hits the market. The company then works to help clients see what will happen and how it will affect their business.
• In 1987, Forrester predicted the fall of the mainframe and the rise of PC-based client/server computing systems. At that time, only Forrester made the call.
• Forrester forecast the rise of the Internet from its use primarily by universities. Forrester was considered outrageous in 1993 to think that one day consumers would use the Net from home.
• In 1997, the company was the first to forecast business-to-business trade as the predominant type of eCommerce. Forrester accurately noted cost and supply chain issues as the focus of this commerce.
• In April 2000, Forrester announced that many dot-coms wouldn’t survive the year and was the first to see the coming crash.
• In June 2000, Forrester’s report, “eCommerce Integrators Exposed,” stopped the industry in its tracks. By separating marketing hype from actual deliverables, the company found no big winners in the space and set new standards for service providers.
• In 2000, few companies were implementing iterative development. Teams were tasked with squeezing a year’s work into just a few months. The answer came with research that introduced true parallel development, refinement (agile development), and required projects to start with predefined deliverables — now second nature to development teams.
• In 2001, “The X Internet” introduced what will be next phase of the Internet. The X Internet looks beyond today’s Web by putting more intelligent software near the user and connecting the digital world to the physical world by using smart chips. The X Internet will deliver better user experiences and better business results, as seen with today’s radio frequency identification (RFID).
• Forrester forecast that 2001 online sales would hit $51.5 billion, and according to Index and Comscore data, actual 2001 sales were $51.2 billion.
• In 2002, 15 years after coining the term “client/server,” Forrester noted another major shift in corporate technology architecture. Forrester calls it “Organic IT.” While the idea is big and long-term, Forrester provided guidance for immediate application.
• In 2002, Forrester was the first to predict that during the next 15 years, 3.3 million US services jobs would go offshore. Today, the updated prediction of 3.4 million in 10 years is being quoted in the press worldwide.
• “The Minority Report: Selling To Ethnic Groups” from 2003 told retailers that racial differences do not matter as much as demographics. Forrester believed that this insight helped clients get their share of racial minorities’ $460 billion annual spending power.
• In 2003, Forrester revealed a coming massive power shift in the entertainment industry — CDs and DVDs going the way of the LP. $700 million in lost sales would drive the music and film industries to back new distribution channels.
• In 2003, the company forecast that database marketing services vendors would acquire their email counterparts. Since then, Acxiom, Experian, Harte-Hanks, and infoUSA have done just that.
• Final data on 2004 spending on information technology goods, services, and staff by US companies and governments confirmed Forrester’s forecast of 5% growth for the year. Actual 2004 IT spending was $734 billion, just $2 billion higher than Forrester's final projection of $732 billion.
• Forrester predicted that 2004 eCommerce sales would reach $144.6 billion. The actual figure was $136.6 billion.
• Forrester anticipated that 2004 would see a substantial increase in the number of pharmaceutical firms including allied health professionals (AHPs) like nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) in their online promotional programs. The growth from 2003 to 2004 in non-MDs more than doubled from 9,900 to 19,873.
• Forrester noted that the US online retail market was $172 billion in 2005. In Europe, the online retail market was only about €40 billion in 2004. Forrester estimates that by 2009, it will quadruple to more than €167 billion.
• Forrester predicts that IT spending growth will drop from 7% hikes in 2005 and 2006 to a 2% rise in 2007, before bouncing back to double-digit figures by the end of the decade.
See also
External links
Sources
This information was gathered from www.forrester.com
