Forrester News

Demand Insights: The Network And Telecommunications Market For SMB Customers
True to our "SMB phoenix" characterization, small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) are proving to be aggressive adopters of network and communications technologies and services. No longer can SMBs be considered laggards, compared with large enterprises, as exemplified by SMBs' advanced understanding, implementation, and interest in unified communications; although their motivations and business drivers for networking and communications technology adoption remain unique.
Determine The Business And IT Impact Of Agile Development
This report outlines the business and IT impact of Forrester's solution for application development and delivery (AD&D) executives looking to implement Agile and Lean. It is designed to help AD&D execs prepare for Agile and Lean. How do you quantify the business impact of adopting or expanding the use of Agile? From technical debt to software econometrics, IT organizations struggle to articulate value. Business impact is the make-or-break justification criterion for virtually all IT activity today; newcomers to Agile need to justify adoption and business participation in terms that make business sense, and even firms with several successful Agile efforts under their belts have to justify the change and investment required to scale Agile to the next level.
Asia's Channel Localization Imperative
Tech companies once thought they could export channel models like they do products — that what worked in North America would work just fine globally. Today, the realities of diverse cultural and market dynamics in fast-growth locations like China, India, and Southeast Asia are upending channel models in Asia Pacific. The challenge facing tech companies is to replace homogenous global channel models exported from the West with something that blends the need for global marketing efficiency with local execution effectiveness. It is a challenge that cannot wait, as 75% to 85% of tech industry sales in Asia flow through channels. Tech companies that don't find innovative ways to adapt their Asia Pacific go-to-market models at the regional and country levels will fail to gain market traction as more of the global tech industry's action moves to Asia.
TechRadar(tm) For I&O Professionals: IT Service Management Processes, Q1 2012
Into 2020, the rise of "as-a-service" technologies, empowered workers, and a radically more complex business environment will challenge IT I&O leaders to deliver higher levels of value, agility, and user satisfaction, all while lowering the cost of IT services. This will require I&O organizations to shift from the role of primary provider of IT services to a broker of public and private services. To succeed, I&O leaders must improve and streamline IT service management (ITSM) processes by adopting best practices such as those described in ITIL. This report focuses on the key ITSM processes I&O leaders must improve to operate in this new model of IT and to provide IT-as-a-service. In particular, I&O leaders should prioritize incident, problem, and knowledge management in the short term, while maturing IT financial, configuration, and release management over the long term.
HEROes Are Using Skype — Embrace It
Infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals who manage unified communications (UC) must decide how to incorporate public connections based on Skype software. HEROes in today's enterprises routinely take technology into their own hands to solve customer problems. Thus, these empowered employees won't tolerate the barriers to collaborating with external parties that internally deployed UC systems often impose. So what should I&O professionals do? In this report, we lay out four potential approaches to Skype in the enterprise.
The Financial Impact Of Storage Refresh Cycles
This model is designed to function as a decision tool for planning enterprise storage refresh strategy. Given a set of assumptions, a firm can use this tool to model and compare two scenarios for frequency of storage refresh or other factors related to the storage refresh strategy decision.
Software-As-A-Service Adoption In Europe
This document provides an analysis of key drivers and trends for software-as-a-service (SaaS) across Western Europe. By extracting and analyzing an extensive data set of three recent Forrester surveys we offer detailed insights into the different SaaS adoption plans and patterns across the three largest Western European country markets: France, Germany, and the UK. Because Europe is far from a homogenous whole, vendor strategists will need different go-to-market strategies for each country.
Update 2012: Proactive Outbound Notification Saves Money
In 2009, Forrester identified opportunities for contact center infrastructure and operations professionals (I&O) to use proactive customer communications to reduce costs for incoming calls by sending outbound messages of interest to customers to the devices of their choice. Entering 2012, these solutions have added a number of new capabilities such as more in-depth reporting, tighter contact center integration, and the use of more capable mobile devices to improve the user experience. Because the industry is more mature, I&O professionals can now seek solution providers that are more experienced in what transactions make sense in their industry. Unlike automated messages that intrude rather than inform, proactive notification systems identify areas that customers find important, such as account changes, alerts, or time-sensitive offers, and then send notifications to them via the media of their choice.
Refine Priorities Now For IT Service Management And Automation
IT service management (ITSM) has swept the IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) role over the past half decade or so. But gone are the days ruled by the technology illuminati. The future of ITSM is a world that relentlessly focuses on just the right portfolio of services. It is obsessive about the customer. It expands far beyond the traditional ITIL walls of the I&O organization. And automation will irreversibly alter the skills and organizational structure. This report examines the definition of a service; the importance of standard processes; the impact of automation; the implications on skills, organizational structure, and collaboration across the enterprise; and continual service improvement.
Open Source And Cloud-Based Integration Trends
Open source and cloud-based integration solutions are becoming more prevalent in many organizations. Still, many others are resisting these new alternatives, sometimes based on rational concerns but in many cases due to outdated perceptions related to security exposures. This report examines current trends for both of these technologies and provides application development professionals and enterprise architects guidance on how to fairly evaluate their potential for improving enterprise integration solutions.