For each Map, Coldago collects lots of data during the previous 12 months meeting vendors, end-users and partners, scrutinizing product announcements, success stories and partnerships. Each vendor receives, if needed, a dedicated matrix to fill covering the product line and related features aligned with the topic, business and operations, users and installed base. The team then digests, segments, groups and normalizes all this data to make comparison and ranking easier.

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We consider and rank companies not products and we include all products related to the specific Map for each vendor we study. In other words, we chose to not limit a vendor to one specific product among others and thus to face potential difficulties to justify this limit and one particular product. As an effect, a vendor could be represented by one product if it plays in the category with that single product but also by a line of products if several of them belong to the domain. A product is considered in the matrix if it exists for at least 6 months at the date of the matrix. No minimum age is mandatory for any company to be listed in the report but it is required that companies already have clients in production. It means that a small install base is a must to illustrate some traction. We also limit our selection of companies from our own decision. Small medium business and other entry-level categories are avoided.

The vendor filled matrix allows the analyst team to consider categories such as companies, business and strategy, product and technologies.

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• For companies, we pay attention to management, background and founding team, track record, successes and failures, years of existence, geo presence, number of employees, VC status (funding, total raised, number of rounds, VC names…), IPO, visibility and potential exits.

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• For business and strategy, dimensions related to business model, go to market, alliances, partners and oem, pricing model, revenue, various ratio, transactions, operating efficiency, use-cases, vertical and solutions approaches, references, end-users installed base and retention with repeat orders, competition replacement and uninstalls.

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• For product and technologies, key indicators are product/market fit, current release, evolution and roadmap, frequency of releases, IP and patents, product development agility, internal product design and architecture, new technology integration, standard adoption, positions and contributions, features, access methods, data protection and services, cloud integration and other options, performance, official benchmark participation with public results and visibility. Open source modules and integration of external components are also important as we pay attention to the real ownership of the technology. In other words, we value design, build and development by vendors vs. integration. Beyond data protection, data corruption, loss of integrity and regression impact vendors’ rankings if it had happened at users’ sites.

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With all this information collected, sorted and weighted, we inserted them in a series of formulas to obtain indexes to help us rank vendors. These secret sauce algorithms represent the core of the study coming from raw data to final positions and indexes, resulting in the Coldago Index and the Coldago Map.