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

Ted serves CIOs. He has 24 years of experience in the technology industry, focusing on the effects of disruptive technologies on the workforce and workforce productivity. His research focuses on workforce technologies and the programs that support them, including smartphones, tablets, and their impact on productivity; social business and collaboration tools; cloud email and collaboration tools; and the consumerization of IT.
Ted is the co-author of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, September 2010). Social, mobile, video, and cloud Internet services give consumers and business customers more information power than ever before. To win customer trust and business, companies must empower their employees to directly engage with and solve the problems of empowered customers using these same technologies.
It is through this empowered lens that the consumerization of IT makes sense: employees solving customer and business problems using readily available technology that they master first at home — social, mobile, video, and cloud. This management book helps CIOs and IT organizations engage directly with business managers and employees to build an empowered strategy: understanding which employees are workforce "HEROes" — highly empowered and resourceful operatives — implementing empowering collaboration and innovation programs, creating a new empowered security architecture, and supporting HEROes with the right technology platforms.
In 2009, Ted launched Forrester's Workforce Technology Assessment, the industry's first benchmark survey of workforce technology adoption. This quantitative approach helps professionals and the teams they work with have a fact-based conversation about employees' technology adoption and requirements.
Prior to joining Forrester in April 1997, Ted was a cofounder of Phios, an MIT spinoff. Before that, Ted worked for eight years as CTO and director of engineering for a software company serving the healthcare industry. Early in his career, Ted was a singer and bass player for Crash Davenport, a successful Maryland-based rock-and-roll band.
Ted has a master's degree in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland and a B.A. with honors in physics from Swarthmore College.
MSPs Are Reaching A New Level Of Maturity
The IT channel has radically transformed over the past several years, and managed service providers (MSPs) have emerged triumphant. MSP market growth now outpaces the rest of the IT industry, but...

Despite Vendor Efforts To Marketing-Enable Their Partners, Partners Still View Channels As Implementers, Not Influencers
Is your channel marketing enablement program first-rate? Sorry to break it to you, but we have reason to believe it's not. Tech vendors are investing more than ever today to empower their channel as...

Service Provider Market Dynamics Will Muddy The Channel Ecosystem
An inflection point has surfaced in the managed service provider (MSP) market. Tech vendors must awaken to the revolution that is swiftly taking shape in the ecosystem as cloud computing adoption...


Road Map: The Channel Partner Loyalty Playbook
In this report, we present a compendious road map to guide you through the steps to build a partner loyalty program or to revamp an existing one. Follow this road map — and the companion...

Becoming A Trusted Marketing Advisor Requires Focus And Follow-Through
B2B partner marketers are tasked with improving the marketing prowess of their partner communities, but progress has been slow to date. With the rise of social media and avant-garde digital marketing...

Assessment: The Channel Partner Loyalty Playbook
To systematically determine how well your partner program is performing today, and set a baseline for what to improve moving forward, measuring all the significant activity you put into building...

Which Channels Are Customers Sourcing From?
In 2010, Forrester published a report on channel sweet spots to address how small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) source their software needs. Two years later, we're revisiting this topic to...

Cisco’s annual partner marketing conference, Partner Velocity, wrapped up in Las Vegas last week. Two hundred and thirty-five partners from 24 countries were in attendance to witness...
Indian Partners Outpace Chinese
China and India are two of the largest emerging markets with strong economic growth. China represents the third largest single country tech market by market size; India ranks 11th. Homogenous...

A Critical Mass Of Channel Partners Are Embracing Cloud
Forrester recently surveyed channel partner company executives on their business model plans with respect to cloud computing. What we learned: After much gnashing of teeth (over marginalized...

Assessment: The Channel Partner Loyalty Playbook
Forrester's Channel Partner Loyalty Capabilities Assessment is a tool that illustrates and scores the seven critical program elements that contribute to channel partner loyalty.

Organization: The Channel Partner Loyalty Playbook
This report maps out the range of stakeholders within your organization whom you will work with, and work for, in executing the channel partner loyalty playbook. It is designed to help you plan and...

Over the last two months, I’ve had the opportunity to interview a plethora of managed service providers (MSPs) and MSP platform vendors across the US, Europe, and Asia. The experience has...