Computer Weekly Buyer's Guide feature list 2022
Here is our 2022 schedule of up-and-coming in-depth articles that will cover carefully selected topics to help IT leaders select the right technology for their organisation
Computer Weekly Buyer’s Guides map the IT buying cycle of our readership onto relevant editorial that will inform and educate readers and help them in making the right buying decision.
On a three-week cycle, the publication runs a series of articles focused on a particular category of software/hardware/IT service. Articles appear in the features section of the Computer Weekly ezine, which can be downloaded as a PDF or viewed as an SEO-optimised Buyer’s Guide page on the Computer Weekly website.
The Buyer’s Guide PDF downloads point readers to the online Buyer’s Guide, where they will be able to access all the articles in one place, along with additional content, such as blog posts and related articles.
The editorial team updates the Buyer’s Guide schedule on a quarterly basis to ensure the chosen technologies are topical and to respond to short-term commercial opportunities.
Buyer’s Guides comprise three separate features, which combine to become a standalone piece of evergreen content that readers can refer back to.
Each part includes a written article, plus relevant background material, as well as exclusive online-only multimedia content and infographics.
Format of Computer Weekly Buyer’s Guides
Market overview
This is an introduction to the topic covered in the Buyer’s Guide. The article will examine the nature of a given software/hardware/IT services product category, look at where it fits in the business, why users need it and which companies sell products in this category.
Analyst perspective
Here, Computer Weekly invites leading IT analysts to submit relevant research that can help readers narrow down product choices with a shortlist of products they may wish to investigate further.
Case study
At this stage in the buying cycle, the reader has a shortlist and may have given his/her technical people a brief to research the products in more detail, such as by following up customer references from the supplier. Computer Weekly supports this research with an in-depth case study, selected for its uniqueness, which illustrates best practices, technical and business drivers, lessons learnt and future plans of a successful IT project using one of the products shortlisted.
Please email Cliff Saran for further details.
The proposed schedule for H1 2022 is as follows:
Hybrid cloud storage
Jan 11 - Jan 31
Whether it is to meet regulatory compliance or to support applications that need to have processing as close as possible to where data is collected and stored, many IT leaders believe their storage needs will be met through a hybrid approach using public cloud and on-premise systems. We explore the business drivers and architectural decisions that go into hybrid cloud storage.
Data integration
Feb 01 - Feb 21
The most successful organisations are the ones that can pull together internal, external and real time data sources to make decisions in a timely fashion to achieve a positive business outcome. We look at how businesses solve their data integration challenges.
Training and education programmes/tools
Feb 22 - Mar 14
In-house or outsourced? What makes a good training programme, and what questions should buyers ask when procuring training-as-a-service?
Cloud enterprise applications
Mar 15 - Apr 4
In this series of articles we investigate how organisations use best of breed software as a service products to fill gaps in their enterprise application strategy and deliver a modern approach to ERP.
Edge datacentres
Apr 5 - 02 May
The public cloud has led to a shift away from centralised datacentre computing. But while organisations may wish to focus on cloud-native and cloud-first strategies, many need to put workloads at the edge. We discuss how edge datacentres work in cloud-native businesses.
Communications-as-a-service
May 03 - May 23
To gain a business edge, organisations are increasingly integrating voice, video, chat and messaging as consumption-based services, which can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. From a management perspective, these services aim to deliver measurable enhanced communications experiences for customers and employees. There is also the new trend of firms bringing non-person communication from sources such as M2M and IOT managed delivered on a CaaS basis. We look at how these services are being used.
The circular economy
May 24 - Jun 13
Given that among the roles of IT admins is to manage the lifecycle of equipment, they are well placed to provide the data needed to recycle equipment via the circular economy. We explore how businesses are using the circular economy for IT equipment to reduce their carbon footprint.
Supply chain security
Jun 14 - Jul 04
In a highly connected world, businesses try to streamline the connectivity between business partners. These connections are only as secure as the weakest link. Increasingly, hackers are targeting these weaknesses to attack major corporations.
Cyber insurance
Jul 5 - Jul 25
In this series we explore what options are available to help CISOs financially in the event of a major cyber attack on their organisation. What is the level of help available and what must organisations put in place to meet the minimum level of IT security, auditing and training required by the businesses underwriting cyber insurance?
Customer and Employee experience management
Jul 26 - Aug 15
With the cost of living getting higher and higher, the post Covid-19 world looks very different to what experts predicted would happen. We look at how organisations are developing new customer and employee experience strategies to cope with the challenges people face in these difficult times and the role enterprise IT plays in supporting them.
Satellite broadband
Aug 16 - Sep 12
We look at the development and deployments of satellite internet services to enable organisations to use remote IoT in places that lack mobile connectivity.
AI/ML and RPA
Sep 13 - Oct 4
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are powering intelligent automation. We look at how the market for these tools is evolving, how products build on data-driven RPA and how intelligent bots are being deployed to streamline business processes.
API Management
Oct 5- Oct 24
In this series we explore how far organisations have gone along the route to making more of their systems available as application programming interfaces. Where have these APIs been successful? What barriers have organisations faced and how well are external APIs supported?
Financial Analytics for planning
Oct 25 - Nov 14
In this series of articles we focus on software that is used for financial budget analysis, planning and modelling. These require heavy numbers-crunching and there are now new tools emerging that can apply AI and robotic process automation to the business processes running in the finance function of businesses.
Anti-ransomware
Nov 15 to Dec 5
Beyond maintaining a strong IT security posture that includes end-to-end encryption, a comprehensive business continuity plan and regular integrity tests of backups, there is a growing number of products and cloud-based services offering anti-ransomware protection. We look at what is available.
Data visualisation
Dec 6 to Dec 31
Enterprise business intelligence is only useful if it can deliver meaningful and actionable insights. As organisations amass greater volumes of structured and unstructured data, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sense of what is really going on and challenging to put all of this information into context. This is driving demand for advanced data visualisation tools and AI techniques that are designed to help users make sense of the data in their organisations.
