garykoelling

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.

As organizations become increasingly customer-centric, planning and implementing intelligent customer relationship management (CRM) is at the top of the Customer Intelligence (CI) professional's "to-do" list. Intelligent CRM enables CI pros to complete their view of each customer, drive value, improve relationships, and compete in an ever-changing consumer environment. CI professionals should maximize intelligent CRM to drive desired behaviors, including increased transactions, profile creation, conversation, and repeat purchase. This report provides a blueprint for intelligent CRM, including case studies from best practitioners, and a self-test tool for measuring your own intelligence-powered CRM readiness. .

Interactive marketing often takes a back seat in emerging markets, a victim of the low online penetration in these countries and of local marketing teams who lack experience with interactive tools. But that's shortsighted. You should put more of your budget online in these countries, not less, because the minority of the population that is online is both highly attractive and much easier to reach online than through traditional channels. This brief report helps marketers make the case for increasing their interactive budgets in emerging countries, and advises them on how to get the best out of that budget.

More people own smartphones than ever before and they're using them more often too. This makes a mobile marketing strategy crucial for any interactive marketer. Yet today we find that although mobile budgets are beginning to increase, the majority of interactive marketers are just starting to experiment, and many still treat mobile phones as mini-PCs. This report explains how marketers at each phase of mobile marketing evolution should craft successful mobile campaigns by hewing to three key principles: immediacy, simplicity, and context.

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.

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.

As social TV continues to grow, so does the number of questions that clients ask Forrester about it. One crucial piece of this multiscreen puzzle: How can marketers ensure that their second screen messaging is synchronized to what consumers are watching on the television screen? The most promising solution: audio fingerprinting. This document explains what it is, why it matters for social TV, who the players are, and what marketers should do about it.

In recent months, Forrester took a journey to plumb the depths of sales battle cards &mdash a highly inconsistent and dysfunctional asset &mdash to identify obstacles and develop a method for making battle cards more valuable to sales teams. Along the way, we noticed that the problems thwarting battle cards also get in the way of delivering other internal sales tools, such as ROI calculators or customer references. Forrester's road map for overhauling battle cards also functions as a framework for transforming many other internal sales tools. The teams that create sales tools &mdash product, industry, or marketing groups &mdash tell Forrester a similar story; they know that the tools could provide more value to sales reps, but they don't have a road map that shows where or how to create that value.

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.

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.

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.

As four of the largest and arguably most currently influential technology companies — Google, Amazon.com, Apple, and Facebook — continue to exhibit ambitious tendencies to capture consumer information and transaction data, eBusiness executives are left to ponder the impact of these players on their day-to-day businesses. These companies collectively have a market capitalization of more than $700 billion and are increasingly viewed as the gateways to Internet traffic. Their impact on eBusiness ranges from interesting and innocuous forays into commerce to disruptive forces that must be approached with circumspection.

Retailers are ditching the term multichannel. Instead, in the era of agile commerce, they talk about delivering a "buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere" experience to their customers. In pursuit of this vision, eBusiness leaders' and their peers' in-store operations are embarking on an aligned journey to digitize the in-store experience by empowering customers and sales associates alike with best-in-class mobile and interactive technologies. The business case for this investment is twofold: First to prevent the loss of in-store sales, and second to create an endless aisle where stores can capture sales for items beyond those on the shelf. This report will help eBusiness professionals identify best-of-breed in-store digital experiences and the technology behind them, as well as understand their role in building out these experiences.

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.

When thinking about how to organize their marketing departments, business-to-business (B2B) CMOs face constant tension regarding the decision to put marketing resources closer to the customers and markets they serve — whether segmented by geography, industry, or product lines — or to build core centralized marketing capabilities and teams. CMOs must figure out what work needs to get done and where it should be performed, while providing the right level of corporate support for decentralized resources and ensuring that they are best aligned with the go-to-market strategy of each business unit.

The splinternet — the fragmented world of incompatible web, social, video, and mobile touchpoints — is where your customers live now. They want to reach you in more touchpoints, but you can't afford to be everywhere. To help companies invest with insight, we developed the splinternet engagement index, a single measure that tracks the depth of connection across these four touchpoints. It reveals, for example, that the highest online spenders in Europe demand investment across all touchpoints, but many of the high-net-worth investors that Fidelity might target don't. Market insights professionals should use the index to help corporate strategists know which touchpoints to invest in and to prepare for agile commerce that connects across those touchpoints.

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.

Increased government regulations and a tough economy have combined to create significant challenges for financial services firms. Consumer product strategy professionals are leading the charge to stem customer defections as well as increase revenues. Effective customer onboarding is an increasingly important aspect of strategies aimed at solving the problems of retention and revenue generation. This report discusses the onboarding opportunity; execution challenges; and an approach to effective onboarding strategies built on understanding people, objectives, strategies, and technologies.

Sales reps need battle cards to anticipate and counter competitors' claims in sales conversations, but today's battle cards are little more than side-by-side product comparisons. Sales enablement (SE) professionals will help sales reps outmaneuver competitors by developing battle card content from the customers' point of view — using buyer problems and priorities to frame the points and counterpoints that matter to them. This report outlines Forrester's standardized approach to building battle cards to help your sales reps win competitive deals.

This report outlines Forrester's solution for infrastructure and operations executives working on data center infrastructure. This report is designed to help you build a road map for 2012. Looking at the remainder of 2012, the landscape is a combination of the familiar and the new. The drumbeat of new servers and new x86 CPU offerings will continue, with announcements from all of the major players. Forrester also expects to see the first commercialization ARM CPUs, which will offer additional options for energy-efficient processing. On the data center front, expect that the pressures on power-efficient operation will continue unabated, driving adoption of emerging data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software. Modular data center options will proliferate as entry prices decline and additional options appear. This report focuses on eight key predictions that I&O leaders should consider when planning for their server and data center infrastructure moves.