DAO RESEARCH
As of June 1, 2021, Dao Research became a fully-owned subsidiary of a research and market analysis consulting firm Pique Solutions based in San Francisco, California. Please direct all inquiries to [email protected].
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DAO research
Dao Research is a competitive intelligence firm that helps global enterprise software, hardware, and IT systems vendors find the path to competitive advantage by arming them with the data and tools that enable them to make better business decisions and compete more effectively.
Charge Forward
Our Business Model
Dao Research constitutes a large network of highly experienced and respected technical subject matter experts, competitive intelligence experts, and researchers, each with more than 15 years of experience supporting competitive intelligence initiatives exclusively for large enterprise IT vendors. A great majority of our team members comes from Tier-1 or the Big-4 consulting firms. Because the most sought-out experts typically work independently, Dao Research uses a hub-and-spoke business and staffing model. We assemble and manage consulting and research teams from this continuously expanding network of top talent from the United States and Europe based on the exact requirements of any given project. This allows us to land supreme expertise to our clients at an unparalleled return on investment.
Our Specialties
Razor-Sharp Focus

Dao Research focuses on one core competency in order to surpass our competitors on value and quality of services. To that end, we support only large enterprise software, hardware and IT systems vendors, and only in the area of competitive intelligence. Our results are enhanced by maintaining our headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, a major technology hub with strong outreach to the most formidable international vendors and experts.
Services
Our Data-Driven Approach
While gathering competitive intelligence and developing competitive tools and recommendations for our clients, we rely heavily on real-market data obtained from primary research. We also have the capability to conduct real-life benchmarking of the competitive solutions in a laboratory environment, effectively simulating real-life use cases. The objective of this research is to uncover competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and identify competitive advantage for our clients. We use our large network of experts and our closely managed network of senior IT and business decision makers as well as influencers to find the required competitor and customer experience data. Based on the needs of the project, we use one or more interviewing techniques.
In-depth phone interviews
divided into qualitative and quantitative sessions
Focus groups
On-line surveys
mostly used to validate previously developed hypotheses with a large sample size
Dao Research is capable of competitor and customer data acquisition in more than 20 countries.
Our areas of research include the following:
Competitor profiling
e.g., competitive positioning, intentions, threats, opportunities
Customer experience assessment
e.g., pain points, perceptions, buying decision drivers
Benchmarking
e.g., strengths, weaknesses
Competitive product comparisons
e.g., technical performance, functionality and features, business and economic value