Reports CTRM Vendor Perceptions 2018 | Page 3

INTRODUCTION
The 2018 Commodity Technology Advisory’s vendor perception study was conducted to es-
tablish end-user and market influencer perceptions of the CTRM vendors to determine market
leadership perceptions as well as buying criteria, demand levels, and brand awareness of the
different vendors. The research comprised of a comprehensive set of questions that end users
and others (including industry consultants but excluding vendor personnel) were invited to an-
swer as an internet survey. The survey was open for responses between May 21st and Septem-
ber 30th, 2018 and collected some 195 responses.
The survey was promoted in several ways to attract
bone fide respondents. ComTech Advisory used email
notification, Linkedin posts, blog articles, banner ad-
vertising and verbal requests to encourage responses.
CTRM vendors and service providers also promoted the
survey of their own accord. Unfortunately, the EU’s new
GDPR legislation had a significant impact on our ability
to use email to request responses and also forced us to
add a privacy notice to the survey essentially meaning
that to respond, respondents had to opt in to take the
survey. Some 10% opted out with a further unknown
number who did not take the survey due to the priva-
cy notice. Consequently, the number of responses is
slightly down on 2016 (230 responses) and a number
of responses were left blank by respondents after read-
ing the privacy notice.
ComTech were extremely rigorous in validating the re-
sponses and in the end, utilized only 95 (49%) of them
in the results presented below. We found that quite a
few responses were blank after the EU privacy notice
and assume that the notice caused the potential re-
spondent to discontinue with the survey. We also reject-
ed a number of obviously vendor submitted responses
utilizing alternate email addresses. Reasons for reject-
ing responses included;
1. The respondent worked for a vendor. Despite in-
structions to discourage vendor employee respons-
es, ComTech eliminated several such responses.
These included responses that were obviously by
vendor staff using a vendor email address and also
those that were apparently vendor responses using
a private email or alternate address,
2. Incomplete responses were eliminated where the
respondent had answered less than 50% of the
questions,
3. Duplicate responses were eliminated,
4. Finally, suspicious responses were eliminated.
These included those with fictitious email address-
es, names or company names, or those lacking
such validation data.
The results presented and discussed in this report were
obtained using the 95 responses that we deemed to be
valid. This pool of valid respondents reflected 60% end
users and 40% influencers.
Vendor perceptions are interesting both in terms of
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