Buyers Guide Overview

Comprehensive Software Evaluation for Informed Business Decisions

The ISG Research Buyers Guide is a comprehensive assessment of how well software providers' offerings address buyers' requirements for specific categories of software. Built on over two decades of research experience, this unbiased, fact-based guide represents the industry's most thorough evaluation of software value designed specifically for business processes and functions.

Why the ISG Buyers Guide Matters

Making the wrong software decision can raise your total cost of ownership, lower return on investment, and hamper your organization's ability to reach its performance potential. The ISG Buyers Guide is designed to replicate an RFI/RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, and deploy technology while maintaining strong relationships with software providers.

Our approach goes far beyond examining product features, potential revenue, or marketing-generated customers. Instead, we provide an extensive evaluation using our research-based Value Index methodology that reflects how organizations actually assess software providers in the real world.

Improve Organizational Maturity
If your organization's goal is to improve its maturity across people, processes, information, and technology, selecting the right software provider and product is critical. Our guide serves as the only reliable research-based tool for determining what organizations need and what products they should consider.

Comprehensive Seven-Category Evaluation Framework

Product Experience (5 Categories)

Usability
Assesses the value of investment by examining utility for varied business levels and diverse user competencies. We evaluate support for all functional roles—from executives to frontline workers—and examine mobile, web, and voice technology capabilities across different generations of users.

Manageability
Ensures products meet business and IT needs for installation, deployment, and administration. Our criteria include IT and business administration support, security provisions for user identity and access control, data security effectiveness, auditing and compliance capabilities, and licensing requirements.

Reliability
Evaluates products' ability to deliver required performance and scalability. We examine IT architecture support at enterprise, network, server, and data levels, development and customization capabilities, remote and mobile user access, server processing performance, and scaling capacity.

Capability
Measures the fit between product capabilities and functional needs across business and IT groups, from executives to frontline workers. We assess functionality specific to each Buyers Guide category and evaluate enterprise-wide support for consumers, customers, suppliers, and vendors.

Adaptability
Ensures products can be configured and customized to meet enterprise needs. Our evaluation covers product configurability, customization extent, user interface technology support, data-related process integration, application and database interfacing, and required investments for adaptability.

Customer Experience (2 Categories)

Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment (TCO/ROI)
Assesses the value providers deliver through products and support relative to achieving expected TCO/ROI. We evaluate provider focus and commitment, sophistication in demonstrating product value, tools and documentation for customer TCO/ROI evaluation, and investments in benefit and cost optimization.

Validation
Evaluates provider commitment to market segments and products, plus breadth of relevant communication. Our criteria include provider focus and commitment, management and financial stability, customer testimonials, product roadmap clarity, deployment support services, and product support quality.

Our Rigorous Research Process

Foundation of Experience
The ISG Buyers Guide distills a year of software provider and product research efforts, built on 20 years of business and technology research. We've worked with thousands of organizations through benchmarking and advisory services, providing deep context for buyer needs.

Objective Methodology
We use our carefully crafted Value Index methodology and extensive benchmark research to validate prioritizations and focus areas. This unique approach blends our firm's experience, research, and comprehensive provider and product framework to create the only reliable research-based tool for technology selection.

Comprehensive Validation
We validate information independently through our knowledge base and extensive web-based research, then consult directly with software providers. We may also conduct customer interviews to ensure assessment accuracy.

Inclusive Participation Policy

Open Invitation
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet inclusion requirements are invited to participate at no cost. If providers don't respond or decline, we determine inclusion based on defined criteria covering geographic operations, customer base, revenue, and product fit.

Automatic Inclusion
If a provider actively markets, sells, and develops a product within our scope as reflected on their website, they're automatically evaluated for inclusion. We view it as our responsibility to assess all relevant providers whether they choose to participate or not.

Real-World Representation
Our guide is independent of packaging, pricing, and whether products are sold individually or as suites. We include providers offering product packages because individual modules must still be evaluated by business process owners.

Participation Requirements

To ensure comprehensive evaluation, participating providers must:

Complete detailed questionnaires across all seven evaluation categories
Provide product documentation and/or demonstrations for functionality verification
Participate in one-hour analyst discussions for clarification and exploration
Supply customer references for independent interviews
List submitted products on public websites and make them available to buyers

Learn More About Our Process

Watch Our Overview Video
Get a comprehensive overview of the Buyers Guide process and learn how to maximize its impact for your organization. Our video covers:

Summary of the Value Index methodology
Explanation of rankings and classifications
Participation overview and requirements
Research deliverables and outcomes
Go-to-market strategies and support
Measurable impact of our research