About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

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.
Cloud Platforms: Foundational Systems Could Strengthen Your Preferred Service Providers
A growing number of public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds are coming to market that share the same underlying capabilities, technologies, and interfaces. Rather than build their clouds...

Pop quiz: How many of your company’s top business leaders do you talk to on a daily basis? How many know your name? And finally, how many of them do you engage to brainstorm on how to...

Improve Time-To-Market And Lighten Lab Management Burdens
We are looking for vendor software that could provide self-service portals to provision an environment and software that will allow us to create a logical data center with a shared infrastructure. We...
Hot on the heels of Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark comes today’s $3.2 billion purchase of Savvis by CenturyLink, signaling that the rush to be an enterprise cloud leader is on. It...
Amylin Shaves 15% Off Its IT Budget By Incorporating Cloud Services
To keep pace with a changing business model and rapidly changing technology demands, Amylin Pharmaceuticals had to dramatically change the way it delivered IT infrastructure services. This required...
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...
Forrester just published parts I & II of its market overview of the public cloud market and these reports, written primarily for the Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) professionals, reveal as much...
Having attended the OpenStack Design Summit this week and at the same time fielding calls from Forrester clients affected by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, an interesting contrast in...
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?
Wouldn't it be nice if your employees actually asked you this question before they went off and signed up for a cloud service or deployed a new app to a cloud platform? If they did ask, would you...
In the IaaS market the open source torch has officially been passed from Eucalyptus to OpenStack, a community effort that is showing strong momentum in both vendor participation and end user...
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...

We all know the conventional wisdom about cloud computing: it's cheap, fast and easy. But is it really that much cheaper? Or is it simply optics that make it appear cheaper? Optics can...
Forrester’s survey and inquiry research shows that, when it comes to cloud computing choices, our enterprise customers are more interested in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) than...
Curious about where we are in the development of the cloud computing market? Here is my opening keynote from the 2012 SV Forum in Santa Clara, CA....
Today's move by Citrix to put its CloudStack IaaS solution into the Apache Foundation says more about the state of the cloud market than it does about OpenStack. As our Fall 2011 Forrsights...
South Korea has better broadband than we do. Australia has faster wireless networks. And according to Forrester’s Internet Population Forecast, by 2013 the number of online consumers in...
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...
Cloud adoption, particularly of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), is still in the early-adopter phase, and as a result there are no set industry standards. For IT infrastructure and operations...

Accenture And HP Lead A Strong Field Of Worldwide Providers
In Forrester's 40-criteria evaluation of IT consolidation consultancies, we found that Accenture and HP led the pack due to their breadth of capabilities and superior ability in business...
Empowered Users, HPC, And Business Intelligence Will Drive Adoption
IaaS is undoubtedly one of your top priorities, but will you craft a plan for success? Many enterprises are headed toward a number of cloud pitfalls, such as misunderstanding the makeup, benefits,...
A startup, who wishes to remain anonymous, is delivering an innovative new business service from an IaaS cloud and most of the time pays next to nothing to do this. This isn't a story about...