Have you heard of Hubba? Coupa? What about APX Labs? Forrester features these technology vendors, alongside 19 others, in our new Breakout Vendor reports. To keep pace with the expectations of digitally empowered customers and clients, firms must stay on top of disruptive and emerging technologies. Keeping up with new providers of potentially game-changing technologies is overwhelming, which is why we’re introducing this new Breakout Vendor research. In these reports, we give you insight into the most promising innovations — and the companies behind them — that will accelerate growth in the age of the customer.

Forrester’s Breakout Vendor reports provide insight into:Offering: What are the capabilities of the products and the technology?

  • Scenarios: What are the scenarios and environments in which the company excels?
  • Maturity: What is the company’s go-to-market approach, channel strategy, and viability?
  • Challenges: What are the potential pitfalls and areas for improvement?
  • Road map: What’s next for the business and its products?

Don’t miss these five new Breakout Vendor reports that went live this week:

Breakout Vendors: Virtual And Augmented Reality by J. P. Gownder
Extended-reality technologies offer firms that seek to disrupt their less digitally mature competitors an opportunity to reshape both their digital operations and their interactions with customers. Three related technologies make up the extended-reality landscape: virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. We have identified five breakout vendors operating in hardware and/or software in the virtual and augmented-reality spaces to give you an early look at who is driving these nascent markets forward: APX Labs, HoloLens, HTC Vibe, Marxent, and Sensics.

Breakout Vendors: Innovators Stretch Big Data Integration by Brian Hopkins
Big data technology can bring new data sources and faster results into integration processes — and big data integration is a thriving market of established and new vendors. To help enterprise architects get ahead of the latest innovations, we have identified three breakout vendors that are not sticking to the classic big data integration rules but are changing when and where data integration happens to further compress time-to-value: Looker Data Sciences, SnapLogic, and Snowflake Computing.

Breakout Vendors: Retail eBusiness by Sucharita Mulpuru
Retailers operate in a highly competitive and ever-changing market where they must compete with the ever-higher standards that leading firms set in the shopping, buying, and post-transaction processes. Many retailers struggle to replicate superior customer experiences on their own. We’ve identified four vendors that enable them to better compete via off-the-shelf products that accelerate their ability to launch valuable and profitable eCommerce features and services: HookLogic, Hubba, Mirakl, and Narvar.

Breakout Vendors: Sales Content Management by John Bruno
Increasingly self-directed B2B buyers educate themselves about the products and services they evaluate and, as a result, have high expectations of the interactions they have with salespeople. In turn, reps struggle to find, personalize, and deliver relevant content to their customers and need new content management tools to help them create powerful content aligned to the customer life cycle. We have identified four vendors that treat sales content management as a life cycle that is flexible and agile: ClearSlide, Highspot, Mediafly, and Seismic.

Breakout Vendors: SaaS Business Applications by Paul D. Hamerman and Liz Herbert
Forrester estimates that the market for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications is currently $52 billion, and it will grow by 24% to $65 billion in 2017. While a few key players dominate the market, thousands of vendors exist and few reach critical mass, let alone profitability. As more and more SaaS vendors materialize and traditional on-premises vendors retool for SaaS, it gets harder for newer players to achieve success. To help application development and delivery leaders in this rapidly evolving environment, we have identified six up-and-coming SaaS vendors with the potential to disrupt the status quo and become breakout leaders in their respective categories:  Anaplan, BetterWorks, CloudCraze, Coupa, LLamasoft, and Plex Systems.