About Forrester
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Shar serves Marketing Leadership professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company's interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester's sales and consulting organizations.
Shar's research focuses on overall interactive marketing strategies; crafting efficient, effective interactive programs; organizing for interactive marketing; and integrating interactive channels into the rest of the marketing mix. Specific subjects addressed in Shar's research include email marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, ad serving and targeting, interactive budgeting and forecasts, and interactive marketing organizational models.
Shar returned to Forrester in 2004 after several years away working in marketing consulting. Shar served as research director for marketing research boutique, TideWatch, where she led internal strategy efforts and client strategy projects. Shar was also a consultant with Carlson Marketing Group's Business Strategy Consulting team, developing CRM and email programs for clients including British Airways, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and Home Depot. Shar began her career at Forrester in 1997 during the early days of the Internet and has written research on customer loyalty, ad networks, and marketing measurement and planning.
A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.
Shar is a graduate of Harvard University.
We're looking to implement a community/shared private cloud solution for central banks. What are some of the people, process, and technology considerations we would have to take into account for this...
It looks that EMC has finally admitted it needs a better approach for courting developers and is doing something significant to fix this. No longer will key assets like Greenplum, Pivotal, or Spring...
For years I have been railing about cloud washing -- the efforts by vendors and, more recently, enterprise I&O professionals to give a cloud computing name to their business-as-usual IT services and...

Lately it's starting to seem like private clouds are a lot like beauty – in the eye of the beholder. Or more accurately, in the eye of the builder. Sadly, unlike art and beauty, the...
Improve Time-To-Market And Lighten Lab Management Burdens
It's one thing to say infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals need to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing; it's quite another to justify the financial and resource...
Oracle makes itself an easy target for the ire of the cloud community when it makes dumb, cloudwashed announcements like last week's supposed IaaS offering. But then again, Oracle is just doing...
Policy And Procedures: The Cloud Computing Playbook
Today it is no longer a question of when IT will align with business leaders but how. Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game-changers to hit the technology landscape in the...

And No, It's Not Your Virtualization Manager
Nearly half of all enterprise IT shops claim to be prioritizing private cloud investments in 2013, but both in the largest enterprises and those firms that are most aggressively investing in public...

You've told your ITOps team to make it happen, you've approved the purchase of cloud-in-a-box solutions, but your developers aren't using it. Why? Forrester analyst Lauren Nelson and...
In typical Microsoft fashion, they don't catch a new trend right with the first iteration but they keep at it and eventually strike the right tone and in more cases than not, get good enough. And...
Future Look: The Cloud Computing Playbook
The cloud landscape is shifting to cover a broader range of enterprise needs. Why? Cloud is curing the lack of responsiveness and economic flexibility that ails on-premises IT. Look for the popular...

Maturity, Acquisitions, And Enterprise Experience Drive Cloud Use Forward
With interest in and priority for investment in cloud rising, concern and challenges remain regarding what is (and isn't) a cloud computing service and which options are safe, mature choices. To help...

Business Impact: The Cloud Computing Playbook
When a market disruption as large as cloud computing comes along, it sends ripples throughout your organization, so it should come as no surprise that attitudes toward this technology vary widely...

You know there are developers in your company using public cloud platforms, but do you really know what they are doing? You suspect it’s just test and development work, but are you sure? And if...
We're in the process of building out a transformational infrastructure road map for our IT and business executives. What are some best practices for such an infrastructure road map?
How should we approach consolidating our data centers?
What is one of the most important decisions infrastructure & operations (I&O) professionals face today? It's not whether to leverage the cloud or build a private cloud or even which cloud to use....
Navigating The Shifts In Computing Infrastructure
Over the past several years, we've seen two key cloud trends in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space: 1) Public cloud adoption rates are highest among "informal buyers" (non-IT employees),...
A funny thing happened while we in IT were focused on ITIL, data center consolidation and standardization. The business went shopping for better technology solutions. We’ve been their go-to...
Road Map: The Cloud Computing Playbook
Early in 2011, Forrester made a series of predictions about the future of cloud computing for that year. With 2012 now upon us, it's time to evaluate last year's predictions and introduce new...

Everyone understands that cloud computing provides pay per use access to resources and the ability to elastically scale up an application as its traffic increases. Those are values that turn on cloud...
Over the past year, what changes have you seen in the channel relating to delivery of cloud services using a business partner as a resource (cloud builder, cloud provider, cloud consulting, cloud...
Ever since 2009 when NIST published its first definition of cloud computing there has been a promise of community clouds, and now we finally have a second one in the financial services market, thanks...
In 2008, Forrester examined whether cloud computing was ready for the enterprise. In 2012, the answer is a definitive yes, but many enterprises aren't ready for the cloud. This report outlines the...
