Valona is a Forrester Wave Leader!

Celebrating our recognition

The report recognized Valona’s strategic vision and acknowledged that Valona “was using its own generative AI model to summarize information long before other vendors,” as well as our ongoing AI investments, with a focus on more vertical, functional, and use case-specific models and analyses.

We’re proud of this achievement; it’s a great note to close 2024 and fuels our motivation for new developments in 2025 (more on that later in the post). 

Here’s our analysis of why we believe we were named a leader and how the CMI software market has changed.

Why the Forrester Wave Report matters

Independent research firm Forrester executes the Forrester Wave^TM1 and evaluates 11 market and competitive intelligence (M&CI) platform providers based on 31 evaluation criteria, focused on current offering, strategy, and customer feedback.

We found the evaluation comprehensive; it included a detailed survey, a presentation and platform demo to analysts, and customer interviews. Participation gives us insights into our competitive landscape and the differences between platforms. In a competitive software market that’s evolving quickly, we value external assessments that support the comparison of offerings and vendors.

How the CMI software market has evolved

When navigating the complex world of global business intelligence, having the right tools can make all the difference. Forrester starts their Wave Report by stating that:

“M&CI platforms are becoming mission-critical to B2B organizations due to the pace of change and complexities of today’s business environment.”

We’ve seen this at Valona too, as there is growing interest in using the Valona platform for continuous market monitoring, global source coverage, and AI-powered search and analysis across business functions.

The adoption of generative AI tools has exploded. Valona was the first among CMI platforms to launch our generative AI assistant VAL in 2023. Still, many other conversational AI tools have emerged since, and general-purpose genAI is evolving quickly. This is reflected in the Q4 2024 Forrester Wave, which had three different AI-related assessment criteria and more detailed technical questions.

Strengths that we believe set us apart

Forrester’s comprehensive evaluation looked at 31 critical criteria, and Valona received the highest scores possible in 17 of them.

Some of the Wave criteria we’d like to highlight:

1. Advanced Generative AI

This assessment criterion is about a platform’s capabilities in utilizing generative AI to summarize content, analyze multiple news articles or feeds, provide natural language query responses, review sources comprehensively for information, offer contextual prompts, and include source links in its responses.

We initially launched our AI assistant VAL as a tool for creating executive summaries of insights, but it now has all these features. You can ask VAL all kinds of CMI-related questions but also analyze the market with common frameworks like SWOT and PESTEL or prompts like “Give me an overview of recent developments in….”.

2. Other AI Capabilities

Valona also scored high in our other AI capabilities. We use AI and ML techniques across our platform architecture for tasks such as source translation, automatic classification, entity recognition, deduplication, and sentiment analysis, enabling us to continuously monitor the global market in real-time.

3. Publicly-available data sources, Proprietary, paywalled sources

Valona received the highest scores possible in both criteria.

Imagine having insights from 150 countries and 115 languages. That’s the kind of comprehensive coverage we provide. “The Valona platform has always been exceptional for its sourcing of public information across 150 countries and 115 languages while also monitoring more than 300 paywalled sources,” the report states.

4. Customer Support and Success

It was a point of pride for us that Valona received the highest score possible in the customer success and support criterion. Each client has an assigned CSM to support platform adoption and engagement. The Valona Intelligence Community hosts regular webinars, best practices sharing, and networking opportunities to support clients in building out world-class CMI programs—and it’s open to join for everybody.

5. Global Reach and Delivery

This criterion concerned vendors’ ability to support global and multi-regional customers, as well as their intelligence needs. In Forrester’s words, Valona is an “excellent fit for large enterprises that want a proven and sophisticated platform with global insights and analyst/consulting support to build intelligence capabilities across multiple functions.”

6. Insights Dissemination

Intelligence work has the most impact when it’s accessible across the organization, delivered in a timely manner, and as the right kind of deliverables for different stakeholders and use cases. Valona received the highest score possible in this criterion, and our ‘deliverables’, including dashboards, alerts, and newsletters, reach over 350,000 users daily.

7. Information sharing via Integrations 

Per Forrester’s definition, vendors who scored a 5/5 in this criterion have greater than the average number of out-of-the-box integrations and have SSO and write-back capabilities, more comprehensive integrations, allow interaction or discussion threads, and allow access to the AI assistant from the internal system. Valona’s platform is very flexible in integrating and embedding content into the platform and sharing insights with various stakeholders.

Integrations and connecting companies’ internal data sources to Valona is a topic that’s received growing attention in our product development during 2024; for example, we recently redesigned our SharePoint integration.

8. Vision 

Valona received the highest score possible in the vision criterion, which focused on how well-articulated and differentiated the vision for the offering is and how well it supports customer business outcomes and different use cases.

Valona’s vision focuses on domain-specific AI, developing the platform for different functional use cases, and leveraging generative AI to make human analysts’ work more impactful.

AI enables us to “collect the dots” more effectively than ever before, giving companies access to market insights from across the globe and more time to “connect the dots” and truly analyze the impacts of events and developments.

What’s ahead for Valona’s offering?

We believe being named a leader in the Forrester Wave Report^TM is a valuable recognition of our product development efforts and vision. For us, it’s also a declaration of Valona’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in market and competitive intelligence.

We recently added trend radars for mapping, e.g., trends or competitive threats, and supporting strategic foresight. For 2025, we have some exciting developments on our roadmap:

• Proprietary Content & Sources: Further packaging and developing our content to support functional use cases and extend our industry data sets.
• AI Ecosystem: We’re continuously developing our AI ecosystem for increased relevance, accuracy, and performance. Valona’s Insights Engine, our proprietary content production process, consists of 30+ AI models that power real-time insights from across 150 countries and 115+ languages.
• Conversational AI: VAL is currently available for Valona Research App users. However, we’re working on extending the AI assistant to all platform users, giving VAL controlled access to customers’ published content from different internal and external sources, and enabling more relevant analysis and new use cases.

A big thanks to everyone who’s made this recognition possible—our dedicated team of Valonians and valued customers. Our ambition is to continue our industry leadership in 2025 and beyond.

Read the full Forrester Wave Report for Competitive and Market Intelligence Platforms Q4 2024.

Want to see how we can transform your business insights? Let’s talk.