Technology Trends Analysis

These services look at the technology and market trends that will present the greatest opportunities and risks for buyers, investors and entrepreneurs. They examine a range of trend areas including: communications, applications, data, infrastructure, security and enabling technologies. The purpose of these services is to identify the most and least promising investment areas and to help investors and entrepreneurs from making the wrong investments at the wrong time. These services identify the technologies most likely to impact specific business models and processes by vertical industry. The ultimate outcome of this work is the development of a “technology watch” strategy that will help companies track the trends most likely to impact their business.

The methodology used to develop our trends analyses involves three steps.

First, the methodology is based on content analysis, a formal technique based on document scanning and the cataloging of found categories. For example, if the subject of “Linux” appears in 100% of the scanned material then its content score is high, and if “Linux support” appears in 75% of the material as part of the general Linux coverage, then a pattern can be identified. These patterns become the source of potential trends. The primary materials scanned to do the high level content analysis include various content sources.

Second, the patterns are assessed against an existing data base of trends developed over a long period of time.

Third, for validation purposes the patterns and trends are discussed with “real” analysts and practitioners including investment banking analysts, CIOs and CTOs.

We rely on a variety of content sources including the popular industry research organizations, trade publications, academic literature, vendor analyses, case studies and white papers. We also subscribe to the on-line content sources like TechRepublic. We have a partnership with the Cutter Consortium (www.cutter.com) for the conduct of original applied research and for the analysis of technology trends and technology best practices.

All of this is synthesized into the trends that appear to be valid at a point in time. Obviously, trends change - though it’s the persistent leading edge ones that our clients are the most interested in. Trends analyses are generated monthly or quarterly, depending on the complexity of the analysis.