By Peter O'Neill

This is my first post on this blog, till now you could find me only on the Forrester Vendor Strategy Professional
or IT Infrastructure and Operations pages, so I thought I would first introduce myself. I have been at Forrester for over 4 years now, worked at META Group prior to that and served 20 years in various positions and businesses at HP before moving to the dark side of our industry. I cover the content area of IT service management as well as vendor partnerships and go-to-market execution. I am also now the one European representative of the Technology Product Management and Marketing research team (quite an important factoid, I would suggest, as we move into the "Post American" era).

I
am now assuming a new research focus and targeting my reports at a new
role, one to be serviced within these pages. I will be building up research for one of my favorite
marketing contributors, the Field Marketing Manager, that true
marketing schizophrenic.

They are
schizophrenic because the field think they are factory, while the
factory thinks they are Sales. Their success depends on being effective
at communicating both downstream, converting technology statements to
business value propositions; and upstream, giving actionable feedback
to product management on an ongoing basis. And by the way, we estimate
that 40% of a vendor's marketing budget goes through their hands.

So, watch out for this research and feel free to let your field marketing
colleagues know this is coming. All suggestions for research ideas,
best practices, benchmarks are welcome. If you would like a copy of my
new research agenda, just drop me a line.

 Always keeping you
informed!

Peter