CONCORD, Massachusetts, August 2002- Thomas Publishing Company today appointed the Gantry Group to conduct and analyze its annual editorial survey for the company's leading automation magazine - Managing Automation. With a circulation of over 100,000, Managing Automation is targeted towards technology executives in manufacturing enterprises who make IT decisions. This important study is the foundation for the magazine's 2003 editorial strategy.

Each year, Managing Automation magazine conducts a comprehensive study of a representative sample of its readership in order to shape the content for the following years' issues. The 2002 online survey is being developed with Gantry Group's proprietary technology and will run during the month of August. Gantry Group will then assist Thomas Publishing management with data analysis and interpretation, capturing important buying trends and shifts in purchasing priorities in the automation marketplace.

Already a partner of several other media companies, Gantry Group views its new partnership with Thomas Publishing as the start of a long-term relationship, enabling the companies to examine year-over-year results of this and other important primary market research studies.

About Gantry Group
The Gantry Group is a strategic advisory firm that uses primary market research to help companies cost-effectively accelerate the successful market adoption of their products and services -- online and offline. Gantry Group has helped over 165 client companies drive sales, acquire new customers, increase brand equity, and increase customer lifetime value through our market analysis, marketing testing, and ROI/TCO benchmarking service suites. Gantry Group creates customized market research studies to better understand customers’ needs and experiences. Gantry Group benchmarks a client company’s opportunity, competitive landscape and their offering’s ROI impact on its target market. The result is a quantified value proposition that is crisply differentiated within a receptive market.

The Gantry Group designs custom TCO and ROI studies to help companies communicate factual quantified value propositions to prospects and customers. Gantry Group designs custom ROI and TCO calculators to comprehensively profile the ‘impact’ equation of a company’s technology offering. Using such tools, Gantry Group then conducts online and in-person studies to consistently profile ROI/TCO across a carefully selected sample of participating companies.

Gantry Group has equipped many technology product and service firms with credible TCO and ROI models that communicate value in the terms of the business metrics that customers and prospects use to access the performance of their own companies.

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