IDC Business Value Strategy engagements are designed to help organizations whose managers are challenged with the following questions:

• How does my company take advantage of the demand for business value?
• How do I quantify and articulate my value proposition?
• What is the impact on my company's bottom line?
• How do we promote business value internally and externally?
• How do we train our sales force to sell business value?

IDC Consulting leverages our global research community, drawing on the research and insight of more than 1,000 worldwide analysts in more than 110 countries to deliver objective, actionable insights to ensure your company's success and market position. IDC Consulting clients benefit from our team's years of technology, industry, market, and business experience as well as our approach to problem solving and project management.

Our in-depth consulting and analysis help you:

• Create winning, realistic, and credible business plans to increase market share
• Accelerate speed to market
• Identify winning partnering and alliances strategies
• Evaluate and successfully enter new markets
• Forecast demand accurately
• Assess and position against the competition
• Discover and build intelligence on prospective partners that can make a difference
• Deploy resources for maximum return
• Communicate to customers and prospects the financial benefits and business value of IT and services investments
• Analyze "build versus buy" issues and develop appropriate cost/benefit metrics

IDC's strategic analysis, market research, and business planning counsel support the development and implementation of winning business strategies. Our expertise includes:

• Market opportunity assessment: Market sizing, segmentation, analysis, and custom forecasting
• Demand-side research: Qualitative and quantitative studies
• Supply-side research: Competitive analysis and strategies
• Channel and alliance strategy: Partner and prospect identification programs
• Brand positioning: Brand equity measurement and development
• Return on investment (ROI) calculations: Building cost/benefit models

IDC helps clients developing their business value programs to position their company as a business value provider and change the way they market and sell their IT solutions.

Market research identifies which value propositions influence IT buying behavior and map to target customer groups.

Business Value Centers of Excellence ensure consistent business value promotion and administration.

Business Value Micro-sites act as a platform for delivering business value messaging and support to partners, customers, and sales.

Through interviews with CIOs, CFOs, and IT and business managers, IDC has developed comprehensive methodologies for using end-user research to quantify the true costs and benefits of IT solutions that accurately reflect the value of a technology investment. From these studies, IDC can provide ROI analysis for each case study that clearly delineates the financial results and bottom-line savings.

Corporate IT departments are tasked with managing both shortening hardware life cycles and growing operational requirements. IDC Consulting's TCO life-cycle analysis helps corporations, vendors, and financing firms navigate this challenge by conducting primary research and offering a solution to the costs of product or service ownership and techniques for lowering these costs.

With survey-based data, consistent methodologies for analyzing data, and standardized financial metrics (ROI, IRR, payback, and NPV), IDC Consulting provides its customers with actionable validated information they can use to build their business value story.

IDC Consulting works with vendors to create white papers, sales tools, Webinars, lead-generation devices, and seminars to deliver IDC-branded validation of vendors' business value proposition. The deliverables are used by IDC customers to promote their value to customers, partners, the media, and financial analysts.

Scope: A network solution company faced a significant barrier to accurately conveying the use and value of its technology. IDC's broad series of studies was packaged as individual cases and as multiple documents targeted at specific vertical markets. IDC provided training to the company's sales force in understanding the ROI methodology and continues to work with this company's current and potential customers to understand the benefits they can receive and are achieving.

Benefit: A seminar series promoting ROI cases to potential customers and teaching those customers how to undertake their own ROI calculations made ROI a standard part of the sales process in this market and left competitors at a disadvantage.

Scope: A PC manufacturer wanted to define the real costs of PC ownership and techniques for lowering costs, hoping to have the findings support its new product line. With respect to desktop PCs, IDC's research has identified successful techniques for reversing rising costs, including standardizing on a limited number of vendors and configurations and extending the life cycle of PCs.

Benefit: The client was able to demonstrate how its product could lower PC life-cycle costs and maximize the business value of IT.

Scope: For a software provider, IDC modeled multiple layers of the middleware market to identify which products had the most impact on infrastructure costs per investment. IDC then mapped the ROI segmentation to the industries that exhibited a strong demand for the middleware and valued ROI in their buying criteria.

Benefit: The client used the analysis to identify key target markets and optimize its marketing efforts.

As a privately held company, IDC believes that our customers are our primary constituency. A large percentage of every revenue dollar is reinvested back into our products, including more analysts, more geographic coverage, and extensive primary research.

Our steady growth over the past 10-plus years reflects our commitment to investing in our customers.