Internet Research Group - Research / Consulting

Research and Consulting Services

IRG Advisory Service

IRG’s Advisory Service is focused on companies that are involved in the Internet Infrastructure business. At the core of the service are IRG’s reports on cutting edge Internet Infrastructure topics. This service includes Strategic Positioning Sessions that combine the findings from our research with situational analysis. The goal of these sessions is to provide insight into the following questions:

	How do you give your customers an unfair competitive advantage?
	What are the high value applications which can be built on your platform?
	How does your offering align with your customers’ overall business and service goals?
	Who do your customers think are your natural competitors? How do these customers contrast you to these competitors?
	What is critical for the successful exploitation of your platform?
	What are the primary values that your platform offers to each of its primary markets?
	How big are these markets?

In addition, this annual service also includes support for relevant strategic, technology and market positioning questions on an un-metered basis.

Product Launch Advisory Service

The Product Launch Advisory Service is aimed at helping marketing and product teams answer the question: "How can we best position our products in the minds of the key decision-makers?" This process revolves around a 1/2 day strategy session where we work jointly with your team to develop and improve the market positioning. During this session, we work to get everything laid out in front of the team so that we can jointly discuss it: We focus on the position messages and the effect it may have on customers, press and analysts. In this session, we typically target these key areas:

	Review the current market conditions.
	Identify the target customers.
	Determine the key value propositions.
	Understand the product and technology roadmap.
	Identify competitive threats and partnering opportunities.

After the session we follow up with two written reports:

	A report summarizing our strategic recommendations.
	A Market Analyst Report (4 pages) identifying the importance of this category for customers within the targeted space and an assessment of the strengths of your offering. This document is intended for external distribution to customers, channel partners, press and analysts to help build out the relevance of the category and your participation within it.

Product Positioning Advisory Service

With so many vendors competing for the same position within a customer’s mind, it is hard for even the biggest companies go clearly get and keep a market position. Technology changes continue to quickly re-arrange product categories and re-arrange value propositions. Yesterday’s high performance solution is tomorrow’s legacy system. Marketers continue to ask: How can we build a competitive advantage? What is our value proposition? Where are the biggest customers? Who will buy in volume? How can we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the market?

Answering these questions requires a skillful blend of market analysis with customer input. It’s not enough to understand the product and services landscape. Input from the most important customers – those customers that have the most to gain by quickly adopting new technology and improving their business position. Internet Research Group is skilled at combining consultative, interview based research with industry market analysis to develop and refine the positioning process.

The objectives of the Product and Positioning Advisory Service are:

	Develop strategic positioning to establish leadership position the most valued customer segments,
	Create a market segmentation analysis that combines the strongest market opportunities and the strongest value propositions and
	Quantify the market opportunity

IRG’s Product Positioning Advisory Service is a premium, interview based consulting service designed for identifying the target market, segment the market and position in the minds of the most important and influential prospective customers. This service begins with conducting an on site situation analysis then continues by developing the research questions, identifying early adopters that can understand both the potential technology and the motivations for deployment and then conducting interviews. The findings from these interviews are then combined with our market research to produce actionable positioning and strategic recommendations.

If you would like more information on how Internet Research Group can assist your company with strategic positioning, contact John Katsaros (jkatsaros@irg-intl.com 650-949-3256).