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.
Marketing And Partnering For Support/Service Excellence
Forrester's research shows that customers rank technical support at or near the top of their criteria for both vendor and product consideration. Yet the support experience in the tech industry is...
Top Performers' Channel Investments Span The Customer Tech Adoption Life Cycle
Tech vendors have historically treated channels as "outsourced sales" — or have, at least, invested that way. But a handful of vendors have departed from this model, choosing instead to invest...

SMBs' Plans For Servers, Storage, Virtualization, Form Factors, And Cloud Computing
Suppliers of infrastructure hardware to small and medium-size business (SMB) buyers are poised for better times, given plans by SMBs to upgrade their software and associated hardware infrastructures...
Knowing Which Generators Customers Use For Information Is Paramount
Tech vendors' returns on marketing messaging are shaped as much by where it's said and who says it as by what is said. Indeed, social media grants "others," including customers and partners,...
"Business Development" Doesn't Equate To "Partnering"
The business development (biz dev) function in the tech industry is essentially broken. Most tech companies have allowed biz dev to diminish into little more than a partnering function. Although...
Relationship Incentives Count As Much As Sales Incentives
The number of tech vendors looking to develop channel partner relationships or to increase their partner wallet share is on the rise. Yet the growth in the number of channel companies is just not...

Channel Ecosystem Entropy Diminishes Results
In this economic climate of scrutinized marketing budgets and demonstrable return on investment (ROI) expectations, business-to-business (B2B) marketers need to make sure that they're doing the right...
New SMB Realities Require New Go-To-Market Approaches
As big as the small and medium-size business (SMB) market is, both in terms of sheer numbers and IT spend, only a handful of tech vendors have penetrated it with what can be deemed success. Based on...
Assessments, Audits, And Strategy Consulting Drive Technology Adoption
Customer spending on IT services will grow dramatically over the next five years, and that includes small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), particularly medium-size businesses. As SMBs' IT spending...
Performance Management: The Channel Partner Loyalty Playbook
Program performance management is about systematic measurement and relentless adjustment, in this case, of your channel partner loyalty program. Identifying the right metrics and implementing the...

Growth Continues In Channel-Generated Revenue Share And Investment
It's a case of good dollars following good — channels continue to perform, in terms of revenue contribution, so tech vendors continue to invest in them. Tech marketers will be operating with...