Welcome to my blog!

I joined Forrester recently as a senior forecast analyst on the ForecastView team focusing on business technology (BT) topics. What is ForecastView you ask? It’s a Forrester product that puts the numbers around our research reports by publishing a five-year quantitative outlook. To learn how our forecasts can help you with your investment decisions, read our ForecastView overview.

Our BT forecast team takes a look at cloud, security, IoT, business intelligence, marketing ad technology, Big Data, and other hot topics in the BT space. We launched our ForecastView BT bundle in 2015. In case you missed it, our three 2015 forecasts examined eCommerce platforms, cloud security, and API management. Some highlights:

2015 Year In Review: What Was Hot? Looking back at 2015, we examined the most popular BT search terms on Forrester.com. Unsurprisingly, cloud tops the list. In 2016, we expect to hit the ground running with a new Business Intelligence And Analytics forecast which will give you insight into spending growth in basic BI (such as reporting, basic analytics [OLAP, slice/dice], dashboards) and advanced analytics tools. Why does this matter in the age of the customer? BI and analytics are huge drivers of the big data movement.

As my colleague Boris Evelson states, “enterprise knowledge workers need to be empowered with easy access to agile, flexible and responsive enterprise BI tools and applications.” Customer-obsessed firms serious about personalizing customer experience must invest in BI and analytics. Our forecast illustrates for industry players and vendors which segments are driving spending growth over the next five years.

What do you think will be the hot topics in 2016? What BT forecast would you like to see?

Happy holidays and happy New Year!