Emerging technology vendors can provide a competitive advantage to your enterprise through their innovative capabilities, but identifying the vendors that are right for your objectives is exceedingly difficult. Which emerging vendors are right for your organization?

As our focus is on emerging technology vendors, we should begin by differentiating between incumbent vendors and emerging vendors. While incumbent vendors can provide stable and trusted offerings for your enterprise, emerging technology vendors offer newer capabilities that can potentially accelerate your unique business goals. More specifically, we define emerging technology vendors as companies from the startup ecosystem that have raised venture funding in the last 2 years.

While following the money is an imperfect measure of vendors and favors those who have raised money versus those operating efficiently, we believe recency of funding is a good first approximation of emerging technology vendors’ capabilities, as measured by investors betting of late on their product and technology visions.

We present the Daybreak Sunrise as a framework for enterprise business leaders to identify the emerging vendors in a given technology category for deeper diligence. Below is a notional Daybreak Sunrise for a category; you can also see a real example for the Enterprise AI Chatbot Building Platforms category here.

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Through our research process, we first identify all the vendors in a given category, and then we plot them on the Sunrise chart. The X axis represents the total funding of the vendors with the most funded vendors on the right and the Y axis represents the date of the last funding round over the last two years with the most recently funded vendors up top.

As you can see, there are five segments on the Daybreak Sunrise. Typically the vendors on the leftmost segments have more nascent emerging capabilities while those on the rightmost segments are accelerating their growth trajectory. No one segment is inherently better than another segment, and enterprises should select from the emerging vendors on the Sunrise based on their unique capabilities. Thus, it is important to note that the Daybreak Sunrise provides just the very first step in evaluating emerging vendors from the same category. From there, vendors should be analyzed through briefings and product demos, and ultimately shortlisted based on their unique features and technology offerings that match the unique needs of your enterprise.

In summary, we believe the Daybreak Sunrise can offer your enterprise a holistic top down approach in your emerging technology vendor selection process.