It’s only been 3 months since I last reported in on ACT vendor assessments , and some changes we made to improve the match rate which you can expect to find when you sync and start looking for vendor data. Now that we’ve performed the update, I wanted to report back on how things have improved.
The good news is that the match rate on an ACT inventory is now more than double what it was back in April, when we began the latest initiative around improving that match rate. My hat goes off to the team who executed brilliantly against this objective – that’s going to end up saving a lot of time for people migrating away from Windows XP.
My friend Marc, who is a PM on the ACT team, went on to perform some additional analysis on match rate, to see if we can understand which factors contributed most to improving the success rate. Now, I had a hunch that simply being a company that operated outside of the US would be a factor, as anecdotally I found lower rates if I was working with a customer outside of the US, but I couldn’t prove that quantitatively. Unfortunately, we don’t have that attribute to data mine, and though he tried to approximate that by dividing those inventories that had at least one foreign language application in them, the outcome was utterly inconclusive.
What he did find, however, was a strong relationship between the match rate you can expect to find and the size of an inventory. Those with smaller, well managed application portfolios also had the side benefit of having a higher match rate! Here is how the data maps out (through August):
Hopefully, if you are using ACT, you have been able to benefit from the investments we made to improve the match rate and save yourself a bit of time. Perhaps now is also a good time to consider rationalizing away a number of your applications if your ACT inventory is bulging in the 100,000 range…