Vikram Rathnam is Research Director for Software Lifecycle Engineering at The Futurum Group. His coverage follows the software lifecycle as AI agents take on more of the work: development, testing, security, operations, platform engineering, observability, the control planes that govern agents, and the open standards that let them interoperate. He studies who owns the outcome when an agent acts and what evidence shows whether the agent did what it was supposed to do.
He came to analyst work from the vendor side. Over 24 years, he worked first as an engineer, including at Silicon Labs, and later in product and partner strategy at Cisco, Secureworks, Dell, and CMIT Solutions. Across those roles, he managed B2B cybersecurity, IoT, and AI products and worked extensively with partner and channel ecosystems. At CMIT Solutions, he led product strategy across a franchise network of 180 independently owned locations. Franchisees ranged from shops with dedicated technical teams to two-person offices.
He tests vendor positioning against the technology, the practitioner who has to adopt it, and the partner who has to sell it. Vendors briefing him get an analyst who has participated in roadmap reviews, pricing debates, and channel enablement meetings and can identify where a strategy will work and where it will fail.
The vision behind everything in Futurum’s Custom Research practice is this: research should show you what is happening, what comes next, and what to do about it. It should be personal to each audience, easy for people to grasp, and structured so LLMs can reason over it accurately. And it should be fast and turnkey; you want answers now, not another project to carry for quarters.
Whether you are defining business, channel, or go-to-market strategy; evaluating vendors or justifying ROI; or commissioning research to fill an emerging market need, we have your back, with a program that answers your questions with the objectivity and credibility to drive real decisions.
To do it, we bring unmatched data to bear: Futurum research, surveys, and market projections; validated market feeds; ETR’s 15 years of insight from 10,000 technology decision-makers; G2’s buyer and user data; and what our analysts hear every day. Add leading primary collection, from AI-moderated voice interviews to surveys and analyst-led interviews, all turnkey, and every project comes out credible, nuanced, and actionable.
And we don’t just drop the results in your lap. For internal work, we provide analyst-led sessions, interactive dashboards, and a range of formats. For market-facing work, Futurum delivers turnkey activation and amplification that actually gets seen, by people and by LLMs, through our media and share of voice. This is research that moves decisions and markets.
We will meet you wherever you are, from a fast-turn brief to a multi-year program, and shape the work to your goals, timeline, and budget. The right program for your moment.
If any of this is useful, I would love to talk.
VP, Custom Research · The Futurum Group
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