Many of you have asked about how our market model works, so we wanted to add to the coverage included on our About page. The diagram above is a simple guide to our taxonomy and organisation of our data model. You’ll find this useful in understanding our market sizing, shares forecasts and predictions.
4.5 Billion Theoretical Data Points
Ther’s lots of talk about Big Data today – theoretically our model would currently produce 4.5 billion data points if every vendor sold all offerings in all countries, to all industry sectors, etc. In practice the size of the database is far smaller of course and we currently handle it all in Microsoft Access and Excel applications. We have now completed 16 years of quarterly assessment – having lots of historic detail is an advantage in looking at long-term trends and calculating installed bases.
For our forecasts we strip out vendor and model data from our historic data and build expectations for offerings from categories and using GDP forecasts to help us predict and modify country growth rates.
In addition to this overall model, we also call out a number of specific areas, such as chips, PCs, servers, storage systems, basic and smart mobile phones, smart tablets, printers and other peripherals from the 22 offerings; adding extra relevant data cuts and publishing tracker spreadsheets before rolling the modified data back into the overall data set. We also study a number of specific themes such as Cloud Computing, Converged Infrastructure, Storage Virtualisation, CSR and Corporate Client Refresh which we use to colour our forecasts and outlook.
The ITCandor Advantages For Supplier Business Planners
Our free market sizing, forecasts, analysis and predictions are very popular, but there are times when you need more detail and advice. There are a number of clear advantages of our data model. For instance:
- The thoroughly consistent nature of the data – unlike other research houses, a change of a single data point ripples across the whole set.
- The 100% tie-in between vendor financial results and market sizing: when its performance in multiple offerings or countries a vendor’s revenues cannot exceed its published number.
- Our deep understanding of how to handle exchange rates to show market values in local, regional or global currencies accurately.
While we are a small company our credibility has been built on 30 years of experience in building and running these types of model for some of the world’s largest IT market research companies. We set our model up carefully at the beginning to avoid the inherent design inconsistencies of others.
If you work as a market planner or in market intelligence we’d like to find out how to help you in your work, whether in improving or adding to your processes.