I’m delighted to announce that Forrester has hired a new Principal Analyst, Brendan Witcher, to bolster our coverage of commerce technology. Brendan joins Forrester from a retail background, having most recently held several leadership positions in eCommerce, CRM and strategic planning at Guitar Center. Prior to Guitar Center, Brendan also held senior eCommerce and direct marketing roles at Harry & David. Brendan will be based in Forrester’s headquarters in Cambridge, MA.

With the addition of Brendan to the team, Forrester is making an investment to grow our coverage of commerce technology across the four stages of the customer lifecycle (discover, explore, buy and engage). Vendors and clients alike have already been asking how we’ll be dividing research coverage across our ever growing team. The answer is that we will intentionally be collaborating on much of the research, so expect to see some or all of us on inquiries, briefings as well as authors of much of our respective research. Each of us on the team will also be specializing in certain areas in addition to collaborating on core commerce technology research. The 1000 ft view looks like this:

  • I will continue to lead Forrester’s research on commerce platform, mobile commerce, digital experience management (DXM) and order management technology.
  • Adam continues to research and write about the digital retail store and will lead our research on the commerce service provider landscape in addition to order management, site merchandising,  and omnichannel logistics and fulfillment.
  • Andy continues to lead Forrester’s research in B2B commerce and will be co-authoring our forthcoming Wave report on commerce service providers with Adam.
  • Brendan will be focusing on the unique commerce technology needs of the service industry. In addition Brendan will also be looking at the impact that big data is having on ecommerce technology as well as partnering with Adam and me in our research on DXM and site merchandising.
  • Sucharita continues to lead our eCommerce strategy coverage with a focus on areas like mobile commerce, trends, and using insights and data to optimize online selling efforts.
  • Lily will be partnering with all of us on our research in addition to contributing to Forrester’s coverage of payments, fraud and tax technologies as they relate to online commerce. Lily will collaborating with Denee Carrington who leads Forrester’s research on payments.

With our broadening coverage of commerce technology, Forrester has an exciting line-up of research coming in the next year that includes five Waves:

  • Product Information Management
  • Omnichannel Order Management
  • B2C Commerce Service Providers
  • B2B Commerce Service Providers
  • B2C Commerce Suites

If you’re interested learn more about these Wave reports as well as the other exciting research that we have planned in 2014, I encourage you to take a look at our research plans online: Peter, Adam, Andy, Sucharita, Brendan (coming soon) and Lily (coming soon).

It’s going to be an exciting year – investment in commerce technology by our clients continues to rise and the role of the eBusiness and Channel Strategy professionals continues to both widen in both scope and influence across the enterprise. If there is something we are not planning to research that you think we should be – please let us know!

Peter