Compiling this report is a massive and time consuming task and its one that we are not compensated for – ie we do it as basic research every two years. Having said that, advertising is available in the report and that helps us defray the cost of the work a little – let me know if you may be interested? I must say that I find these perception reports endlessly fascinating and being a bit of a curious scientist type, I could really splice and dice the data endlessly. However, this year, I cut out some of the slicing and dicing we had done in the past because it didn’t add that much value to the overall result despite being academically interesting. The report is backward looking in that it deals with perceptions. However, it serves to show just how diverse the solution landscape is yet, it also demonstrates how a handful of vendors have dominated over the last few years. Despite that, there is evidence to show that newer vendors and products are emerging in various categories like cloud delivery, for example. You can also clearly see how these newer vendors emerge in a regional context so that, for… continue reading