Industry analyst Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies is seeking support for his 3rd annual 163-mile Pan-Mass Challenge bicycle ride. The annual fudn-raising event supports the Dana Farber Institute's research and treatment activities aimed at helping children with cancer.

Springboard Research, a leading innovator in the IT market research industry, has announced the appointment of Masami Kashiwagi as Research Manager for Japan.

Jeff Kaplan, founder and managing director of THINKstrategies and a consultant with Cutter Consortium, has partnered with Renovatix Solutions to extend his SaaS Showplace with an online store for SMBs. The partnership provides visitors with easy access to the Renovatix online store designed for SMBs.

Hurwitz analysts Judith Hurwitz, Robin Bloor, Marcia Kaufman, and Fern Halper announced their latest book, Service Management for Dummies.

Eight industry analyst firms were added to the Tekrati directories of high tech industry analysts during May 2009.  The May additions are Pike Research, Neovise, Demartek, Unwired Insight, Altimeter Group, Techaisle, Lopez Research and GigaOM's GigaOM Pro. Featured analysts and analyst bloggers during the month of May included Alvaro Fernandez, SharpBrains; Richard Stiennon, IT-Harvest, R Ray Wang, Forrester Research; and Craig Mathias, Farpoint Group.

Evans Data Corp today announced Evans Data Market Alert, a new service that examines major events or offerings that impact the software development landscape. The first in the series examines Intel’s recently released Parallel Studio.

Dan Kusnetzky has joined The 451 Group as vice president of research operations. In addition to heading up research operations, he will ramp up The 451 Group's market research and analysis on cloud computing and virtualization. He is a well-established analyst and blogger with a reputation spanning his own analyst practice as Kusnetzky Group, his ZDNet blog and more than a decade with IDC.

Om Malik is expanding GigaOM beyond news and events into the subscription-based research and analysis business. The new service, dubbed GigaOM Pro, is focused on delivering timely, high-value reports and analysis for technology innovators and insiders at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research vendors. 

TechCrunch has edged further into the syndicated research business, the traditional turf of analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester Research, IDC, Burton Group, et al, with the release of the TechCrunch 1Q 2009 Report. The idea behind TechCrunch Research is elegantly simple: package up quarterly reports based on the open source CrunchBase wiki database, sell the reports at economical price points and promote the service across the TechCrunch media network.

AMR Research, a leading research firm focused on the global supply chain and supporting technologies, released its Supply Chain Top 25 today, an annual ranking that highlights companies that display superior supply chain performance, capabilities, and leadership.

AMR Research, the leading research firm focused on the global supply chain and supporting technologies, announced the winners of the 2009 AMR Research Leadership Awards. Companies are awarded for top performance in four categories: technology leverage, corporate social responsibility, sustainable leadership, and small-to-midsize company.

The Advisory Council (TAC) announced Benchmark Lite, designed to enable businesses and their management teams to quickly get information that will help them answer qusetions on how they perform relative to the industry they are in, or to businesses similar in size to themselves. The benchmark metrics cover hardware, software, sourcing and personnel associated with each functional area of an IT organization.

Shore Communications has tapped John Buckman as an expert consultant on marketing and communications. Buckman is a marketing and communications consultant with long-standing ties in the information and publishing industries, and currently serves of the board of the MIT Enterprise Forum.

In a first for Australia, the Queensland Government announced it will inform industry of its current and potential technology spending through a range of information products offered by Longhaus.

Celent, a Boston-based financial research and consulting firm, launched two blogs earlier this year. One covers Banking, the other covers Insurance. Both industries are evolving rapidly, and Celent plans to use the blogs to share its perspectives in a convenient, real time, informal manner.