Forrester Research, Inc.
Business Overview: Forrester Research, Inc. (NASDAQ: FORR)
Executive Summary
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research and advisory firm headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in July 1983 by George F. Colony, who remains chairman and CEO. Forrester sells subscription research, consulting, and events to business, technology, customer-experience, and marketing leaders at large global enterprises, built around its flagship Forrester Decisions subscription platform (roughly 80% of contract value).
The company has grown historically through acquisitions — including Giga Information Group (2003), JupiterResearch (2008), and SiriusDecisions (2019) — but has faced a sustained, multi-year revenue decline: full-year revenue fell from $480.8 million in 2023 to $432.5 million in 2024 and further to roughly $397 million in 2025, alongside a reported 2025 net loss of approximately $119 million.
Why it matters: Forrester is the clearest direct, named competitor to industry leader Gartner in the technology-research and advisory space, but it is now navigating an existential-feeling disruption — free/cheap generative-AI tools competing directly with paid research subscriptions — forcing the company to restructure (an 8% workforce reduction in February 2026), exit strategy consulting, and build its own "Forrester AI" product in an attempt to defend its subscription base.
1. Core Business Model & How They Work
Forrester's business runs on what it calls a "CV growth engine": the company sells annual or multiyear subscriptions measured in contract value (CV) — its key internal metric — and reinvests that recurring revenue into analyst research, product development, sales capacity, and selective acquisitions to keep clients renewing. Subscription clients get ongoing access to published research plus analyst guidance (calls, inquiries, briefings); a subset of those clients also buy project-based consulting engagements (maturity assessments, strategy development, vendor selection support) and attend Forrester's events. Clients who buy consulting or attend events renew their core subscription CV at meaningfully higher rates than subscription-only clients, making consulting and events as much a retention tool as a standalone revenue line.
Analyst Research & Data Collection ➡️ Published Research + "Forrester Decisions" Subscription
(surveys, vendor briefings, (~80% of contract value)
client inquiries) ➡️
Client Renewal (Contract Value, "CV")
➡️
Cross-sell: Consulting Engagements | Events Attendance
(both correlate with higher subscription renewal)
➡️
Reinvestment in Analysts, Product, Sales, M&A2. Business Segments
Forrester Research, Inc.
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Research Consulting Events
(~73% of 2024 revenue) (~22% of 2024 revenue) (~4% of 2024 revenue)(2024 revenue: Research $316.7M, Consulting $97.3M, Events $18.5M, of $432.5M total)
Research is the core subscription business, anchored by the Forrester Decisions platform, and the company's primary growth and retention lever. Consulting monetizes analyst expertise on a project basis and — per the company's own framing — functions partly as a retention mechanism for subscription clients. Events (regional conferences across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific) is the smallest segment but, like consulting, is correlated with higher subscription renewal rates; the company announced in 2025–2026 that it is overhauling its events business and exiting strategy consulting as part of a broader restructuring.
3. Key Offerings
| Offering | Category | Purpose | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forrester Decisions | Research subscription | Role-based research, data, and analyst guidance platform | ~80% of total contract value; the core retained revenue base |
| Analyst inquiry & briefings | Research subscription | Direct access to analysts for client-specific questions | Differentiates subscription from free published content |
| Consulting engagements | Consulting | Maturity assessments, strategy development, vendor selection | Higher-touch, higher-margin-potential, and a proven retention driver |
| Regional events | Events | In-person/virtual conferences in North America, Europe, APAC | Relationship-building and lead generation; smallest but highest renewal-correlation segment |
| Forrester AI | New product (2025–2026) | A "private," proprietary-data-and-expert-validated AI research assistant, positioned against public LLMs | Booked over $5 million since September 2025 and reportedly cut sales cycles nearly in half — the company's direct response to AI disruption risk |
4. Competitive Landscape
- Direct competitor: Gartner — the dominant player in IT research and advisory, named explicitly as Forrester's primary direct competitor and significantly larger by revenue.
- Other direct competitors: marketing and consulting agencies, general business-strategy consulting firms, and survey-based market research firms.
- Indirect competitors: clients' own internal strategy/planning staff, trade publishers, free internet sources (explicitly including Google), and — increasingly — generative AI services that can answer questions research subscriptions used to be needed for.
Broad enterprise-technology research scope
|
Gartner (larger scale,
broader category coverage)
Forrester (narrower but
deep in CX/marketing/tech)
|
---------------------------------+---------------------------------
High-touch / paid Self-serve / free
|
Marketing & strategy consulting firms Internal client planning teams
| Google / public search
Generative AI assistantsForrester's named-competitor set is narrower than most companies in this universe — it is effectively a two-horse race with Gartner at the high end, with the far larger and more diffuse threat coming from indirect, often free substitutes (AI assistants, search) rather than from a long tail of paid rivals.
5. Strategic Strengths & Risks
Strengths (Moat Sources)
- Decades of proprietary research and brand recognition: The "Forrester Wave" vendor-evaluation framework and 40+ years of published research and client relationships create switching friction and brand trust that a new entrant cannot replicate quickly.
- Multiyear contract base: 72% of 2025 contract value is on multiyear deals, giving some revenue visibility even through the downturn.
- Cross-sell retention effect: Clients who buy consulting or attend events renew subscriptions at demonstrably higher rates, a structural lever the company can keep pulling.
- Early proprietary-AI positioning: Forrester AI, built on the company's own validated data rather than general web content, is an attempt to convert the company's core asset (curated research) into a defensible AI product rather than simply being disrupted by one.
Risks
- Structural AI disruption to the core subscription model: Free or low-cost generative AI tools increasingly substitute for the kind of synthesized research Forrester has historically sold, a dynamic the company's own commentary identifies as a named indirect competitive threat.
- Sustained, multi-year revenue decline: Revenue fell from $480.8 million (2023) to $432.5 million (2024) to roughly $397 million (2025) — three consecutive down years — with a reported 2025 net loss of approximately $119 million.
- Restructuring execution risk: An 8% workforce reduction (February 2026, ~$13.5–14.0 million in charges), exit from strategy consulting, and an events-business overhaul all carry execution risk and could further strain client relationships during the transition.
- Scale disadvantage versus Gartner: Forrester is meaningfully smaller than its primary direct competitor, limiting its ability to match Gartner's category breadth and go-to-market scale.
6. Financial Overview
| Metric | Figure | Strategic Context |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue (2024) | $432.5 million, down 10% YoY | Third consecutive year of decline, reflecting both macro budget pressure and emerging AI substitution |
| Revenue (2025) | ~$397 million, down ~8% YoY | Decline continued despite reported improvement in client retention |
| Segment mix (2024) | Research $316.7M / Consulting $97.3M / Events $18.5M | Research remains the core; consulting and events are retention tools as much as revenue lines |
| Net result (2025) | Net loss of ~$119 million | Reflects restructuring/impairment-type charges on top of revenue decline |
| Multiyear contract mix (2025) | 72% of contract value | A rare bright spot — longer-duration commitments cushion the revenue slide |
| Client base | 1,900+ client companies (2024); no client over 3% of revenue | Highly diversified customer base limits single-client risk even as aggregate demand softens |
7. Summary Conclusion
Forrester's moat is real but narrower than it once was: decades of proprietary research, a recognized brand (the Forrester Wave), and a cross-sell dynamic that measurably lifts retention give it a defensible, if second-place, position behind Gartner in enterprise technology and CX research. The company's biggest forward risk is not a traditional competitor but a structural one — generative AI tools eroding the value proposition of paid research subscriptions — and management's response (Forrester AI, workforce reductions, exiting strategy consulting, overhauling events) amounts to a real-time test of whether Forrester's curated, validated research can be repackaged into an AI-era product faster than clients abandon the subscription model altogether. Three straight years of revenue decline and a sizable 2025 net loss suggest that test is still very much in progress, not yet won.