About Forrester
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Noel serves Application Development & Program Delivery Professionals. He primarily covers database management systems (DBMSes), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), data replication and integration, data security, data management tools, and related online transaction processing issues. His current primary research focus is on customer usage experiences and broad industry trends of DBMS, IaaS, data security, enterprise data grids, outsourcing, information life-cycle management, open source databases, and other emerging database technologies.
Noel has more than 20 years of experience in IT and has held various technical and management positions. He came to Forrester through its acquisition of Giga Information Group. Prior to joining Giga, Noel spent several years at Exodus Communications and led a group responsible for planning and implementing mission-critical enterprise applications. Prior to Exodus, he served as a principal consultant, benchmark specialist, and data architect for Amdahl. He has worked on several large, terabyte-sized database applications and deployed high-availability and high-scalability solutions for various enterprises. He has vast experience in implementing and supporting leading DBMSes and data management products.
Noel has spoken at numerous industry conferences around the globe and is quoted frequently in industry publications, such as CNET News, Computerworld, eWeek, InfoWorld, InformationWeek, Forbes, Search.com, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He has taught several technical and management programs on grid computing, data management, security, scalability, consolidation, and information fabric.
Noel holds a Bachelor's Degree in business and a postgraduate degree in business administration. Noel is the author of an Oracle book and is currently working on another book on data security.
There are blog posts that you can write without doing any prior work (he says, looking meaningfully at himself in the mirror), and then there are blog posts that require real work. This very...
Requirements Go From Unfortunate Necessity To Strategic Asset
Requirements have undergone a quiet revolution — the conversations have moved from a focus on the high cost of bad requirements to the positive value of good requirements. Not satisfied with...
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has forced technology companies to re-examine and re-imagine innovation. Tech companies were used to treating everything beyond invention as someone else's problem; SaaS...

A common question we analysts hear from our clients is, "How do we scale our Agile efforts?" Now, let's be clear: the question is not how to get Agile to work in a large project. Sure, there are...
Practically everyone who visits the Vatican stops to take a picture of the Swiss Guards. Ditto for the Queen's Guard at Windsor Castle, the Royal Life Guards at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen,...
Complexity is the nemesis of application developers everywhere. While software products' complexity may be, to a great extent, unavoidable, we don't have to complicate software development to...
Another excellent post from Scott Sehlhorst, this time pointing out that, even without product managers, product management still happens. Scott’s post is a response to Jason Calcanis, the...
A big part of my research agenda for this year is productization. Many app dev teams see productization as a way to innovate better, achieve more sustainable results at a lower cost, deal with some...
Politics is a word that we use so loosely that it risks losing meaning altogether. When we talk about office politics, as some recent posts by product management bloggers, we're usually...
Other Industries Have Moved Beyond Product Marketing And Lead Generation
Compared with other industries, B2B technology industry companies treat marketing as an opportunity to sell new products and services to new customers. For these vendors, the product is the axis...
In the technology industry, there has been a rising chorus of questions about the role of the executive in Agile adoption. The recent acceleration of Agile adoption has a lot to do with the...
A few quick observations on what we've seen at Agile 2010 this week: Diversity. Agile 2009 attracted a diverse audience of developers, project managers, QA technicians, product managers,...
[For earlier posts in this series, click here and here.] Imagine that you're dining at a new Italian restaurant that just opened in your neighborhood. You've heard that the chef is well...
Fiction writers I've met have said that the hardest section of a novel to write is not the beginning or ending but everything that happens in between. The middle chapters trace the course of the...
One of the core priniciples of Agile is a realistic attitude about the unknown. We might have a rough idea of how much work it will take to complete a project, but we cannot state with the certainty...
At Each End Of The Innovation Process, You Need A Different Kind Of Lab
In the technology industry, two types of labs exist, each contributing to different parts of the innovation process. The stereotypical lab, focused on pure research, is the source of good ideas from...
Lately, I've been working on behalf of some Forrester clients to answer the question, "How do we build a community?" Frequently, the answer is, "You don't build a community. You expand it."...
By now, the arguments for improving product requirements are very familiar – all too familiar. Bad requirements lead to misconceived projects, many of which fail outright. The...
IBM, Rally Software, PTC, CollabNet, Microsoft, And Serena Software Lead The Pack, With HP, Atlassian, And Rocket Aldon Following
In Forrester's 116-criteria evaluation of application life-cycle management (ALM) vendors, we identified the nine most significant software providers in the category — Atlassian, CollabNet, HP,...

The Australian product management consultancy brainmates just published the results of a survey on a very interesting topic, social media usage among PMs. The short list of questions get right to...
One of the face palm moments I had while researching PM's role in SaaS was the timeline for platform and app development. The traditional path for on-premise products was platform first, then...
Now that we've posted the outline for our study of thought leadership in the technology industry, it's a good time to take stock of our success so far. It's important to start the...
[As promised, here's the first in the series about the tech industry's drive to reduce complexity.] Remember the magic number? It's the one thing from Psych 101 that you should recall,...
The always incisive and effervescent April Dunford has a great post at her blog Rocket Watcher about the reasons why your start-up needs a website, before you have a product to talk about. I...