Opportunity Analysis & Forecasting
OverviewOver the last 20 years, we have worked closely with virtually all of the major IT providers on market opportunity projects, enhancing each client’s ability to understand and project the future direction of the markets they work in. The insights obtained have allowed our clients to develop fact-based business plans (which include the setting of short-term sales objectives), incentive-based executive compensation plans, and long-term strategic investment plans. Through an enhanced understanding of current and future markets, our clients are able confidently to communicate their understanding of their current opportunity; its future development and their place in their chosen markets. They understand what could change that future, either for the better or worse.
To compete effectively in today’s marketplace, the successful company cannot depend solely on selling a superior technology. Globalization hasn’t created a single worldwide market – instead it is forcing an understanding of many markets. This requires a fact-based answer to a deceptively simple question: who buys what products and services from which channels of distribution now and into the future? Short-lived technology advantages are no substitute for long-term market insight. Perceptions of IT products and services buyers have changed, such that “the next big thing” pales in all significance to the ebb and flow of corporate budgets dictated by the many linked business cycles.
To meet the complex analytical needs we confront in developing customized multidimensional product/vertical/channel market representations (known as “cubes” to our clients), IPR has developed a rich toolkit of market modeling techniques. These allow us to estimate cells where we have conflicting or missing data and to develop forecasts driven by assumptions such as product penetration, product life, price/performance, and market share. Importantly, our forecasting methodologies are tied to significant demographic and economic measures.
IPR has invested heavily in a key software tool to satisfy the market opportunity sizing needs of our clients. This unique software, ISPS, has been crafted over many years. ISPS allows IPR and our clients to view and manipulate complex cubes in a variety of ways, depending on the problem at hand.
Each market/product/channel cube uniquely reflects the way a client chooses to look at its opportunity. IPR works with each client to inventory the sources of data available for analysis. A client typically has many sources of information, often conflicting and almost always incomplete. These sources may be economic forecasts, end-user surveys, measures of channel activity, estimates of competitive sales, data from industry associations, and company sales figures. IPR has many years of experience with integrating and rationalizing most of the relevant sources of information measuring the IT industry.
Since we do not provide syndicated industry data ourselves, we have developed productive working relationships with most of the industry’s data providers. Consequently, we help our clients increase the value of their investment in their own information sources by using them to estimate the market/product/channel cube with fact-based data.
