With Forrester’s new blogging platform in place, I have the opportunity to launch a series of blogs about tech economics.  What do I mean by tech economics?  To me, tech economics first means how the larger economy and the tech sector interact.  I am interested both in how economic conditions impact the demand for technology goods and services and how business and government purchases of these tech goods and services affect the economy as a whole and the industries and firms in the economy.  Second, tech economics is about the revenue of tech vendors, both what they are reporting in the present and past and what we expect those revenues will be based on future purchases by their business and government customers.

 

My published research on the US and global IT market outlook, industry, regional, and country IT purchase trends, big trends like Smart Computing, and the ePurchasing software market (which I also cover) will continue to be my platform for addressing tech economics.  However, I want to use this blog to talk about four focused aspects of the tech market: 1) tech data sources; 2) tech industry definitions; 3) tech market developments; and 4) tech market dynamics.   Let’s call these the 4Ds of tech economics, and each will have its own strand of comments and observations.

 

D1: Tech data sources will be of most use to the data geeks like me in tech vendors.  These are folks who use my numbers in their own forecasts of the market for their firm and its products.  These blogs will talk about the data sources that I use in building my tech market sizing and forecasts, issues and questions about these data sources, and how the data geeks can leverage them.  I will share some (but not all!) of our secret sauce for our forecasts, and I hope you will share some of yours so we can all get better.

D2: Tech data definitions will be of interest to market strategists who are trying to understand how the tech market is morphing in response to new product categories and client demands.  We will publish a document that provides our basic definitions of what is included in different buckets of technology goods and services, industries, and geographical markets.  However, there are many boundary questions, so I will use the blog to put our proposals for where we would “bucket” specific technologies and offerings, and seek your feedback.

D3. Tech developments.  News that impacts or reflects developments in the tech market happen every day.  It doesn’t make sense to write reports about each of these.  But I will use the blog to alert others about events that I think are significant and would be missed otherwise, as well as to comment on the big events like quarterly US or Canadian GDP announcements with their information on business investment in IT. 

Q4. Tech dynamics.  Like other Forrester analysts, I have regular contacts with executives at tech vendors, from whom I pick up intelligence on how they see the tech market evolving and changing.  Given my report on Smart Computing, I am especially on the look-out for examples of whether, how, and where Smart Computing is putting down roots and showing sprouts of growth. 

Each of these strands of commentary on the tech economics will be tagged and “logo’ed” so you can track them.  And, like all blogs, this will be better and richer for your contributions.  So, let me know what you think!