Ovum slashes IT procurement costs; helps CIOs to justify solution investment

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: Today sees the launch of the Ovum Interactive Decision Matrix (OIDM), a formalised approach to assessing the vendor solution landscape according to key business requirements. The OIDM addresses the complexity surrounding the vendor selection process for enterprises, and provides critical insight to enhance research and development for vendors.

Through its interactive tool, Ovum provides a fully customisable and comparable evaluation of the vendor landscape, helping CIOs and other enterprise decision-makers shortlist solutions based on their own specific criteria. For vendors, the evaluation provides crucial intelligence around competitors’ offerings. It enables sales to rationalise their product’s position within the market, while research and development teams can identify untapped functionality that will help them regain the competitive edge.

“As economic uncertainty continues, our research indicates IT budgets will remain flat in 2012. CIOs are therefore under increased pressure to ensure that decisions are justified and investments deliver,” says Maxine Holt, Ovum’s enterprise solutions practice leader. “As the product landscape becomes more diverse, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to assess capabilities on a like-for-like basis. However, this process can be simplified using the Interactive Decision Matrix, as Ovum has already done the research to help shortlist potential candidates.”

Based on the comprehensive research conducted in Ovum’s technology evaluation and comparison reports, the OIDM assesses technology vendors on three core dimensions: Market Impact, Customer satisfaction, and Technology. Each of the three dimensions consists of 6–12 specific criteria as standard, but users can adapt this to include the most relevant criteria to their business. Users can also supply up to three additional products to include, and up to 30 additional features for comparison.

Weightings can be assigned against features applicable to a particular technology (0=insignificant, 10=business critical) according to how important support for each of these are to the users requirements. Functionality rankings, vendor capability diagrams, and executive summary worksheets provide a holistic view of the individual products and how well they match requirements against each functionality group.

“The Interactive Decision Matrix complements Ovum’s existing portfolio of leading edge technology intelligence. In particular, the detailed analysis of vendor solutions and our understanding of enterprise demands ensure that our clients maintain a continuous 360-degree view of the market for CIOs and vendors,” concludes Holt.

The OIDM currently covers the following core technologies: identity and access management, IT service management, application and software lifecycle management, collaboration, business process management, content management, business intelligence, customer relationship management, information security, and enterprise search. Ovum undertakes an annual review of these technology areas to ensure that they are still appropriate and relevant to enterprises.