InformationWeek Reports: Now Free

How commonplace is network-based data loss prevention software? Are your peers using on-premises email archiving or moving to SaaS/hosted alternatives? Are enterprise search products more commonly used this year than last? While no one bases technology adoption plans purely on what their peers are doing, it's useful to recognize which techs are mainstream and which are more esoteric. Likewise, it's good to know if the technology you're pursuing is ascendant or descendant with your peers--and why.

InformationWeek Analytics has been dedicated to providing enterprise IT with just that kind of data on technology adoption, along with expert guidance on where and how to deploy, buyer's guides to a variety of product categories, and much more. Our writers are expert practitioners, our surveys accurately capture trends--it's everything you could want in a service aimed at providing actionable information to make your IT organization successful. Except for one thing: We make you pay for access to all that data.

You Voted, We Listened

Now, we've fixed that problem, too. We've changed the name of InformationWeek Analytics to InformationWeek Reports and made the service free to registered users. In the process of doing that, we learned a lesson about just how valuable and accurate our own data can be. In 2009 and again this year, we fielded a study that sought to determine what content you value enough to pony up for, and of course, what business models work best in delivering that content to you. Back in 2009, at the depth of the recession, we weren't too surprised to learn that you weren't really willing to pay for much.

[Check out our new group of free research reports. See our InformationWeek Buyer's Guide on mobile device management.]

We use a 1-to-5 scale for questions of this type and have found that 3.0 is a good demarcation between "probably will" and "probably won't." While the services we're offering--tutorials, expert peer analysis, industry-expert analysis, and research--all came up high on the list of content that was worth paying for, none of them came close to the 3.0 mark (all registered 2.5 or 2.4 in 2009). When we put the survey out again this year, with a better economy and most IT pros reporting a rosier picture for spending, we were hopeful we'd see more willingness to pay. Nope. The numbers were almost identical to 2009 (just one item moved up, from 2.5 to 2.6).

We're strong believers in our own data, so free it is. Just sign up and you'll have access to hundreds of research reports and hundreds of shorter articles on everything from cloud computing to mobility, security, IT business issues, and more. Want to know how your peers rate Android compared with Apple's IOS? We've got that. Thinking about IPv6? We have a report for you. Worrying about identity management? Got it covered. Curious about how your salary stacks up against what your peers make? Take a look at our salary survey. You get the idea.

Oh, and how commonplace is network-based data loss prevention software? Just 3% of organizations have it deployed. Are your peers using on-premises email archiving or SaaS/hosted alternatives? Both, with the split at 82% for on-premises systems, 43% for SaaS. Are enterprise search products being used more this year than last? They're slightly less common, down to 64% usage compared with 68% last year. Find these results and a lot more in our Enterprise Content Management report, which is now free to registered users.

Art Wittmann is director of InformationWeek Reports, a portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports. You can write to him at [email protected].