Forrester

Fly, Eagles, fly! I normally prefer competitive Super Bowl games, but this Eagles fan was perfectly happy with a massacre this year. And also — there were ads! Organizations are facing more pressure than ever to deliver profitable growth, and brand budgets are getting squeezed as marketers are being asked to do more with less and prove the returns of practically every penny spent. That makes coughing up $8 million per 30 seconds of media (plus creative production, talent fees, PR, etc.) an even higher-pressure situation for Super Bowl advertisers, who must achieve disproportionate growth from their efforts. So let’s look through the lens of the growth levers that my colleague Dipanjan Chatterjee and I laid out in the report Unlock Your Revenue Growth Potential to see which ads went beyond just making us laugh, cry, or scan a QR code to set up their brand for sustained profitable growth. If You’re Not Meaningfully Pulling These Growth Levers, Spend Your Budget Elsewhere Salience: This is (or should be) the primary goal of every Super Bowl advertiser — to put their brand in the consideration set in a buying context — but of course, some do it better than others. Bud Light created a fun ad that positioned it as the beer of choice for suburban barbecue occasions. By comparison, Michelob ULTRA broke out the pickleball paddles to cement ULTRA as perfect for a post-workout celebration. Lay’s surprised me when it went for a moving ad about its local potato sourcing, but I imagine that it created more affinity for when consumers will inevitably cross a display in the grocery store. Access: poppi aired a colorful 60-second ad that seems very in line with its brand aesthetic, positioning it as an evolution of soda. But the content of the story was telling: The ad showed poppi as an option on restaurant menus where you would typically find soda, hinting at an ambitious distribution channel strategy. Cirkul likely leveraged its ad buy to have very strong in-store presence in the country’s largest retail chain, which boosts its chances of a strong return on Super Bowl spend. Price: Highlighting value can be a smart strategy in a time of perceived economic headwinds, and I’m surprised that it wasn’t more at the forefront (maybe Temu spent its entire decade’s budget during last year’s game). DoorDash, for one, highlighted the savings from its DashPass product and how it can lead to spending on other “luxuries.” Product: The biggest tearjerker of the night in our household was the Google Pixel ad that highlighted how its Gemini AI platform could be relevant in very real-life situations. Bosch and Jeep, in very different ways, highlighted their product portfolios with hopes of expanding consumers’ perceptions of how their brands could fit into their lives. Experience: Making it easy and enjoyable for customers to use your product or service should be a cost of entry but can be wielded as a growth lever, as well. T-Mobile aimed to lure new customers by highlighting the investments that it made in frictionless, consistent cell service, addressing one of the key drivers of people switching carriers. Meta and Ray-Ban hoped to wow with a dramatized experience of using their AI-powered glasses. Growth should always be the goal, and that means strategically thinking through the consumer base from which you want to source that growth, along with the levers that you’ll need to pull to win and retain those consumers. Feel free to reach out to me and my colleagues at Forrester as objective thinking partners as you pursue super growth (and go, birds). source

Every time you turn around, it looks like someone is taking a shot at customer success (CS). Whether at last year’s SaaStr or elsewhere, more voices have been calling for new approaches to CS — ones that transform CS from cost center to tool for growth. While it’s still early to plan a funeral, CS leaders who are feeling the pressure should examine their objectives and strategies more closely. Whether you are service-based or product-driven — or following a more traditional business model — certain “truths” about customers remain constant. Specifically, you can’t grow what you can’t retain, and it costs less to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. Enhancing retention should be a top priority on every B2B firm’s 2025 goal list. Prove Value So That Growth Becomes Inevitable Whether or not you have a distinct function called customer success, some part of your company must be responsible for ensuring that what customers signed up to get is going to give them value for their business so that they then will continue to pay you for that value and more. The problem today is less with the “what” and more about the “how.” Common questions we hear today are “How do we scale CS efficiently?” “How should we measure CS’s impact on the business?” and “How do we justify further investment?” As companies grow and mature, their approach to customer retention requires interactions that decision-makers and users alike find valuable. Answering these questions and ensuring that you can demonstrate that these interactions provide value requires a solid strategy, the resources and skills to execute it, and the ability to account for your results. Is My Strategy Setting My Customers Up To Succeed? Of course, the answer to questions about strategy will depend on where you are and how you are doing. At Forrester, we believe that a successful CS strategy has six main components: Purpose or charter. Is CS’s role to manage the account, resolve issues, and advocate internally? Or are you helping customers achieve their goals through a differentiated customer experience that drives retention, growth, and advocacy? Alignment. To what degree does CS work in a highly collaborative manner — and share metrics — with all customer-facing teams to help ensure that customers achieve their goals? Performance metrics. How does CS show that it improves customers’ business outcomes — through periodic reviews and success plans or by continuously reporting on and managing results through a digital experience personalized to each account? Technology and data. Do your data and technology practices increase CS productivity and enhance insights? Or are you also creating a distinctive digital experience that supports a seamless journey and enhances their realized value? Customer lifecycle management. Do you actively work to define your customers’ journeys and ensure that they reflect the key milestones they must achieve to adopt your offering successfully and shorten time to value? Is the ultimate stage of that journey an activated advocate who differentiates your brand? Budget and capacity. To what extent is CS run as a self-funded P&L? Does it use a tiered coverage model with pricing that ranges from free to customer-funded? Is the business case for budgets based on a multiyear cost-benefit analysis that includes provisions for risk and future expansion/flexibility? How Mature Is Your Approach To CS? To explore these strategic questions further, we invite you to take the Forrester Customer Success Strategy Assessment, available to everyone through this survey link. After the survey, you will receive an overall score and scores for each of the six components. For those planning to attend Forrester’s B2B Summit North America in Phoenix, Arizona, at the end of March, Shari Srebnick and I will be hosting a workshop where attendees can: Assess customer success strategy and identify capability or maturity gaps. Compare results with peers and collaborate on possible solutions or next actions. Outline an action plan to update the CS strategy after the conference. The workshop will be held on Monday, March 31, at 3:30 p.m. Pre-registration is required and space is limited, so don’t delay! Hope to see you there. source

Despite persistent inflation, US real GDP is forecast to grow 2.7% in 2025 and US tech spending to grow by 6.1% to reach a staggering $2.7 trillion. Buoyed by Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, tech spending in 2025 is driven by: Software. Software spending in the US will increase by 10.7% in 2025. As cybersecurity risks escalate, and cloud and generative AI (genAI) continue to revolutionize tech offerings, enterprises look to leverage these technologies to drive future growth and innovation. Cloud giants such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft lead the charge, showcasing significant revenue growth from these technologies. Despite this, companies feel the complexity of managing cloud costs — three out of every five organizations saw cloud costs rise in the past year. Cloud revenues are on track to grow faster in 2025 than 2024. Industry dynamics. The media and information sector, alongside finance and insurance, will see faster tech spend growth, largely driven by digital transformation and genAI advancements. Retail and healthcare sectors also leverage technology to innovate and enhance customer and patient experiences. Eighty percent of financial institutions plan to increase technology spend over the next two years, with fraud detection and mitigation, digital banking, and data analytics the the top three technology investments in 2024 and 2025. Hardware. Computer equipment sales will experience a revival with significant growth in US PC shipments, driven by demand for AI-capable devices and the phaseout of Windows 10. Strong PC equipment demand offsets tepid 0.4% growth in communication equipment spend as US telecom companies scale back capital expenditure amid economic pressures. IT services. Spending on IT services shows modest 3.5% growth driven by the momentum of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. Consulting revenue growth was tepid in 2024; Accenture’s North American revenues saw flat growth in the the first three quarters of 2024, forcing a downgrade to growth guidance. Tech employment trends. Forrester estimates that the 7.1 million US information workers in 2023 will grow 10% by 2030 as the employment landscape within the tech sector evolves. Data science and information security roles will expand rapidly, whereas computer programming jobs will face declines due to the impact of large language models. Dell cut 10% of its workforce to create a more AI-focused business. Intel announced $10 billion in cost reductions with the loss of more than 15% of its workforce and recommits to “delivering AI everywhere” despite losing market share to NVIDIA. Cisco last year announced two rounds of job losses that reduced its workforce by 12% to focus on AI, cloud, and cybersecurity. As a result, driven by the US, Forrester forecasts that North America will see the fastest regional tech spend growth in 2025. The Forrester report, US Tech Market Forecast, 2024 To 2029, shows that tech spend, excluding staff costs, will exceed $2 trillion for the first time in 2025 to capture 41% of global tech spend. Also keep an eye out for Forrester’s forecasts on European and global tech spend between 2024 and 2029 to place this US tech spend growth into context. source

The SE is dead; long live the iPhone. In what was billed as a surprise announcement, Apple today introduced the newest member of the Apple family: the iPhone 16e. But it wasn’t really much of a surprise — Apple’s impending iPhone SE revamp has been its worst-kept secret. Rumors of a refresh have been rife for some time, and finally, Apple has pulled the plug, bringing about a much-needed rationalization of its phone portfolio. The new iPhone 16e no longer stands out as the iPhone that was not just cheap but felt cheap, as well. Now, Apple’s brand of accessible luxury gets a little more accessible for people who don’t want to settle for anything less than (almost) the real thing. Luxury, made even more accessible, will drive customer lifetime value. The embrace of a lower-end product and its rationalization within the core portfolio is standard in the mass luxury playbook; we have seen this strategy succeed with great effectiveness in luxury car brands, such as BMW and Audi, that thrive on entry-level options without hefty price tags. The iPhone 16e generates a new revenue stream for Apple, and this will be particularly noticeable in key markets like India, where iPhones are out of reach for most people and there is furious low-cost, high-quality Android competition. There is also a second-order effect of cheaper devices like the iPhone 16e bringing new customers into the Apple ecosystem. The revenue and margins from devices are just the beginning of what Apple hopes will be a beautiful friendship. Customers engage with all of Apple’s services (which are twice as financially lucrative as its device business) over an extended period, boosting their “customer lifetime value” to the brand. The 16e is a smart boost for Apple Intelligence. The new iPhone 16e also provides a more accessible on-ramp to Apple Intelligence. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, tells us that iPhone sales have performed best in markets with Apple Intelligence. But even in these markets, the constrained backward compatibility (15 Pro and better required) effectively prices out the adoption of many of these AI capabilities. We’ve seen a limited appetite among many of the installed base to upgrade from previous versions, but the new phone reduces the cost hurdle of joining the Apple Intelligence bandwagon. Effective product management and marketing will minimize cannibalization. The problem with a lower-end product in a luxury portfolio is that you want it to be good but not so good as to cannibalize the crown jewels. The iPhone 16e is designed to limit such flight from higher-margin phones. For example, if it’s photography and video a buyer is after, then the camera on the 16e is never going to meet the needs of a “pro-sumer.” And if it’s all about symbolic status, the single camera lens will immediately signal where the 16e resides in the social hierarchy of iPhones. That said, some leakage from the higher-priced iPhone product lines is inevitable, but this will be offset by the financial benefits of growing the base. ————————————————————————————————————— Learn more: Forrester clients can read my research on how brands grow, especially by harmonizing their brand and customer experience. Follow my work: Go to my Forrester bio and click “Follow.” Chat with me: If you are a Forrester client interested in discussing these topics, please schedule time with me for an inquiry or guidance session. Plan a session: If you are a Forrester client looking to host a strategy session on a related topic (for example, “the future of digital consumer experience related to AI”), please contact your account team or email me at [email protected]. source

A chatbot dispensing weight loss advice to people with eating disorders? Ranking resumes based solely on what race and ethnicities the names on them are associated with? These are just two real-life examples of the harmful results of failing to apply responsible design when creating generative AI (genAI)-powered experiences. In contrast, when designed well, genAI-powered experiences can do immense good — for example, Be My AI, which enables people who are blind or of low vision to get immediate visual assistance by taking a picture of an object and getting an AI-generated description of it. The decisions that teams make when designing experiences that include genAI can steer outcomes one way or the other. Answer Essential Questions To Design Better With GenAI Design leaders should guide their organization through the process of answering 12 key questions as they explore opportunities, plan experiences, and evolve their practices and teams. For example, ask: Which of our ideas are good use cases for genAI? Just because you can use genAI doesn’t mean that you should. Conduct experience research using discovery methods such as contextual inquiry that are particularly effective for identifying unmet customer needs or problems for which AI can solve. Evaluate the impact of ideas, not just their desirability, viability, and feasibility. Facilitate a session to arrive at an understanding of the impact that AI might have on individuals, communities, and society — both how it might help but also any potential harms to mitigate. Are we applying established genAI design patterns in the user interface? While genAI design patterns are evolving, best practices have emerged. For example, learn from Salesforce’s “Human at the Helm” research on what aspects of an experience build trust in AI and the corresponding interaction design patterns. Start with published patterns like these, but tailor them to your specific brand, design, and content standards. Do all of our designers need to become genAI experts? Every designer should have a basic understanding of how AI works so that they can 1) use it well as a tool for designing experiences and 2) incorporate it as an ingredient in the experiences they design. But organizations also benefit from having designers with deep genAI expertise to help upskill team members, operationalize best practices for working with genAI, and collaborate with developers on technical issues that impact the user experience. Next Steps If you’re a Forrester client, read my new report, Design GenAI-Powered Experiences Responsibly, to learn about the rest of the 12 questions that teams should ask when creating genAI-powered experiences. Then, if you’d like to ask me questions or discuss how to apply this research in your organization, you can set up a conversation with me. You can also follow or connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like. source

As software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) hit the peak of excitement, Forrester analysts noticed that the hype wasn’t turning into deployments. Many of the SD-WAN investigations were being held up by security teams that put a pause on the projects as the teams tried to wrap their heads around the shift in security architecture and controls from data center to cloud. At the time, networking and security were becoming interdependent, yet organizations and solutions were not quite there. Forrester put together a model that would help clients build a single, integrated networking and security model, coining a term that we thought was fitting — Zero Trust edge (ZTE) — as these changes made way for providing Zero Trust security via networking at the edge. But we weren’t the only ones naming this same new phenomenon; the term secure access service edge (SASE) rose around the same time. It didn’t set the bar quite at the same threshold as ZTE, but it described the same change. At the time, the market was full of partnerships between networking and security vendors, and only a few vendors had started to create a single solution with management and monitoring delivered from the cloud. Why Now? Five years later, the market is full of integrated solutions. It is also clear at this time that SASE (pronounced “sassy”) is the preferred market term. As such, we are going to switch over to this market-preferred term while pushing that term to meet the same bar we set for ZTE. For me, this is an easy decision, as customer-first has always been my one key truth to live by. Why? Please indulge me as I take a trip down memory lane, as my career is shaped by two prior experiences: Engineering aircraft components. Straight out of college, I spent time at a small aircraft company engineering new capabilities and improving the manufacturing, safety, or quality of existing parts. In that world, a slight change in dimension of component, such as landing-gear tube thickness, could cause a crash. I spent a lot of time talking to the pilots to see what improvements would drive them to buy the next model or lure new buyers. My greatest contribution: a curved dashboard. The costs of manufacturing the dashboard increased, but current and potential clients loved it. It made the aircraft feel personalized, and the instruments were easier to read. Launching ProVision ASIC and 5400. While I was at HP ProCurve (before the HP split into HPE and HP Inc.), account managers heavily pushed client visits to promote the previous launch (5400 and ProVision ASIC). Not only did I get a lot of direct feedback from customers about the new products (and launch) that helped shape the next cycle, but they also weren’t shy about sharing their thoughts about other products. Many of these thoughts were about real barriers they faced that made their day-to-day or real-world scenarios challenging. Hence, I try to create and release information as if I’m walking in the customer’s shoes, removing any hurdles to getting the best information to make the right decision for their organizations. If clients search “SASE” looking for best practices, design guides, and vendor comparisons, then that is the term we must use to get them what they need. Rather than waste cycles drawing comparisons between the two, we will simply push SASE to be better and achieve a higher standard to meet clients’ needs. We will be pivoting our original definition to now define SASE this way: A solution that combines security and networking functionalities — such as software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs), cloud access security brokers (CASBs), Zero Trust network access (ZTNA), and secure web gateways (SWGs) — delivered and supported by a single vendor with any combination of cloud, software, or hardware components. Tactically, this means that over the next few weeks, our current research with ZTE will be relabeled with SASE, along with any future research listed. A big thank you to my friend and former colleague, David Holmes, for his collaboration on this research. It was truly a pleasure. source

The 2024 CrowdStrike software incident reinforced the importance of three key pillars for crisis communications. While CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz issued a specific, fact-based statement within hours of learning that there was a major outage caused by a bad software update, he faced criticism for not immediately offering an apology. Crises are never convenient and can strike at any moment, leaving businesses scrambling to respond. Having a crisis communication plan in place is essential to safeguarding your company and brand reputation. It empowers a quick and accurate response and should be built to express empathy. Take These Steps In A Crisis Be first with the news. Audiences have high expectations when it comes to crisis communications and expect to be notified right away. Social media enables information to travel incredibly quickly, and in the absence of communications from the company itself, audiences will make assumptions — usually for the worse. It is better for companies to respond with the information they have rather than wait to make a statement until every detail is in place. Inform audiences with precise information and let them know when you will provide updates. Be ready to monitor news and social channels for sentiment analysis, and respond accordingly. Communicate what you know. While being first out with your message is critical, so is accuracy. To help ensure that you can issue messages quickly with the right information, prepare crisis scenario-specific drafts and templates that can be quickly adapted to the actual situation as part of your crisis communication plan. Develop key messages, FAQs, and other content formats that align with identified crisis scenarios and audiences. Have clear roles and responsibilities assigned with the appropriate executives, communication leads, and legal advisors who will take charge during a crisis and verify the facts. Show empathy. When a crisis hits, people and businesses are often negatively affected, and they want recognition for their suffering. An apology can feel like a concession or admission of guilt, something organizations are hesitant to offer when they don’t have all the facts. But an apology doesn’t have to be an admission to guilt. Acknowledging that a crisis has caused inconvenience, suffering, harm, disruptions, etc., shows that a company cares about the people and considers their needs. Ensure that designated spokespeople understand the value of empathy and embed it in your crisis communication response. How a business responds in a crisis speaks volumes about its values. Demonstrating accountability, empathy, transparency, and consistency in your communications can turn a crisis into an opportunity to strengthen your brand. By focusing on the importance of responding quickly and accurately with empathy, and building a resilient communication framework, your company can better navigate crises and maintain trust. Remember, the best time to prepare for a crisis is before it happens. Forrester clients can access the report, Creating A Comprehensive B2B Crisis Communication Plan, and schedule a call with us. source

Advanced Analytics: The Future Of CX Despite the recent challenges in overall experience quality seen in Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) benchmarks, customer experience (CX) remains a priority for many organizations. Unfortunately, these organizations have struggled to realize tangible benefits from their CX programs. In new research, we discuss key challenges CX programs face when relying on customer feedback as their primary capability and why they need to leverage more advanced quantitative analytics to drive action, increase financial impact, and prepare for a more analytics-driven future. The Challenges Of Survey-Only CX CX measurement programs report that their most common challenges are driving action to improve experience quality and proving the financial importance of CX. One primary cause is their reliance on soliciting customer feedback, usually through surveys. Surveys don’t often provide definitive root causes that compel business functions to make changes, and the relationship between survey scores and financial performance remains theoretical in most organizations. While a survey-reliant CX strategy is holding CX programs back, we are not advocating that they stop surveying customers. Instead, they should reduce their reliance on surveys and use that feedback data as part of a more comprehensive quantitative approach. The Quantitative Future Of CX Integrating advanced quantitative analytics into their strategy helps CX programs drive action and prove value. This involves shifting from treating survey score metrics as their primary output to using feedback data as an input to more advanced techniques. When CX programs combine customer feedback data with other metrics like operational interaction data, financial outcome data, and additional non-survey perception data, these inputs to advanced analytics can produce more actionable and financially connected insights than survey feedback alone. Executing On The Promise Of Advanced Analytics In CX After discussions with dozens of CX leaders, top vendors, and service providers in CX analytics, we found a consensus on several steps organizations must take to implement advanced CX analytics successfully. Among the five key components presented in our research, two demand considerable attention: Enabling a comprehensive experience dataset. This includes ensuring the availability, quality, and validity of a comprehensive dataset of customer perceptions, interactions, and the financial outcomes of their behavior. Most experts agree that this is the most critical and challenging aspect of implementing an advanced CX analytics strategy. Operationalizing insights from advanced analytics. While insights from advanced analytic techniques can prove fascinating in many organizations, acting on the outputs is crucial. This means using advanced analytic insights to take a proactive approach to CX, where organizations use diagnostics, predictions, and prescriptions to manage the experiences of all customers rather than reacting to feedback from a small percentage who respond to surveys. Avoiding Missteps In The Adoption Of Advanced Analytics In CX For our recent research, we have defined advanced CX analytics as “advanced analytic techniques — including diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive machine learning — that identify how customers’ experiences affect their behaviors.” The terms “advanced analytics” and “predictive analytics” are used somewhat loosely in the CX ecosystem. While useful, language analytics, conversational and digital intelligence, and sentiment analysis differ from advanced diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive methods. CX leaders should ensure they understand these differences when pursuing quantitative CX strategies. Another variation in CX analytics is leveraging machine learning models to predict common CX survey metrics like Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) or customer satisfaction (CSAT). While novel, most organizations would be better served predicting the actual outcomes of customer behavior with direct financial impacts rather than making the effort to develop these capabilities only to reinforce challenges associated with relying on customer perceptions to manage experiences. Final Advice While advanced analytic techniques are uncommon in CX practices today, CX programs and leaders should challenge themselves and find a path to facilitate, collaborate , or expand the CX mandate to pursue a more quantitative approach that will prepare them for the future of CX. If you’re ready to advance your CX program’s analytics strategy, Forrester can help. Forrester clients can access our two new reports, Why You Need Advanced Analytics To Transform CX and How To Transform CX With Advanced Analytics, where we provide a practical approach for pursuing advanced CX analytics in your organization. They can also schedule a guidance session on the topic. CX leaders can join us in Nashville this summer for Forrester’s North America CX Summit, where I will be available for live in person guidance. source

Forrester’s annual State Of B2B Events Survey is back! We invite all B2B event leaders and practitioners to participate and gain access to the latest B2B event market trends to help shape their event strategy over the next 12 months. Last Year’s Survey The 2024 iteration of the survey delivered a number of insights into the evolving event mix, priority focus areas, and approaches to event technology: Two-thirds of marketers faced flat or declining event budgets. While the event mix is now multiformat, small and hosted events were by far the fastest-growing event format type in 2024, followed by webinars. Better event measurement, maximizing the value of event data, and improving post-event attendee follow-up were the top three priorities. There were stark regional differences when it came to sustainability, with 79% of EMEA teams saying that this was a priority compared to just a third of North American teams. Only one in five organizations had integrated their primary event technology platform with their wider infrastructure, leading to data silos. 2025 Survey Overview While events continue to dominate marketing program spend in 2025, teams face an uncertain and challenging environment. Budgets remain under pressure, younger attendees want different experiences, and technology remains siloed. To thrive, teams must align event plans to business objectives and attendee needs and do a better job measuring event impact. The 2025 State Of B2B Events Survey will delve into key topics to help leaders understand the environment, including budgets, event mix planning, priority focus areas, and attitudes about AI. Confidentiality And Benefits Rest assured that all survey responses will be kept strictly confidential. The survey itself will take less than 15 minutes to complete, and all respondents will receive a complimentary copy of the Forrester reports, The Global State Of B2B Events, 2024: Marketers Continue To Ride A Wave Of Transformation and Reimagine B2B Events With AI. We will also share a summary of the findings when available in Q2. Join The Survey Your input is invaluable to us! If you’re involved in running B2B events, take the 2025 State Of B2B Events Survey before February 21. For any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Conrad Mills ([email protected]) or Hannah Jachim ([email protected]). source

Managed detection and response (MDR) — without a doubt — has successfully claimed the crown of all managed security services for making and keeping clients happy. Clients are far happier with MDR services than they ever were with legacy managed security service provider (MSSP)-style security services. MDR vendors have higher customer retention, wallet retention, growth, and margin compared to their MSSP predecessors. Now that MDR is an established market beginning to struggle with services bloat, the next set of choices for providers and customers is on the horizon (and in the pitch deck). That’s why it’s important for buyers and users of MDR services to understand the direction of the provider they work with and which services will deliver value in the near and long term. We recently published a new report, Choose Your Own MDR Adventure Amid Ever-Expanding Services, to guide security buyers through the available options and help them make informed investment decisions for their security services. For this research, we surveyed and spoke with MDR providers, buyers, and users to identify which services augmented MDR, which ones made sense to “sole source,” and which services were designed to please investors and shareholders … but not customers. We classified what service providers offer — or plan to offer — into three categories: Adjacent MDR services destined to disrupt Adjacent MDR services destined to distract Adjacent MDR services destined to self-destruct Read on to learn about each of these. Adjacent MDR Services Destined To Disrupt These services naturally augment MDR. Incentives align with these services by making the service delivery experience better for users and providers. Two of the services we put in this category are automation and exposure management. The benefits of automation are obvious: More automation equals more throughput, more bandwidth to focus on things that matter, and service delivery scale for providers. The key here is that providers are helping their clients automate, not just demanding that they automate. Exposure management gives much-needed context about the technology estate, detection surface, and attack surface for providers and their customers. Services in this area can help improve — and demonstrate — overall security posture across the service, driving real benefit for clients. Adjacent MDR Services Destined To Distract These services “fit” with MDR by seemingly producing value but, in reality, deliver less value due to scope limitations inherent in the service or in the relationship with the client. In other words, the MDR provider lacks enough visibility, context, information, and permission to drive meaningful change. It’s not that these services are bad, per se; it’s that they require significantly more effort from all parties involved to produce valuable outcomes. Two of the services we list in this category include risk dashboards and legacy vulnerability risk management. Risk dashboards — not posture dashboards — are the realization of video game-style microtransactions to cybersecurity to make the “line go up” (or down). These services give you an abstracted “risk score” based on your current environment that you can improve. This is often accomplished through purchasing additional features and functions of your existing products or services. These dashboards don’t so much track how much risk you’ve reduced as much as give a visual representation of how much your spending has increased with this provider. Vulnerability risk management (aka managed vulnerability scanning) is an MSSP oldie but goodie. It was often the next service purchased by MSSP clients one year into the relationship. The problem with this service is that confirmation of successfully executed scans is already available through vulnerability risk management platforms. Additionally, API integrations bring in scanning data to MDR providers without you paying more for a special service dedicated to it, especially when you don’t control patching. This is as close to the old-school “alert factory” services of MSSPs as you can get, unfortunately. Adjacent MDR Services Destined To Self-Destruct The final category includes services that fail to complement MDR in meaningful ways by trying to be all things to all clients. One challenge that MSSPs faced is they became a “portfolio vendor” of a bunch of services that didn’t have much to do with each other. Security teams run identity and access management technologies and manage firewalls. But doing one doesn’t necessarily make the other better. MSSPs went to market with this approach, and some MDR providers are now making that same mistake, creating a mishmash of semi-related services that fail to improve — or even coexist — with one another. Two of the services we identified in this category include virtual CISOs and security engineering (managed firewall). Virtual CISOs as an offering doesn’t make sense, as CISOs are a target buyer for MDR and most CISOs aren’t terribly interested in hiring their replacement. As a result, these services are primarily aimed at small organizations or those without a dedicated security team. In those scenarios, a virtual CISO may make sense. Otherwise, virtual CISOs lack all the things a CISO needs to be effective: constant communication, relationships, and a fundamental understanding of the political environment with senior leadership in a company. This service simply doesn’t make the core functions of detection and response better — and that’s why people buy MDR. Security engineering — aka managed firewall — does perform tasks such as blocking command-and-control communications to stop malware beaconing or data exfiltration. But the same can be done via integrations, APIs, and automation. Security doesn’t need to perform “managed change control” on these devices to accomplish those activities. In a world of Zero Trust, secure access service edge, and Zero Trust network access, you can work with providers that really understand networking to manage these devices. But those providers often don’t have expertise in detection and response, and if they do, their service delivery organizations aren’t integrated well enough to deliver meaningful improvements in each service. If you need a great router person, go to a telecom. If you need a great detection and response person, go to an MDR provider. For the full report and