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Tech's Top 50 R&D Spenders: The Methodology
Our list of big research and development spenders was derived from the CIOZone 100, our survey of the biggest publicly held technology companies.
With the exception of SAP, the list is limited to U.S. companies. We made an exception of SAP because we felt the company is too important to CIOs not to be included.
Our report uses 2007 calendar-year results, eliminating the apples-to-oranges period comparisons that would otherwise arise because of when many companies' fiscal years end. In the case of companies that don't have quarters ending in December 2007, we used the closest quarter we could find. Thus, in the case of some companies, their 2007 R&D data may actually reflect results for the 12-month period ended on Nov. 30, 2007, or on Jan. 31, 2008.
We used a cut-off of Feb. 20, 2008, for our data-gathering, meaning if a company reported results after that, the results aren't reflected in the R&D list.
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