Each Ventana Research Value Index is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research, the premier benchmark research and advisory services firm. Built on a foundation of 15 years of business and technology research, this unbiased, fact-based index is the first such industry undertaking to assess the value of software designed specifically for the business process or function on which it focuses.
The Ventana Research Value Index is an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements for a particular category of software. The Value Index is not an abstraction; we use a carefully crafted best practices-based methodology that reflects how organizations actually assess vendors. We have designed the Value Index to ensure that it provides objective independent research and guidance to organizations looking to assess and evaluate their applications for business and IT needs. The structure of the Value Index reflects our understanding that the proper evaluation of vendors and products involves far more than just examining product features or potential revenue or customers generated from marketing and sales. We believe it is a service to both organizations and vendors to take this approach, since making the wrong decisions can raise the total cost of ownership for an organization, lower the return on investment and hamper its ability to reach its performance potential. On the other hand, an organization with a successful deployment is a satisfied customer.
The Value Index evaluates the software in seven key categories. Five are product-related: usability, manageability, reliability, adaptability and capability. In addition, we consider two customer assurance categories: vendor validation and total cost of ownership and return on investment (TCO/ROI). These seven categories are explained on the following pages.
After gathering the requested information from you and other vendors we use our research-based analytics and methodology to generate the Value Index percentages. We then build them into a set of pie chart indicators that are the graphic representation of the Ventana Research Value Index. In these indicators the degree of fill and the colors reflect our assessment of the value to the potential buyer. The Value Index thus is both an analytic and a graphic representation of the value of your and competing vendors’ offerings based on an evaluation of what each can deliver.
The profile of user needs for which the Value Index has been developed is derived from Ventana Research’s experience in working with organizations and from our benchmark research. We use the extensive body of our benchmark research as a framework to validate the prioritizations contained in and the focus of each Value Index assessment. This approach of using benchmark research to guide the assessment of vendors and their products for use in deployment decisions is unique, blending our firm’s experience, research and comprehensive vendor and product framework to yield the only reliable research-based tool for determining what technology users need and what products they should consider.
Our Value Index guides provide an important service; if an organization’s goal is to improve its maturity across people, process, information and technology, it is critical that it be able to select the vendor and product that will do the job best. These guides serve as valuable marketing documents as well: They are our independent evaluation of how well suited your offerings are to an organization’s needs.
Unlike the offerings of many IT analyst firms that rank vendors from an IT-only perspective and do not do research or provide advice on practices, Ventana Research has designed the Value Index to provide a balanced perspective that is rooted in an understanding of the real-world business drivers and needs of employees. Thus, using the Value Index will significantly improve an organization’s capability to achieve the levels of efficiency and effectiveness it needs to optimize its performance. This value is increasingly being recognized, making the Value Index a key performance optimization and product selection tool and more and more a companion to the RFP.
The Ventana Research Value Index is an analytic assessment of how well vendors’ offerings will address buyers’ requirements for a particular category of software. The Value Index, which we have prepared for more than a decade, is structured to replicate an RFI/RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select and deploy technology and maintain relationships with vendors.
Ventana Research is committed to an objective review of the vendors and products in each area of the enterprise on which we focus. To prepare this value index, we’ve drawn on our research-related work with organizations over the last 15 years, which has included the benchmarking and advising of more than 10,000 organizations. This provided the context of the needs of buyers, while our research on technology suppliers, knowledge of the market and thought leadership on this topic balanced the framework for this Value Index.
We have invited you to participate because you market and sell relevant products. Participation is subject to these terms and requirements:
We will use our benchmark research, the questionnaire, interviews with you and reviews of the products themselves as the baseline for our research. Across the seven categories, we will review each response to determine the score for the category. After validation, we will aggregate the scores to determine your and your product’s score. If you submit more than one product for evaluation, we will include the product with the best score in our product functionality evaluation.
To arrive at the overall Value Index for each vendor, we will weight each category to reflect its relative contribution to the value as realized by a purchasing organization. We have determined the weighting of the evaluation categories based on our experience and prioritizations derived from our benchmark research.
We have made every effort to encompass in the questionnaire for this Value Index the appropriate functional requirements and capabilities, following a blueprint that we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. We will validate the information independently through our database of product information and extensive web-based research, and after that in consultation with you. We also may conduct customer interviews to validate our assessments.
We have designed the Value Index evaluation categories to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to vendors such as yourself. We will evaluate your submissions in seven categories, five relevant to the product or package being evaluated and two to the vendor grouped into a focus we call Customer Assurance. These categories and criteria are as follows:
The Usability category involves evaluation criteria intended to assess the value to a business of an investment by looking at its utility for varied levels of business and the diverse ages and competencies of organizations. The evaluation criteria include the extent to which the product provides the support needed by each of the functional roles involved in enabling the particular business process – executives (CxO), management (EVP, SVP, VP), managers, directors, analysts and those involved from the IT organization. They also include how sophisticated the product’s support of mobile, Web and voice technologies is, including the extent to which the product design enables its usage by workers of different generations. The Usability section examines how much work the vendor has put into the human interface aspects of the product.
The Manageability category involves evaluation criteria intended to ensure that the products meet business and IT needs for installation, deployment and administration. The evaluation criteria include the support that the product provides for IT administration and for business administration. They also include how sophisticated the security provisions built into the application are with respect to user identity and role and access, how effective the data security is that the application provides, to what extent it supports auditing and compliance, what the license options are, how use is audited and what investments are required in licensing or subscription and maintenance.
The Reliability category involves evaluation criteria intended to ensure that the products can deliver the performance and scalability required. The criteria include the nature of the product’s support for an organization’s IT architecture at the levels of the enterprise, the network, the ser¬ver and the data, and how sophisticated its development and customization capabilities are. They also include the extent to which it supports access by remote and mobile users, how well and quickly it performs server processing, how well it scales in terms of number of users, volume and complexity of data and server demand, and what investments are required to ensure reliability.
The Capability category involves criteria to evaluate the fit between the capabilities of the products and the needs of various groups within the business, from executives to line managers. It examines functionality to provide support across the enterprise, for commerce, suppliers and consumers. It also evaluates integration potential with other systems, sup¬port for standard protocols, and specific capabilities.
The Adaptability category applies evaluation criteria designed to ensure the products can be configured and customized to meet the needs of a given business. The evaluation criteria include how configurable the product technology is to enable it to interface with business and IT, to what extent it can be customized, and whether it supports user interface technologies and systems used by particular lines of business. The evaluation criteria also include how well the product operates across data-related process and workflow systems, whether it can interface well with business applications and databases, and what investments are required to ensure adaptability.
The Validation category applies evaluation criteria designed to assess the vendor’s commitment to the market segment and its products along with the breadth of its communication of relevant information. The evaluation criteria include the extent to which the vendor is focused on and committed to this product line, how stable the vendor company’s management and financial condition are, and what existing customers say about the company and its products. The evaluation criteria also include the extent to which the vendor can provide a clear road¬map of the product line’s development and direction, what services it provides to support deployment, and the quality of its product support.
The TCO/ROI category applies evaluation criteria designed to assess the value the vendor delivers with its products. The evaluation criteria include the extent to which the vendor is focused on and committed to this product line and how sophisti¬cated it is in demonstrating product value, TCO and total benefit of ownership. The criteria also include an evaluation of what tools and documentation it provides to enable customer evaluation of ROI and TCO and what the vendor cites as its investment in optimizing the customer’s TCO and ROI.
All vendors that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements are invited to participate in the Value Index evaluation process, at no cost to them. If a vendor does not respond to or declines the invitation, a determination is made whether to include it in our analysis based on our defined set of inclusion criteria. These criteria are designed to ensure we include in our evaluation vendors’ geographic operations, customer base and revenue as well as all relevant aspects of the products’ fit for the particular category being evaluated. If a vendor is actively marketing, selling and developing a product as reflected on its website that is within the scope of the Value Index, it is automatically evaluated for inclusion. We have adopted this approach because we view it as our responsibility to assess all relevant vendors whether or not they choose to actively participate.
To ensure the accuracy of the information we collect and ensure that the Value Index reflects the concerns of a well-crafted RFP, we require participating vendors to provide evaluation data across all seven categories. Ventana Research then validates the information, first independently through our knowledge base of product information and extensive web-based research, and then in consultation with the vendors.
The Value Index is designed to be independent of the specifics of vendor packaging and pricing and whether the products are priced or sold as part of a suite or bundle or individually. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include vendors that offer suites or packages of products, as the relevant individual modules or applications must still be evaluated by those responsible for those business processes. We take no position on the offering approach of the products or packages being offered; where options exist, organizations using the Value Index will need to decide whether they choose a suite of products or individual applications that best meet their requirements.
Completed surveys and customer references for a Value Index are typically are due within six weeks of receiving the submission package. If you are unable to meet this deadline, please contact the research program manager at Katie.Prince@ventanaresearch.com.
Please upload the submission package and all supporting documents at the Vendor Participation section for each Value Index. If you have any trouble uploading files, please contact the research program manager at Katie.Prince@ventanaresearch.com.
We ask that you provide three to five customer references along with your completed submission package. You can enter this information in the appropriate fields in the Product Data form or you can provide it directly to the research program manager. We send each reference an email message with the questions below; alternatively, we are happy to have a phone call if the reference prefers to answer the questions that way. In all the process should not require more than 15 minutes of a reference’s time. All responses are confidential; while customer feedback is a valuable part of our evaluation, we do not share the content of reference interviews with the vendor or the general public.
Below is a list of questions we ask references. Analysts may follow up with an email message or phone call for clarification or further details.
We strongly encourage full participation in the Value Index, but if this is not possible, we suggest you provide whatever documentation you have on your product — release notes, any publicly available information and anything else that will help provide an accurate picture of the product for the analyst. We also suggest you provide customer references and schedule a briefing with the analyst during the scoring period. Please contact Research Program Manager Katie Prince for further information about limited participation.
Prior to initiating any new Value Index, our leadership team develops criteria that include the nature of the product, product marketing, overall revenue and countries of operation. All products that meet the criteria are included in the Value Index. In our view this policy is essential for ensuring our evaluation is unbiased and that it accurately represents the state of the marketplace and the needs of business executives pursuing RFPs.
Yes, briefings are required for the purpose of confirming the analysts’ assessment and clarifying any outstanding issues. The analyst or research program manager will contact you to set this up during the scoring period.
We ask that you imagine the briefing as a final pitch for a $1 million deal. Please plan for an hour and understand that schedules often prevent extending these sessions. We suggest you structure the briefing as follows, allotting about 15 minutes per segment: Company overview, product overview and demo, discussion of product as relates to the Value Index evaluation categories and Q&A.
More information about the Ventana Research Value Index is on our website here. To purchase a value index, please contact sales@ventanaresearch.com.
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