A new telecom analyst and the process of forcasting

I just finished up my first major report since joining Analysys Mason, it's description is located at http://www.analysysmason.com/Research/Programmes/Telecoms-software/Service-Fulfilment/ . It is almost 50 pages of text, diagrams, and charts that show my projections of the market for systems in the Order Management, Inventory, Activation, and Engineering Tools markets.

It was a fascinating experience to make such projections, and to gather information about the current sales and strategies of the various vendors. Most of the public company vendors are too large to report at the detail that I needed while the small companies are private, and often do not report any financials. So how do we do it? A number of vendors give us reasonable access to data on their sales at a remarkable level of granularity - all under tight non-disclosure, of course. These data serve us well as we try to put together the puzzle of the market size, along with estimates of revenue we can make ourselves, sometimes just from the number of employees of a company! It's actually rather scientific, but with a fair amount of windage - that's why industry analysts tend to be people who have been around an industry for a long time.