EMA Top 3 Product Selection Process

How It Works

EMA Top 3 - How We Obtain and Triangulate Customer and Product Data
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EMA Top 3 for Serverless Technologies - How We Review and Test
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EMA Top 3 Product Selection - Is It Fair?
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Q&A

Q: What are the criteria for EMA selecting Top 3 vendors?

A: We select these vendors based on the amount of customer value they bring to the table. This means that they need to enable enterprise customers to release software faster, cheaper, and at higher quality, while at the same time bringing down operations cost and enabling staff experimentation. These criteria fit with our concept of the Digital Attacker. 

Q: Drilling down one level from the requirements of a Digital Attacker, how do the EMA Top 3 evaluation criteria break down actually.

A: Here is our basic "checklist" of evaluation criteria:
1) Most importantly: How well does the product address the empirically determined customer pain points.

2) In case of the AI report the next question for us was: Can we explain and quantify the added value introduced through leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning. It is crucial for this to go beyond vague vendor explanations that focus on the "coolness" of the AI term today. Core evaluation rule: Only concrete and verifiable examples move the needle. 

3) How hard and expensive is the implementation, considering enterprise customers' existing architecture, tooling, and staff. For example, if an AI product can only produce results if customers replace their entire infrastructure, tooling and staff, the tool will not make the EMA Top 3 listing. 

4) WYSIWYG (specific to AI): This criteria is specific to the AI report, as EMA believes that the next big frontier in AI is to drastically broaden the use of AI solutions. We compare this to the time when the first HTML editors came out and building a website stopped being reserved for a few selected geeks. For more detail, please read this post on my EMA blog. 

Q: How do you obtain your data?
A: We obtain market data through primary end user research. This research data focuses on finding out granular detail in terms of customer pain points and how individual vendors are perceived.
We obtain product data through customer conversations, demos, surveys, briefings, and primary experimentation. 

Q: Can vendors influence the report results?
A: No. Vendors are simply notified of their award. Vendors are not aware of any award details before until the report content is complete.