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Melinda-Carol Ballou

Program Director, Application Life-Cycle Management & Executive Strategies

Melinda-Carol Ballou serves as Program Director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research. In this role, Ms. Ballou provides thought leadership, expert opinion, research, and analysis through comprehensive research on application life-cycle management (ALM), with specific focus on software life-cycle process configuration and management, software quality, and IT governance software. Ms. Ballou also offers competitive intelligence and consulting on key aspects of the ALM market to service providers, investment firms, and G2000 end-user companies.

Ms. Ballou's research is published principally within IDC's Application Life-cycle Management (ALM) and Industry Insights' IT Executive Strategies (ITEx)service. In addition, she provides special support through a range of custom consulting projects and multiclient research programs.

Ms. Ballou is working collaboratively with other teams at IDC to create IDC's project and portfolio research (PPM) in the context of ALM topics. She is also focusing on ways in which ALM must evolve to support services-oriented development and composite applications. For the ITEx service, Ms. Ballou collaborates with colleagues targeting IT governance as it relates to IT portfolio management, encompassing IT PPM, IT asset and financial management to research and support end-user technology decision-making, organizational and process strategies.

Ms. Ballou comes to IDC with over 18 years of extensive experience in IT research and analysis. Prior to joining IDC, Ms Ballou founded Ballou IT Strategies, an independent consulting company that offered analysis of PPM and ALM, as well as supporting collateral to G2000 end-user clients and software providers. Ms. Ballou also served as Senior Program Director at META Group, and during her eleven years with META successfully established and evolved the software development life-cycle management and project and portfolio management research practices. Ms. Ballou has also held various editorial positions, including Senior Writer/Senior Editor for ComputerWorld, and Staff Writer/Senior Editor for Digital Review.

Ms. Ballou holds a Masters Degree in Professional Writing from MIU, and a BA from Williams College in Philosophy and Music.

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Research Authored by Melinda-Carol Ballou

Early Uptake of Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shows Combined Benefits with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Collaboration and New Product Breadth
Melinda-Carol Ballou, Al Hilwa
Aug 2010 - Doc # lcUS22458110      IDC Link
The second quarter of this calendar year packed a punch of new product announcements for Microsoft. In a two month period from April 12 to June 12, Microsoft launched Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Microsoft Silve ...
Worldwide Public Application Development and Deployment as a Service: 2010–2014 Forecast
Stephen D. Hendrick, Melinda-Carol Ballou, Maureen Fleming, Al Hilwa, Carl W. Olofson
Aug 2010 - Doc # 224052      Market Analysis
This IDC study provides a sizing of the worldwide public application development and deployment as a service (ADDaaS) market from 2005 through 2009 and a 2010–2014 forecast for this market. Historical and forecast revenue data is shown f ...
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SaaS IT PPM and PPM Vendor Daptiv Better Positioned via Parallax Acquisition
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Jul 2010 - Doc # lcUS22443010      IDC Link
Exemplifying ongoing market consolidation, Daptiv, a project and portfolio management (PPM) and IT PPM vendor based in Seattle, Washington, was acquired earlier this week by Parallax Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Laguna Hills, ...
Quest Targets Private Clouds with Surgient Acquisition
Mary Johnston Turner, Melinda-Carol Ballou
Jul 2010 - Doc # lcUS22441410      IDC Link
Quest Software's acquisition of automation software provider Surgient is an important addition to Quest's rapidly growing data center management portfolio. Although best known for its Windows management software and older database managemen ...
IDC MarketScape: Global Testing Services, 2010 Vendor Analysis
Rona Shuchat, Mukesh Dialani, Melinda-Carol Ballou
Jul 2010 - Doc # 223954      Competitive Analysis
This IDC study represents a vendor assessment of the global testing services landscape through the IDC MarketScape model. This assessment analyzes both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that clarify success in the business str ...
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Worldwide Automated Software Quality 2009 Vendor Shares
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Jun 2010 - Doc # 223893      Competitive Analysis
This IDC study provides an analysis of vendor share for the automated software quality (ASQ) market during 2009. This IDC study discusses IDC's automated software quality vendor share assessment in a market that experienced losses of 5.6 ...
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Worldwide Software Configuration Management 2009 Vendor Shares
Melinda-Carol Ballou
Jun 2010 - Doc # 223878      Competitive Analysis
This IDC study provides a 2009 vendor share analysis of the software configuration management (SCM) market. Flat and declining revenue from leading vendors resulting from the difficult economy led to a revenue decline of 2.7%. This impac ...
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IBM Continues to Build Out Software Strategy with Addition of Web Analytics Vendor Coremetrics
Mary Wardley, Melinda-Carol Ballou
Jun 2010 - Doc # lcUS22390410      IDC Link
On June 15, 2010, IBM added yet another company to its growing mix of software capabilities by announcing its intent to purchase Web analytics and marketing automation vendor Coremetrics. This is one more company that is being added to IBM’ ...
Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2010–2014 Forecast
Frank Gens, Robert P. Mahowald, Richard L. Villars, John F. Gantz, Henry D. Morris, Stephen D. Hendrick, Mary Johnston Turner, Rona Shuchat, Melinda-Carol Ballou, Matthew Eastwood, Chris Morris, Satoshi Matsumoto, Chris Ingle, David Bradshaw, Lidice Fernandez, Nigel Wallis, Vladimír Kroa
Jun 2010 - Doc # 223549      Market Analysis
This IDC study forecasts revenue growth from public IT cloud services through 2014, segmented by five functional categories within eight regions/countries. The forecast data, driven by IDC's key assumptions for public IT cloud services d ...
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SAPPHIRE NOW 2010: SAP Broadens Offerings and Sets Out a Road Map for an In-Memory Future
Henry D. Morris, Bo Lykkegaard, Mary Wardley, Robert Parker, Ruediger Spies, Stephen D. Drake, Praveen Sengar, Gard Little, Kimberly Knickle, Michael Fauscette, Alan Tong, Ricardo Villate, Brian McDonough, Mariana Zamoszczyk, Melinda-Carol Ballou, Raymond Boggs
Jun 2010 - Doc # 223698      Vendor Profile
This IDC Vendor Profile presents a review of SAP's user conference, SAPPHIRE NOW 2010. purchase document
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