Vendor R&D

STAC provides product development organizations with help across all four C's of competitive strategy by enabling a better understanding of what customers want, what competitors offer, what collaborators (partners) can bring to the table, and how the company's offerings stack up.

Research

STAC Reports assess products using common yardsticks. This provides insight into the capabilities and tradeoffs of competitors' products. It can also provide pointers to potential partners offering complementary technology that would benefit customers.

Tools

Vendors members of the STAC Benchmark Council have access to the same STAC Test Harness software that STAC uses to generate these reports. This not only enables a vendor to prepare to go public with STAC Benchmark results, if that is what they choose. It also enables R&D staff to study standardized financial services workloads in the privacy of their own labs.

The fact that these workloads were developed by multiple customers means that they correspond to real business needs and are not specific to just one customer. R&D staff can optimize their products for these workloads without the pressure and exposure of a client engagement.

Meetings and events

R&D staff also benefit from engaging with the STAC community. Participating in STAC working groups and special interest groups gives product managers and development staff a low-pressure opportunity to interact directly with client staff and allows them to influence the direction of the standards against which their products will potentially be measured. Product owners and development staff also benefit from attending STAC Summits, where they can get a better sense of the state of play from customers, competitors, and partners.

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