Stephen Powers

VP, Group Director

Forrester Bio

Author Insights

Blog

Salesforce Picks Up (The) Slack To Extend CRM’s Reach Into Collaboration But Won’t Dethrone Microsoft Teams

Kate Leggett December 1, 2020
Find out how Salesforce plans to use the $28B buy to extend the reach of its CRM platform.
Blog

Explore Your Future Fit Technology Strategy At Technology & Innovation Global

Stephen Powers October 7, 2020
The technology leader's key to accelerating out of this crisis is developing a future fit technology strategy. Learn more in this post and at the upcoming Technology & Innovation Global event.
Blog

Manage Through The Pandemic’s Next Stage With Technologies In Four Categories

Stephen Powers May 21, 2020
As firms continue to deal with the changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, they will need to expand their tech strategy beyond enabling remote workers.
Blog

Redefine “Digital Transformation” In The Era Of Technology-Driven Innovation

Stephen Powers February 11, 2019
What does the term “digital transformation” mean to you? Is it about digital customer experiences? Digital operations? Transforming business models? Leveraging software ecosystems? Is it a floor wax? A dessert topping?  Digital transformation (DT) as a term loses meaning when it involves everything under the sun. Over the past few years, we’ve seen companies label anything and everything as “digital […]
Blog

Red Hat Acquisition Gives IBM A Much-Needed Booster Shot Of Open Source And Cloud DNA

Chris Gardner October 29, 2018
Yesterday, IBM announced its intention to purchase Red Hat for $34B. Assuming a successful transaction, this acquisition blends hybrid cloud and open source synergies: Both companies target hybrid cloud from different angles; Red Hat provides a compelling middleware environment with OpenShift, while IBM supports enterprise customers with monolithic and even mainframe support in its cloud […]
Blog

Solve The Digital Transformation Puzzle

Stephen Powers April 11, 2018
What do the following companies have in common? Southwest Airlines FTD AARP Stumped? They’ve all made significant progress on digital transformation. And they aren’t alone in undertaking these initiatives. You’ve heard the term “digital transformation” quite a bit over the last few years. But it can be a puzzle. Why? Because people can stretch “digital […]
Blog

Not too late to catch Digital Transformation Forum, 2017

Stephen Powers May 1, 2017
The moment of truth for your digital re-invention has arrived. Digital technology has rendered your legacy systems obsolete, and has liberated your customers to adopt – and abandon – your offerings at a moment’s notice. You already know it’s time to change. You need to transform your firm to meet your customers’ expectations and ensure […]
Blog

Ignore Digital Experience Delivery Technologies At Your Own Peril

Stephen Powers November 7, 2014
Ignore digital experience delivery platforms in 2015, and you’ll spend all of 2016 playing catch up.   Since 2013, no fewer than eight vendors announced enterprise-class solutions vying to offer integrated, business-centric tools to create, deliver, measure, and optimize digital experiences. Just this week, French advertising giant Publicis Groupe acquired Sapient for $3.7 billion, and the […]
Blog

The Great Race to Develop a Digital Experience Delivery Backbone

Stephen Powers September 18, 2014
“A unified platform for content, community and commerce.” “A complete set of integrated solutions helps you maximize and measure your impact in more ways than ever before.” “Everything you need to deliver unique and personal customer experiences.” Unified. Complete. Everything you need. These quotes are pulled directly from the marketing materials of some of the […]
Blog

Developers Hold The Key To Your Business’ Brand

Stephen Powers September 2, 2014
By now, you all know that in order for your company to win, it needs to be customer obsessed. But how do you support that obsession from a technical standpoint? It takes innovation, and the key to innovation is software. In the 21st century, successful brands will rise and fall based on software. Because of that, developers […]
Blog

Content, Commerce, And The Sitecore News

Stephen Powers November 22, 2013
In-line editing? Check. Personalization? Check. Testing and optimization? Check. As the web content management market matures, functional differentiators have become tougher to find. One of the remaining functional gaps in the market is a digital customer experience platform that supports complex but unified commerce-based and marketing-based experiences. Currently, these experiences tend to be disconnected due […]
Blog

Podcast: The Intersection of Customer Experience and Business Technology

Stephen Powers August 14, 2013
As organizations continue their journey in the Age of the Customer, business technology leaders have a challenge ahead of them. As my colleague Harley Manning wrote in his blog earlier this week, "The quality of customer interactions with your brand results from a complex system of interdependent people, processes, policies, and technology that we call the ‘customer […]
Blog

Drive Customer Experiences With Better Technology

Stephen Powers August 13, 2013
The Age of the Customer is upon us and as a result, market leading strategies for mobile, big data, and customer experience are now required to satisfy an increasingly demanding client base. Traditionally, IT organizations have existed to support internal operations but in today’s landscape, the technology leaders at the head of these organizations must play a key […]
Blog

Behind The Scenes Of The WCM Wave For Digital Customer Experience

Stephen Powers June 17, 2013
David Aponovich and I recently published a Forrester Wave™ on web content management for digital customer experience. In this videocast, David and I talk about how we did the research that went into the report, how the market has evolved since the last version of the report, the biggest surprises from our findings, and highlights […]
Blog

An Interactive Discussion About Digital Customer Experience Strategies

Stephen Powers November 19, 2012
Over the past year, we’ve been discussing — through our research and client interactions — the issues involved with digital customer experiences. What’s interesting about this particular problem is how quickly the market is changing and how the issues cut across many roles and aspects of the business. How do you build a digital experience […]
Blog

Four Points To Ponder In A Digitally Disruptive World

Stephen Powers September 21, 2012
It’s amazing how quickly the world of digital experiences is changing technology, and vice-versa. I’ve covered web content management (WCM) since I joined Forrester in 2006, and that particular market has changed quite in a bit, due in large part to the disruptions caused by digital experiences. These days, many more stakeholders participate in the […]
Blog

What Is IT’s Role In Digital Customer Experience Strategies?

Stephen Powers September 10, 2012
    This is a guest post from Anjali Yakkundi, a researcher serving application development & delivery professionals.  Organizations today often take a broad focus on digital customer experiences, which carries great risks for your firm: too much experimentation for not enough return; too much duplication and waste; and too little use of data to […]
Blog

The Revival Of Digital Asset Management

Stephen Powers May 30, 2012
  This is a guest post from Anjali Yakkundi, a Researcher at Forrester Research. It originally appeared on destinationCRM.    By now, everyone knows that engaging and dynamic customer experiences are a key competitive advantage, and “business as usual” will no longer suffice to support these engaging digital experiences. Organizations that don’t embrace this customer-focused […]
Blog

Forrester’s First Digital Asset Management (DAM) Wave Uncovers A Market In Transition

Stephen Powers May 9, 2012
Guest post by Anjali Yakkundi DAM has long been stuck in the shadow of its more mature enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM) counterparts. But if our inquiry numbers are anything to go by, it’s slowly and steadily emerging from the shadows. This renewed interested in the DAM space led us to […]
Blog

The North Plains/Xinet Acquisition: Not A DAM Game-Changer

Stephen Powers April 12, 2012
Guest post from Researcher Anjali Yakkundi North Plains, a legacy pure-play digital asset management (DAM) vendor based out of Toronto, Ontario, announced today that it has agreed to buy fellow pure-play DAM vendor Xinet. The DAM market is fragmented and, with a few exceptions (Adobe, Autonomy, EMC, and OpenText), is littered with smaller, proprietary players. We’ve long […]
More posts