Meredith Whalen

Meredith is responsible for the research, consulting and marketing of IDC's IT Executive Programs and IDC's Insights business units which include IDC Energy Insights, IDC Financial Insights, IDC Government Insights, IDC Health Insights, IDC Manufacturing Insights, and IDC Retail Insights. Additionally, she is the research leader for IDC's Global Technology and Industry Research Organization.

Ms. Whalen leads IDC’s end-user focused research, which includes IDC's IT Executive Programs, a family of research programs intended to help time constrained IT executives make more effective technology decisions. In this capacity she designs research strategies, builds and oversees analyst and management teams, and leverages IDC’s global organization to uniquely position IDC Insights. Ms. Whalen and her team of analysts advise end-user organizations and IT vendors on the critical business initiatives of industries and the role IT will play in addressing them. She tweets about such topics at twitter.com/meredithwhalen. In addition, Ms. Whalen contributes to the Insights blogs in the IDC Insights Community (http://idc-insights-community.com).

Among Ms. Whalen’s recent research initiatives is identifying the future role of technology in an intelligent economy. As part of this research, Ms. Whalen has quantified the impact of government stimulus funding on technology investments. She also closely monitors IT budgets and IT investment priorities. Additionally, she advises technology suppliers on best practices in organizing and selling to industry, including effective go-to-market strategies.

Prior to IDC's Vertical Research Group, Ms. Whalen was a Vice President with IDC's Services Research Group. She initiated IDC's coverage of application service providers (ASPs). She also created IDC's first global view of business process outsourcing services and designed the Services Group's global research process that ensures consistency in market taxonomies, research architecture, and forecasting.

Ms. Whalen started her career in end-user business consulting, advising clients on mid-range systems. She holds a B.A. with honors from Wellesley College and an M.B.A. with honors with from Babson's F.W. Olin Graduate School of Management.