[consulting] Help with Forrester Corporate Blogging Survey

[Boerland, Bert]

-----Original Message-----
From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org on behalf of Michael Haggerty

> Some people on this list might not be familiar with Forrester, but what to
> take from this is they provide high-level (read: expensive) reports on the
> state of the art in information technology to support decision makers. Many
> Fortune 100 companies consult Forrester as a standard practice for risk
> management, and the fact they are recognizing Drupal as a relevant platform
> is a matter of great consequence.

In Europe -or at least The Netherlands- higher management of all "Big Companies" base their decisions on companies like Gartner, IDC and Forrester. These research firms however base their predictions mostly on interviews with higher management of Big Companies. And therefore (rule of bert, 90% change to be true in Q2 2006) the predictions of these research companies become self fulfilling. I haven’t seen a "powerpoint" of a major company without a hype cycle [1], a magic quadrant [2] or a quote of Gartner. So having Drupal in the scope of these research farms might be unimportant for most of the developers, it will raise some heads in the boardroom and depending on your point of view, might change the adoption of Drupal in the "Corporate Blogging" spectrum.

The real bad thing about research firms is however that most of these research companies use their "good name" to publish FUD paid by whoever wants what to be said. 
"Linux is cheaper!" (small print: sponsored by IBM)
"Linux is more expensive!" (small print: sponsored by MSFT).
You get the picture and having Drupal in this picture might not be good at all.

Now Forrester is a company that due to heavy imago damage, got their act clean [3] and dont do -too much- paid FUD reporting anymore, so helping them out to place Drupal on the "Corporate Blogging" map, is not the worst thing to do.

Gartner -the leader in this field- already published some reports about Drupal. I am not allowed to post these reports here ("read: expensive") , but you can find abstracts on the web and look for sniplets at [4] 

So give Drupal a hand and help fill out the wiki.

[1] http://images.google.com/images?q=hype%20cycle
[2] http://images.google.com/images?q=magic%20quadrant
[3] http://www.itworld.com/Tech/4535/031006forrester/pfindex.html
[4] http://www.gartner.com/Search?op=1&keywords=drupal