Earlier this year, Forrester unveiled a new interactive experience, powered by our Forrester Wave™ and Landscape research, to better help our clients make vendor selections for technology products and services. At that time, we also announced that we’d give our iconic Forrester Wave graphic an update and roll out an updated report format for Wave evaluations. Well, we’re happy to say that the future is now here! Forrester clients currently have access to our new Wave report format.

What do you need to know about this new report format? Specifically, it:

  • Ranks each included vendor as a Leader, Strong Performer, or Contender. Forrester’s Wave graphic now shows three bands instead of four, which better highlights our calls about where vendors or providers sit in a market relative to their peers and aligns with our three-point scoring rubric. All evaluated vendors are ranked as Leaders, Strong Performers, or Contenders, and you’ll see us place vendors in all categories (unlike some of the “everyone’s a winner” research in the marketplace).
  • Incorporates customer feedback for the evaluated providers. Forrester’s Wave graphic now highlights the quality and caliber of provider reference customers, as well as ongoing feedback that Forrester collects outside of the Wave process, with more prominent markers on the Wave graphic. Keep in mind that we regularly speak to customers of the vendors we’re evaluating; we don’t depend on surveys or other products to inform us of customer feedback.
  • Complements an interactive Wave digital experience. Forrester clients can use our “Help me find a vendor” wizard to indicate what capabilities and strategic criteria are most important to them. They can see a list of vendors that match that set of criteria and a score showing the ones that best match their needs, compare vendors side by side, and review an individual vendor’s detailed scorecard for our detailed analysis on that offering. Also, notable vendors from Landscape reports are included in our new digital experience, which creates a streamlined experience for an expanded group of vendors. This new DX showcases data from the over 225 tech and services markets we cover.

All of these updates were made based on client feedback and input, with the goal of making this information more useful and more accessible to clients. The interactive digital experience is live today, so if you’re a Forrester Decisions or Forrester Market Insights client, give it a spin. If you’re not a Forrester client, learn how to become a client here.