Forrester Research - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Wall Street Beat: How bad will it get for tech?

  U.S. exchanges were volatile Friday after suffering their worst drop in more than two years Thursday, taking IT companies' shares down along with stocks in just about every other sector of the economy.

• Apple plays customer loyalty, anti-Google cards with iCloud, say analysts

  Apple's strategy isn't about making money with iCloud, analysts said today. Instead, it's all about using the free service to keep customers and battle Google for smartphone and tablet supremacy.

• Tech future: Huge screens, ARM servers, geosocial everywhere

  A new "geosocial" app called Sonar is getting the attention of Steve Peltzman, CIO of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

• Spending on new software projects rises, survey says

  For the first time, companies around the world are planning to spend as much on new software projects as they do maintaining existing systems, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

• Has Oracle stopped making big acquisitions?

  As midyear approaches, Oracle has made only two small acquisitions. This is out of character for a vendor that has made buying other companies a core growth strategy, doing as many as 13 deals each year since 2005, for a total of roughly 70 since then.

• Calculating virtualization, cloud costs: Four approaches

  Until recently, almost no IT industry vendor or analyst questioned the assumption that nearly all kinds of virtualization deliver quick, significant cost savings compared to computing only in the physical world.

• Microsoft's Skype buy could boost unified communications

  Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype could profoundly influence a set of collaboration and conferencing technologies called Unified Communications (UC) that have taken years to catch on, analysts said Thursday.

• 3 ways to ensure Cloud benefits meet enterprise needs

  For all the cost-saving appeal of cloud applications -- more commonly referred to as SaaS (software as a service) -- enterprises are still trying to get their heads around the benefits and risks of SaaS and which parts of the company need it the most.

• Forrester: Economy still hampering ERP upgrades

  ERP (enterprise resource planning) software investments aren't on this year's agenda for three-quarters of IT decision-makers who responded to a recent Forrester Research study, indicating that the global economic downturn's effects are still lingering.

• 10 tips to turn Android into a business phone

  Android has shot past BlackBerry to become the third most popular smartphone operating system in the world behind Symbian and the iPhone , according to StatCounter.

• Forrester: Public cloud growth to surge, especially SaaS

  On the heels of the controversial Amazon EC2 cloud outage last week, research firm Forrester published a timely report on the growth potential of the major public cloud categories.

• Study: Bias, rivalries can threaten UC deployments

  Contention and biases among technology and business factions can derail the deployment of unified communications systems that are efficient, cost-effective and simple enough to use so they actually get adopted by end users, according to a Forrester Research study.

• Offshore IT and BPO services subsidiaries still popular

  Setting up offshore IT services and business services subsidiaries has once again become a preferred route for multinational companies wanting to tap talent in low-cost locations, analysts said. The subsidiaries are known in the outsourcing industry as "captive centers" because they meet the in-house services requirements of companies.

• Why you may not need Facebook to sell stuff

  Facebook is often touted as a must-have tool for small businesses as a means to boost their brand awareness and to reach existing and potential customers. However, the social network does not necessarily translate into more sales if you are an e-tailer. In fact, a Facebook page will have little or no impact on an e-tailer's sales, Forrester Research says. And using Facebook to boost revenues remains "elusive" for e-tailers.

• Facebook joins the ranks of industry's elite

  Facebook's start-up days are long behind it.