Analyst Profile
Heather Ashton
Research Manager
Heather Ashton is Research Manager supporting IDC Manufacturing Insights and IDC Retail Insights. In this role, she is responsible for research and analysis of business and IT issues related to the supply chain and the four pillars – big data, cloud, mobile, and social business. Ms. Ashton also supports research in the asset- and brand-oriented value chains in manufacturing.
Ms. Ashton regularly contributes to the retail and manufacturing blogs on the IDC Manufacturing Insights Community (http://idc-insights-community.com/manufacturing and http://idc-insights-community.com/retail) and tweets (@HeatherAsh_IDC) about business and IT issues relevant to asset- and brand-oriented manufacturers, as well as social business, cloud, and more.
Prior to joining IDC Insights, Ms. Ashton spent more than 15 years in market research and the IT industry, most recently as Principal at AM Consulting Services, where she engaged in consulting projects with software vendors and market research firms on topics as diverse as cloud computing, business intelligence and analytics, social business, sustainability, and business process management. Prior to that, Ms. Ashton spent time as a Marketing Manager at start-up VPN service provider OpenReach, where she leveraged her analyst connections to build a solid library of customer references and case studies.
Ms. Ashton began her analyst career at Hurwitz Group, Inc. During her tenure at Hurwitz, as Director of E-Business Strategies, she helped launch and ran a research practice that focused on the emerging B2B and B2C enterprise software vendors.
Ms. Ashton graduated with high honors from Boston College where she earned a BA in English and was awarded the Scholar of the College distinction.
Research Authored by Heather Ashton
Newsletters 
