Archive for February, 2012

A special link was sent to our Blog readers asking them to take the 2012 EMF Survey of Embedded Developers so that we could compare their responses with respondents from the embedded industry to questions regarding where developers get their most trusted information and other factors in their decision making process.

This is a brief summary – a more detailed paper will be developed later.

First we asked the following important question: Which of the following resources do you find to be the most useful for researching the purchase of RTOSes or compilers, simulation tools, requirements management tools, product management and program management tools for your designs?

The responses were:

	Industry	Blog Readers
Co-workers	57.3%	52.7%
Industry publications	47.2%	52.7%
Vendors’ Web sites	42.3%	41.8%
White papers	42.3%	52.7%
Online forums	39.9%	56.4%
Conferences	37.1%	25.5%
Webinars	32.7%	21.8%
Vendors’ sales representatives	16.5%	7.3%
Wiki blogs	16.1%	23.6%
Other	2.8%	1.8%

 

Not surprisingly, online forums, white papers, industry pubs and co-workers were the leading source of information for our Blog readers, while vendor’s websites replaced online forums among industry respondents.

Second, we asked the following important question: In general, what characteristics are the most important to you in buying embedded products and tools?

The responses were:

	Industry	Blog Readers
Price/cost/value of product	69.1%	73.2%
Ease of use of product	61.4%	58.9%
Quality and reliability of products	57.7%	60.7%
Compatibility of products	41.5%	35.7%
Technical support	37.8%	48.2%
Speed/performance of products	28.0%	21.4%
Reputation of supplier/vendor	16.7%	12.5%
Leading edge technology	15.9%	16.1%
Sales service and support	8.9%	7.1%
Personal trusted relationship to rep or support people	8.1%	7.1%
Ease of dealing with vendors’ processes	6.5%	1.8%
Other	1.6%	0.0%

 

The responses were similar with our Blog readers’ emphasizing technical support and the quality and reliability of products.

The third question was: As Cloud Computing and Machine to Machine computing become prevalent, how important is cloud enabled to your future embedded products purchases?

		Industry	Blog     Readers
	Critical	3.2%	8.9%
	Very important	7.3%	8.9%
	Somewhat important	19.4%	21.4%
	Not very important	23.0%	23.2%
	Not at all important	43.1%	35.7%
	Responsibility of another vendor	4.0%	1.8%

 

EMF believes that in the future Cloud computing will usher in a new and large market for embedded designs and technologies, it seems that our readers are far ahead of the industry in recognizing its importance.

The fourth question was: How important is brand awareness (prior knowledge of the reputation and quality of the brand or company) in your selection of an embedded product or tool?

 

The responses were basically the same – brand awareness is important.

In a paper to be developed later, we will look at branding issues in which we compare responses from developers that are aware of a vendor with those of developers that aren’t familiar with a vendor (such considerations as ranking on search engine, geographic location, and accessibility to a sales person and references from current customers).

These data can be crucial to vendor’s sales efforts.

For those of you that have sales or marketing responsibilities and would like to gain such insight, please contact me at jerry@embeddedforecast.com  (508-881-1850) and I’ll be glad to chat with you.