Forrester session: spc2011

In my prevoius life i got to interact with analysts several ways. One way was giving vision demos for our upcoming work, another was at user conferences, and the third was as a resource to help us make decisions. In all cases, the analysts were treated VERY well and with a lot of love and appreciation.

At the sp conference the analyst got grilled. He was presenting to his customers, to the people he wants to buy his research and the people he needs to tell him things so he can report them. And he got grilled. For the first 10 mins the audience just pulled apart the approach of the survey and the way the data was collected. The analyst admits the numbers are basically "noisy", but then added that they had some qualitative research to back up the numbers. I just about fell off my chair. We moved on from picking on his data very quickly, and instead began discussing the numbers whose methodology we were just questioning. 

The format of this session is built to set the man speaking up as an expert. It's very clever and gives me more disdain for analysts and their approach to making reccomendations. They report what they see now, and that's through a very fogged lens, and use this information to extract trends. I believe that the past cannot be used to predict the future. 

Oh, and the forrester guy used his own slide template and wore his own shirt. Branding him as an "impartial" presenter.

Here are the stats that i collected from his talk:

Platform being used by survey respondents:
Sp2010 57%
sp2007 65%

Organization size by respondent:
19% 1000-5000
16% more than 100,000
(someone in the audience pointed out that thesenumbers must be skewed by more than one person from the large orgs responding)

Satisfaction is good around: Collaboration,  Content management, Sites, portal and intranet.
People aren't using sp for bi, search, extranets, social.

As the importance of sharepoint grows, so does the appetite for custom development of applications on top of it.

Slow deployments are caused by
- technical issues 59%
- lack of governance 41%
- functional issues 36%
- skills and talent lacking 28%
- users adopted more slowly 28%
- funding 25% 

For third party vendors, these have the widest use:
workflow - nintex
Avepoint, axceler, quest - administration
Social - yammer and webtrendz

Business is 73% satisfied with sp deployment
IT is 79% satisfied

81% deployed on-premises
17% of respondents would never use the cloud

28% had a positive experience with deploying sp in the cloud, and the analyst says that more people are going to the office365 platform. It sounded like a commercial. 
He recomends developing a roadmap to deploy functionality based on need, ridk and readiness