Forrester

The Forrester Wave™: Email, Messaging, And Collaboration Security Solutions, Q2 2025, is live — and it looks a bit different from its predecessor in 2023. Why The Name Change? Yes, it’s a mouthful, but the holistic approach of email, messaging, and collaboration security (EM&CS) is a reflection not only of the way people work but of the threats facing those workers as they communicate and collaborate with customers, partners, and each other. Attackers are shifting their focus to other entry points — leveraging targeted multistep campaigns to include voice and text and exploiting SaaS platforms, internal messaging apps and collaboration tools, and file-sharing environments. These avenues are vital for modern workflows, but they’re also vulnerable to malicious activities. As a result, organizations must adopt a more holistic approach to securing the human element, ensuring that these tools and environments receive the same level of protection as the email inbox. EM&CS solutions must protect employees from harmful messages and deliver timely awareness and training prompts to encourage vigilance and safe data practices. This research used 27 different criteria to evaluate 10 vendors: Abnormal AI, Barracuda, Check Point Software Technologies, Cloudflare, Darktrace, Google, Microsoft, Mimecast, Proofpoint, and Trend Micro. What Stood Out? After a decade of stagnation, what I call the “golden age of email security” remained in full swing through 2023 and 2024. The market thrived with continued M&A activity, private equity moves, additional rounds of VC funding, and generative AI-driven innovation propelling vendors forward. The threat and AI landscape will likely prevent another prolonged period of stagnation in this space, but for many vendors, we’re in a period of digestion. Acquisitions and new capabilities are being integrated with improved user and analyst experience in mind. Additional use cases for generative and agentic AI are being developed and tested. With that said, this round of evaluations produced a couple items of note: The layered approach is now de facto. In Forrester’s Security Survey, 2024, 63% of director-level security leaders said their firm currently uses two or more vendors in its content security environment — a category that includes email, messaging, and collaboration security. Customer reference interviews in the 2023 and 2025 evaluations confirm this. A layered approach — typically, native capabilities from productivity suite providers and an additional solution (or two) — is the norm. AI has the spotlight but shouldn’t stand alone just yet. EM&CS solutions have used machine learning for years to detect malicious content by recognizing malicious activity patterns. Now, AI advancements such as natural language understanding and large language models enhance detection, helping identify suspicious requests, urgent tones, fake replies, and brand impersonation. These are often generated by AI for the purposes of advanced phishing and business email compromise. For the near term, employ a holistic approach to content analysis, image and file inspection, malicious URL detection, message authentication, and outbound message protection for more complete protection. Context is key. Using AI to fight AI is a big benefit to using an EM&CS solution, but understanding which models “hit” and why, for each alert, is necessary to help security analysts make more informed decisions, fine-tune security policies, and better communicate with users. Customer references noted when the use of AI in a solution was a “black box” or “secret sauce” compared to when it meaningfully contributed to the speedy detection of malicious activity or the increased vigilance of end users. What Should You Look For? Forrester clients can visit this page when logged in and select “Help me find a vendor.” Then select what you and your team care about most in an EM&CS solution. The site will return a ranked list that aligns to your selected priorities. Forrester’s transparent methodology, where we detail the process behind the full criteria, scale explanations, and scores, allows us to offer an interactive experience to help inform the choices that our clients make about their providers. Additionally, as you compile a shortlist or consider a renewal: Focus on yourself. Focus on your outcomes by using efficacy data from your own environment (not generic third-party lab claims) and running proof-of-concept tests to assess usability, AI explainability, critical integrations, and customer support in addition to efficacy. Dismiss deployment option distractions. Don’t get caught up in the SEG vs. CAPES marketing arguments, and prioritize how well the solution performs within and fits your infrastructure, security tech stack, and workflows. Prioritize analyst experience. Ensure that members of your team test the solution’s interface for usability and alignment with their processes. Look for easy, bidirectional integrations with human risk management solutions and with SOC tools such as XDR, SOAR, and security analytics platforms to speed triage, investigation, and remediation. Forrester clients can check out the full report here for more detail: The Forrester Wave™: Email, Messaging, And Collaboration Security Solutions, Q2 2025. And clients seeking their next primary — or secondary — EM&CS provider can schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me for additional insights. source

Paris will again become the center of innovation and technology next week, as the 2025 edition of Viva Technology takes place from June 11–14 at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. VivaTech has become the largest technology and innovation event in Europe, with 160,000 delegates — including many C-level executives, over 13,000 startups, and 3,000-plus investors — attending from all over the world. The lineup of speakers this year is again quite impressive, featuring Jensen Huang (NVIDIA’s CEO), Joe Tsai (cofounder and chairman of Alibaba), Arthur Mensch (CEO of Mistral AI), Yann LeCun (VP and chief AI scientist at Meta), Mike Krieger (Anthropic’s chief product officer), and Thomas Dohmke (CEO of GitHub) but also CEOs of large firms such as LVMH, L’Oréal, Sanofi, Instacart, Verizon, and many more! I have been attending VivaTech since the beginning, and it is fascinating to see how the event has evolved since the first edition in 2016. If you read my previous blogs from 2018, 2022, or 2024, you really get a sense of the technology evolution. Only a few months after Paris hosted the AI Action Summit, there is no doubt that AI will continue to be front and center. Hopefully, the discussion will focus on the strategic value of the technology and how business leaders can help their organizations make the most of the AI opportunity. Business leadership of AI strategy is a weak spot for most organizations. According to Forrester’s State Of AI Survey, 2024: Fewer than a quarter of CEOs are directly responsible for the AI business strategy (just 21% in North America versus 16% in Europe). In more than two-thirds of firms, the technology function (CIOs/CTOs and their teams) — not the business function — is leading AI efforts across the organization (63% in North America and 71% in Europe). Beyond leadership, there is still a huge cultural and skills gap for organizations to make the most of the latest AI developments. I don’t expect key announcements but mostly debates on the economic, political, societal, and environmental impact of technology innovation. VivaTech is more often than not an opportunity to showcase how large groups innovate with startups and to get a glimpse of the latest technology innovations, especially on deep tech (including cybersecurity and defense tech) and climate tech. VivaTech recently released a list of the top 100 rising European startups. Image source: Viva Technology   Personally, I will pay stronger attention to some of the climate tech players such as 1Komma5° (electrification of buildings), UrbanChain (decentralized energy networks), and Treefera (decarbonization solutions). Interestingly, among the French Tech Next40/120 Class of 2025 that the French government just announced, 29 players are categorized in the green tech/agritech sector, including players such as Chargemap, Electra, ElicitPlant, Energy Pool, FAIRMAT, GravitHy, Metron, TSE, and Voltalis. Many of the startups in attendance will hope to attract new funding and reach unicorn status. Unfortunately, there is still too much hype and fascination around unicorns. Don’t get me wrong: Financing innovation matters, but it is not the panacea. While funding the next generation of green tech will help, technology innovation alone will certainly not be enough to live within the nine planetary boundaries. Low-tech solutions, frugal innovation, regulation, new business models, evolving consumer behaviors, and mindset change among C-leaders are all even more critical. I’ll be at the event and look forward to meeting many of you there! If you’re a Forrester client, please feel free to contact your account team to set up a meeting or arrange a conversation with me. source

Over the past year, B2B event teams have faced mounting challenges. A volatile economic and political climate has intensified existing pressures around inflation, budgets, and staffing. At the same time, competition for attendees and sponsors has grown fiercer, with leaders struggling to attract both the quantity and quality of participants needed to meet their goals. Attendee behavior is also shifting — people are registering later and expecting more interactive, personalized experiences. As a result, planning and executing successful events has become increasingly complex. In fact, Forrester data shows that overall event satisfaction dropped by 8% from 2024 to 2025 as teams struggled to adapt. To help leaders navigate this evolving landscape, Forrester’s Q1 2025 State Of B2B Events Survey gathered insights from more than 250 event decision-makers to uncover key trends. The findings show that:   Budgets and resources are strained. For the second consecutive year, budgets are flat or down for two-thirds of event teams. Even among the 19% of organizations that have seen budgets increase, the reality is that, due to inflation, they’re almost certainly flat or down in real terms. The B2B event mix continues to evolve. As budgets tighten, the B2B event mix is shifting. Marketers are prioritizing smaller hosted events, with 59% planning more of these events over the next 12 months. In contrast, the number of organizations planning more hosted large events fell 12% year on year as marketers shifted resources and focus onto smaller events. Teams prioritize the basics. More than 90% of organizations are focused on the core objectives of getting the right audience to their events, demonstrating ROI, and improving post-event follow-up, but this focus on fundamentals has led to a deprioritization of longer-term considerations such as inclusivity, accessibility, and sustainability, which have fallen in importance year on year and rank lowest on the priority list. B2B event technology is a missed opportunity. More than a quarter (28%) of the largest organizations have deployed six or more event technology platforms while just one in five has fully integrated their primary platform into their broader sales and marketing tech stack. Yet data shows that when organizations do integrate, overall event satisfaction increases significantly. AI uptake remains low. Despite AI’s potential to enhance productivity, attendee personalization, data analytics, and content repurposing, the majority of organizations are still in learning mode. Using AI for content creation is the number one current use case, with 39% of marketers currently making use of it here, but a growing number plan to use AI much more extensively over the next 12 months. B2B events are planned and run in functional silos. In many organizations, events are planned by disparate teams, resulting in fragmented planning and suboptimal attendee experiences, but the data shows that when a centralized team runs the majority of the events, overall event satisfaction levels rise significantly. Forrester clients can listen to an on-demand webinar where we dig into the B2B event survey findings in more detail or request a guidance session to better understand what the trends mean for their teams and organization. source

Customer obsession is more than a buzzword — it’s a perpetual motion that drives business success. At this year’s CX Summit North America, Forrester is honoring two exceptional leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to putting customers at the heart of their organizations. Congratulations to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), winner of the Customer-Obsessed Enterprise Award, and John Miller, AT&T’s vice president of consumer and retail solutions, recipient of the Customer-Obsessed Leadership Award. Both have shown how prioritizing their customers can drive meaningful business outcomes, and in the process, they’re setting new benchmarks for customer-centric strategies across industries. Why They Stood Out CIBC: A Culture Built On Customer Focus CIBC’s commitment to customer obsession is deeply embedded in its operations and culture. By linking customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and business performance, CIBC has strengthened customer loyalty and achieved measurable business success. According to Stephen Forbes, CIBC’s executive vice president, “Our clients are at the center of everything we do.” This mindset has been instrumental in shaping the bank’s customer-first approach. John Miller: Passionately Leading With Empathy At AT&T John Miller, VP of consumer and retail solutions at AT&T, is recognized for his leadership rooted in customer insights and empathy. By staying true to AT&T’s brand promise, Miller improved CX and boosted brand trust metrics. “Our service delivery has fostered meaningful emotional connections not just between our customers and our brand but also between our employees and the people they serve,” said Miller. His focus on building these connections and empowering employees on the front lines to do what’s best for the customer highlights how empathy and customer-first strategies can drive impact. Lessons For CX Leaders The achievements of CIBC and John Miller offer key insights for organizations striving to enhance their customer experience: Leadership drives customer obsession. Both winners demonstrate the vital role of leadership in championing customer-first strategies and inspiring teams to follow suit. Empathy is key to success. By understanding customer needs and fostering connections, organizations can uncover opportunities for innovation and build trust. Customer experience must be integrated. Embedding CX and brand values into every possible interaction in day-to-day operations ensures that customer obsession becomes an organizational norm. Data powers decision-making. Leveraging customer data allows businesses to refine their strategies and deliver tailored, impactful solutions. These winners set a new standard for customer obsession, showing how prioritizing customers drives growth, employee happiness, and innovation. The prestigious Customer-Obsessed Enterprise and Leadership Awards recognize organizations and leaders who embed customer focus into their leadership, strategy, and operations. Forrester’s expert panel uses a rigorous scoring system to ensure that only the best are honored. Want to learn more? Join us at CX Summit North America, June 23–26, 2025, in Nashville to hear directly from these award winners, who will share their groundbreaking strategies on the Summit stage. source

Public-sector IT leaders are no strangers to complexity. From legacy systems and siloed data to rising citizen expectations and evolving missions, the challenges are real — and growing. But so are the opportunities. In our latest research, The Top Emerging Technologies For Public Sector And Government, 2025, we identify 11 technologies that will shape the next decade of government transformation. These aren’t just buzzwords — they’re strategic tools that can help you modernize infrastructure, improve service delivery, and build trust in a digital-first world. But not all technologies are created equal, or equally urgent. Focus On What Delivers Value When It Matters Critical to the public sector is the ability to deliver on time, on budget, and on mission. Having the tools on hand to support your service delivery capabilities is critical, but knowing when and where to invest is essential in securing both quick wins and long-term strategic gains. Regulatory constraints, complex systems, conflicting interests, and shifting mission priorities mean that, despite enthusiasm and an appetite for new technologies, the public sector is often more constrained than its private-sector counterparts. As such, the technologies that will reap the most benefits are different than for other industries. We’ve categorized these technologies across three benefit horizons to help you prioritize the following: For immediate ROI, invest in ready-to-deploy technologies. With the ability to integrate with existing systems, leverage existing capabilities, and use current datasets, technologies in this category can be implemented immediately to significant effect. Generative AI for language has already been deployed in many agencies internationally, addressing language barriers, providing efficiency gains, and assisting in service delivery for various target groups of key government programs. To build capabilities, focus on the next 2–5 years. Technologies are rapidly evolving and can provide extensive benefits over the next few years — when implemented correctly. With the right capabilities and frameworks in place, agencies can look to advance their roadmaps and focus on mission success. Quantum security may still be several years away from mainstream use, but leaders must be prepared to adopt facets of it, such as post-quantum public key algorithms, to improve the security of information exchange and secure increased cryptographic agility in the future. Cautiously approach these high-risk, high-reward technologies for the future. Forward-looking agencies will begin to assess whether these advanced technologies have a place in their roadmaps and whether they will be worth the investment. Delivering tangible value in five or more years, technologies such as Zero Trust edge, which has the possibility to reduce costs and enhance protection, can’t be neglected. They are coming — whether you’re prepared or not. Prepare For The Future: Plan Now Technology continues to develop faster than any one agency can keep up with, and as leaders, you should prepare and implement as best you can. Such preparation demands bold investment, disciplined planning, and a commitment to adaptability. Leaders should: Assess current tech maturity. Not every agency is ready for every innovation — review your current tech stack to identify areas of low maturity or concern. Focus on what aligns with your mission and capabilities, then develop a roadmap. Pilot strategically. Use proofs of concept to test emerging technologies in low-risk environments. Identify measurable outcomes to assess the success of these pilots and create a plan for wider implementation. Build cross-functional coalitions. Emerging tech success depends on collaboration between IT, policy, and operations. Ensure that you’ve established relationships with key stakeholders across the agency and can clearly communicate the risks and benefits of the technology. Invest in talent and governance. New tools require new skills — and new rules. Governance and adherence to policy is critical for public-sector agencies, as trust and reliability are key factors in maintaining stakeholder relations. Ensure that you have comprehensive governance policies to implement these technologies securely, and invest in staff who are capable of long-term governance strategy. Investigate our wider top emerging technology research, or schedule a guidance session with our experts to discuss how you can plan for and implement these emerging technologies. (This blog post was written in collaboration with Chiara Bragato, senior research associate, as part of Forrester’s research and continuous guidance for public-sector and government leaders.) source

Customer obsession is more than a buzzword — it’s a perpetual motion that drives business success. At this year’s CX Summit North America, Forrester is honoring two exceptional leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to putting customers at the heart of their organizations. Congratulations to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), winner of the Customer-Obsessed Enterprise Award, and John Miller, AT&T’s vice president of consumer and retail solutions, recipient of the Customer-Obsessed Leadership Award. Both have shown how prioritizing their customers can drive meaningful business outcomes, and in the process, they’re setting new benchmarks for customer-centric strategies across industries. Why They Stood Out CIBC: A Culture Built On Customer Focus CIBC’s commitment to customer obsession is deeply embedded in its operations and culture. By linking customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and business performance, CIBC has strengthened customer loyalty and achieved measurable business success. According to Stephen Forbes, CIBC’s executive vice president, “Our clients are at the center of everything we do.” This mindset has been instrumental in shaping the bank’s customer-first approach. John Miller: Passionately Leading With Empathy At AT&T John Miller, VP of consumer and retail solutions at AT&T, is recognized for his leadership rooted in customer insights and empathy. By staying true to AT&T’s brand promise, Miller improved CX and boosted brand trust metrics. “Our service delivery has fostered meaningful emotional connections not just between our customers and our brand but also between our employees and the people they serve,” said Miller. His focus on building these connections and empowering employees on the front lines to do what’s best for the customer highlights how empathy and customer-first strategies can drive impact. Lessons For CX Leaders The achievements of CIBC and John Miller offer key insights for organizations striving to enhance their customer experience: Leadership drives customer obsession. Both winners demonstrate the vital role of leadership in championing customer-first strategies and inspiring teams to follow suit. Empathy is key to success. By understanding customer needs and fostering connections, organizations can uncover opportunities for innovation and build trust. Customer experience must be integrated. Embedding CX and brand values into every possible interaction in day-to-day operations ensures that customer obsession becomes an organizational norm. Data powers decision-making. Leveraging customer data allows businesses to refine their strategies and deliver tailored, impactful solutions. These winners set a new standard for customer obsession, showing how prioritizing customers drives growth, employee happiness, and innovation. The prestigious Customer-Obsessed Enterprise and Leadership Awards recognize organizations and leaders who embed customer focus into their leadership, strategy, and operations. Forrester’s expert panel uses a rigorous scoring system to ensure that only the best are honored. Want to learn more? Join us at CX Summit North America, June 23–26, 2025, in Nashville to hear directly from these award winners, who will share their groundbreaking strategies on the Summit stage. source

This spring, I attended three events: Salesforce TDX, Workato Work^AI, and Boomi World. They got me asking an odd-sounding question: Is integration platform as a service (iPaaS) still an iPaaS? My hang-up is with the word “integration.” Calling these tools an integration platform as a service orients them as narrowly focused on connecting applications and data stores. But much of what these events emphasized isn’t necessarily integration — it was at a higher level of abstraction, driven by AI. Vendor Announcements At TDX 2025, MuleSoft announced MuleSoft for Agentforce. This includes the Topic Center for developers to turn MuleSoft APIs into Agentforce topics and actions and API Catalog to centralize access to Agentforce topics and actions created from MuleSoft, Salesforce, and Heroku APIs. It also announced a connector to incorporate Agentforce into any integration workflow. At Workato Work^AI, Workato similarly announced a no-code agent builder. It also showed Agent Acumen, a tool to aggregate insights from multiple systems and data. This enables organizations to proactively monitor business KPIs from agentic actions and intervene when they are out of band. It also released AgentX Apps, which are AI agents for specific tasks such as IT helpdesk and employee onboarding. At Boomi World, Boomi announced Agentstudio. This platform has components to design, govern, and monitor agents without writing any code. Boomi also updated API management with features to present APIs as tools for agents and emphasized plans for agent-to-agent communications, and it described a marketplace of agents, including from third-party partners. All three iPaaS vendors threw their weight behind Model Context Protocol (MCP), with features or plans to address MCP’s major security gaps. iPaaS Is Becoming More Than Just Integration The key theme of these announcements is creating an automation platform to build nondeterministic AI agents that work with traditional deterministic control flows to perform complex tasks and make autonomous decisions. Integration is foundational to this, but these announcements move beyond integration. Instead of focusing on gluing system A to system B, they focus on business process orchestration. So is iPaaS still an iPaaS? The answer is yes … but not for long. This agentic pivot is still new. Most iPaaS vendors are not where these three vendors are with AI agents. These announcements show clear steps of iPaaS evolving to something more than just an integration platform. As agentic orchestration of business processes becomes the core of how these products are used, calling them merely “integration platforms” will become insufficient. iPaaS As The Front End, Applications As The Back End? This will become even more apparent as AI matures. In the future, many UIs will be a combination of two things: 1) agentic ChatGPT-like user experiences powered by agents, many of which will be built by iPaaS agent builders that will have evolved into adaptive process orchestration and 2) custom-built code from application generation (AppGen) platforms, with integration as a component of AppGen. This will pressure user interfaces from many application vendors to start to go away. These vendors will instead focus more on the components and systems of record that AI agents and AppGen platforms orchestrate. This would be an odd flip: What was once called iPaaS would move from the back end to the front end via user-facing agents and broader AppGen, while application vendors would be pushed toward back-end services from the front end. The rebalancing of the user experience is inevitable and will eventually change the world. source

Although details are limited — with more expected to come during an upcoming earnings call — we know that a leader in the security service edge (SSE) market will consume a leader in the managed detection and reponse (MDR) market, with Zscaler announcing that it intends to acquire Red Canary. Here’s our analysis of the good, the bad, and the concerning about this acquisition, what it means for the cybersecurity market, and what it signals for security leaders and their teams. The Good: Complementary Visibility And Business Benefits On its face, this acquisition makes sense. Both companies lead the primary market segments in which they operate and both companies augment weaknesses in the other. Specifically: Platforms are the name of the current game. Competitors in the broader security market are pushing heavily toward “platformization,” leading to significant consolidation with larger security companies (e.g., Exabeam and LogRhythm, Cisco and Splunk, etc.). Zscaler and other vendors looking to become a platform need to expand to compete. They fill key functionality gaps in the other. Zscaler’s legacy is cloud-based network and application access control built on a Zero Trust foundation. Gaps for Zscaler include minimal visibility into endpoints, identities, and security telemetry — though it does advertise security data fabric as part of its catalog. Red Canary plugs in and solves those issues right away, giving Zscaler even more credibility for its Zero Trust platform. As enterprises continue to deemphasize the importance of network visibility via SaaS in favor of endpoint, cloud, and identity detection surfaces, this reduces the likelihood that its primary SSE and secure-access service edge competitors can frame Zscaler as a niche Zero Trust provider with visibility gaps. Each will bring financial benefits to the other. This acquisition brings a sizable infusion of recurring revenue into Zscaler that will boost its financial results and please shareholders. Red Canary struggled with sales, partnerships, and market penetration — Zscaler brings a strong go-to-market engine. In addition, Red Canary, with a predominantly North American-focused customer base, can tap into Zscaler’s existing financials and global footprint, leading to cross-sell opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t exist. One aspect that will make this integration easier: Both companies focus on annual recurring revenue as subscription companies. The Bad: No One Wants To Revert Back To Managed Security Service Providers As much as this acquisition addresses weaknesses in each company, when you dig deeper, the foundation of this acquisition starts to falter. While MDR is taking a turn toward more proactive capabilities and Zero Trust can reduce the impact of breaches, Zero Trust and MDR don’t amplify one another. Therefore, bundling SSE with MDR isn’t a natural or compelling consumption model. One only needs to look at the recent history of the managed security service provider market to see how managed network security and managed security information and event management failed to create synergies beyond bundling via a catalog of services. In fact, the challenges created by this disconnect helped create MDR as a standalone market. Unfortunately: This duo addresses business gaps without creating a better security product. Zscaler’s gaps, such as a lack of detailed logging and reporting or native security services, were easily exploited by competitors like Palo Alto Networks and Cisco. Through Red Canary, Zscaler is positioned to leverage the MDR’s extensive coverage across endpoints, identities, and workloads for richer telemetry, in addition to expert services to augment security teams. Even so, it’s unclear how any technology integration might work in practice. On paper, Red Canary can bring a tremendous amount of visibility to Zscaler to support the core functionality of the platform, but there’s currently neither a public timeline for integration nor details regarding how Red Canary’s telemetry will be bridged into Zscaler’s current product offerings. Scale will be difficult for Zscaler. Red Canary was in a highly competitive market with hundreds of providers offering MDR services, but scaling its business in that market was expensive, challenging, and, critically, uncertain. Zscaler’s competitors already offer MDR services, making the vendor late to bring this into its platform (which is at least one year away at best), and the lack of strong security synergies between Zero Trust and MDR don’t make this an obvious purchase for security leaders seeking out strong detection, investigation, and response services. The Concerning: Conflicting Cultures Rarely Mesh Well In Security There’s a glaring culture gap between these two corporations. Zscaler focuses on a broad portfolio of security offerings with a strong sales and marketing culture and leaders with a long history of scaling a startup to a major cybersecurity brand. Red Canary is expertise-oriented with strong practitioner knowledge and a long history focused on threat intelligence, detection, and response. Further: Based on past performance, the two don’t share the same values. Red Canary excelled in its highly technical community contributions, especially with its work to set a standard for raw telemetry access from endpoint detection and response providers in the MDR market and Atomic Red Team. Zscaler does offer some open-source scripts, but the primary intent of those scripts is enabling deployment and implementation of Zscaler services, not necessarily for the good of the broader security community. Time will tell if Red Canary will continue its contributions to the broader cybersecurity community, but there’s no evidence in Zscaler’s history that it places the same level of value in giving back to practitioners. In cybersecurity history, sales cultures rarely meld well with expertise cultures. The canonical example of FireEye and Mandiant stands out. And even though both companies offer subscription services in the form of annual recurring revenue, which helps the sales motion, it might not be enough to bridge the gap. In Summary: Mostly Upside Potential And A Bellwether For More Volatile Acquisitions For CISOs trying to make sense of the Zscaler and Red Canary combination: In spite of the claims that bringing various acquisitions together makes sense, the simple truth is that an acquisition being better for customers rarely factors into the equation. Forrester expects that this acquisition will bode

Zero-click search, where buyers get information without clicking through to a website, isn’t new, but what it means for B2B marketers has fundamentally changed. What started as quick answers and featured snippets has evolved into full-scale AI-generated responses that summarize, interpret, and often replace your content. In this new reality, visibility depends on whether your content is useful, trustworthy, and structured enough to be surfaced by AI and respected by buyers. Even if your content is relevant, well structured, and aligned to buyer needs, you may not see it reflected in traffic reports, as visibility no longer guarantees a visit, especially when generative AI (genAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews summarize your content without sending a click. Your content might still rank in search results but be overlooked if buyers get what they need from AI-generated answers and don’t click through. Gaining visibility with content now means showing up in context — within the tools that buyers use to research, compare, and make decisions. This often happens before they reach your website. What It Takes For Content To Stand Out In 2025 To stand out in this environment, you’ve got to produce content that gets recognized and reused by the tools your buyers rely on. Here’s what that looks like in practice: Write for reasoning, not just ranking. Structure your content to answer real buyer questions clearly and logically, not just to satisfy keyword formulas. Use concise explanations, well-labeled sections, and context-rich examples to help large language models understand and reuse your content accurately, whether that’s as a direct quote, summary, or reference in a broader AI-generated response. Collaborate with subject-matter experts to build depth and authority. Involve your experts early to surface unique angles, original insights, and meaningful context that your competitors can’t replicate. Then, extend their impact by reusing content from webinars, panels, or keynote presentations, especially when they’ve spoken at industry events or to influential audiences. That visibility not only reflects real-world credibility but also provides proof points and quotable material that strengthens your content’s authority in the eyes of both buyers and AI systems. Signal authority early and often. Lead with a clear point of view and back it up quickly. Reference first-party data, link to peer-reviewed sources, cite analyst or other influencer commentary, or highlight customer results in an opening section. These are trust-building cues for AI and skeptical buyers, and it gives them reasons to surface and stay with your content. Make your content modular and multipurpose. Break long-form content into clearly defined, standalone sections that can be reused across formats and channels. Think in building blocks: strong intros, concise summaries, quotable insights, and key takeaways that can live on a web page, in a social post, or as a featured snippet. Modular content not only improves discoverability but also extends your reach without creating everything from scratch. Measure success beyond traffic. Page views don’t reflect how content is influencing decisions in a zero-click world. Instead, look for smarter indicators: engagement from known accounts or high-fit personas, time spent on strategic content (e.g., resource centers, solution pages, product education content, case study libraries, or tools and assessments), reuse by sales or customer success teams, and mentions or citations by industry influencers or analysts. These are signals that your content is reaching and resonating with the right audience, even if traditional attribution models can’t fully capture it. Content Visibility Starts With Stronger Collaboration For success in a zero-click world, marketing teams require more than content adjustments. They must have tighter collaboration and alignment around what buyers need. Although many marketers know what needs to change, they struggle to make progress because collaboration with subject-matter experts is fragmented, inconsistent, or an afterthought. Without experts’ input, content lacks the depth, authority, and nuance it needs to be discovered and trusted by both AI systems and human buyers. If you’re ready to make content more discoverable, join us for our upcoming webinar, How To Create Standout B2B Content In A Zero-Click World. We’ll share actionable ideas to help your team create content that earns visibility, builds trust, and supports modern buyer behavior, starting with better internal collaboration. source

Forrester is delighted to begin accepting nominations for the Data & AI Impact Award. This prestigious award recognizes enterprise data and AI initiatives that drive effective decision-making for business outcomes. As AI emerges from experimentation to production-ready enterprise systems that transform organizations, the role of data and technology to deliver on the AI promise has never been more important. Data and AI leaders are leading the charge to deliver data and AI products at scale. They are enabling stakeholders (technical and non-technical) across the enterprise through data literacy and democratization of data and platforms, all of this while also building trust — in data, in AI, in technical capabilities, and in data/AI-based decisions, still keeping in mind privacy, security, and compliance. We want to reward the call to action that data and AI leaders are responding to at this critical juncture of transformational change. What The Award Recognizes Forrester is looking to celebrate enterprises (1,000 employees or more) that demonstrate excellence in one and preferably more of the following data and AI priority areas: Strategic alignment: a clear, business-aligned data and AI strategy built to drive measurable outcomes. Modern architecture: scalable platforms and applications that deliver next-gen capabilities. Governance and trust: compliant, well-governed data and AI products that stakeholders can rely on to make trusted enterprise decisions. Decision intelligence: data science and analytics practices that lead to more effective and faster decisions. AI innovation: cutting-edge AI innovations and their timely application to align with strategic goals. Culture and enablement: a strong data culture supported by training and literacy programs. The Value Of Submitting A Nomination The winning team will receive: Recognition: Share your story about creating measurable business outcomes on the mainstage at Technology & Innovation Summit North America (November 2–5, 2025, in Austin, Texas). Visibility: Amplify your team’s visibility by participating in and leveraging Forrester’s global network through reports, videos, and social media. Influence: Elevate the brand of your data and AI program by showcasing its strategic impact to industry peers, partners, and decision-makers. How To Apply For The Data & AI Impact Award The nomination process is straightforward. Here’s what you need to do: Download the nomination packet. Answer six key questions about your strategy, scale, adoption, trust, lessons learned, and roadmap. Feel free to share optional supporting documents — such as metrics, architectural diagrams, or case studies — that help bring your story to life. Submit your materials to [email protected] by July 16, 2025. Don’t miss your chance to stand out and bask in the spotlight! Nominate your team today and show the world what achieving real results from data and AI looks like. Good luck! source