Thunderhead, recognised innovators in document automation and multi-channel communications solutions, today announced that the company had been acknowledged as the highest scoring vendor for overall strategy in “The Forrester Wave ™: Document Output For Customer Communications Management, Q2, 2009” (June 2009) report.

Forrester thoroughly evaluated Thunderhead and 11 other vendors based on the strength of their current offerings, strategy and market presence across three main market segments: Structured, Interactive and On-Demand. Thunderhead distinguished itself through its commitment to XML standards and vision for multi-channel communications, achieving recognition as a “strong performer” in the overall Forrester Wave™ and receiving the highest score for its corporate and product strategy.

Further, Thunderhead was recognised as the sole leader in the Interactive segment, achieving top scores for both its current offering and its corporate and product strategy. According to Forrester, “Thunderhead leads innovation in the rapidly growing interactive segment.”

The interactive segment includes all content that requires human intervention, such as customer correspondence and negotiated documents like group insurance policies, benefit guides, or derivative and margin contracts, and is widely acknowledged as the most rapidly growing segment in the market. As a result, it is not surprising that Thunderhead also achieved top marks in the report for its revenue growth.

In addition, Forrester’s report cites how Thunderhead's unique separation of content and design enables companies to simplify how they manage customer communications across multiple delivery channels. “The XML core avoids conversion to a proprietary format and maintains a broader set of information for downstream multi-channel management, including email, fax, print, SMS, and HTML,” the report adds.

“We are delighted to have received such strong recognition from Forrester,” said Thunderhead CEO Glen Manchester. “We are extremely pleased to be recognised as the leader in DOCCM interactive output, a segment that is driving growth in our industry and is at the heart of our client’s customer communication strategies.”

“Further, we are well positioned in the on-demand segment and are also very pleased that Forrester recognises our support for the structured applications required by our financial services customers, such as policy issuance, wealth management statements and renewals.”

Manchester added, “We believe this independent research report validates the fact that, while Thunderhead clearly delivers the high-volume print output capabilities that all of our clients demand, we have focused our go-to-market activities on the more strategic and rapidly growing interactive market and on providing our clients with the most robust solution on the market for delivering highly personalised, multi-channel communications to improve customer engagement in all use cases: structured, interactive and on-demand.”