Analyst Perspectives

We are kicking off our Supply Chain Planning Buyers Guide™ for 2026. ISG Software Research defines supply chain planning (SCP) as the business discipline of coordinating the future supply of materials and services used in the creation of specific products and services with the expected demand for them. The purpose of planning is to optimize the flow of goods and materials with related services...

There are many reasons why the contact center market is in flux, but chief among them is the drive towards convergence: traditional telephony, digital channels, customer relationship management (CRM), workforce tools and analytics are expected to operate as a unified system, rather than as a set of disconnected point solutions. This creates a problem for enterprises: how to modernize their...

Let's be blunt: The pressure to adopt AI in HR is a panic button being hit by the C-suite. The mandate from the boardroom is clear, and the pressure is intensifying: HR must adopt AI to remain competitive. This directive often lands on the desks of HR leaders who are already managing complex environments, creating a dangerous disconnect between executive ambition and operational reality.

Digitally transforming finance operations has been a priority since 2020. Especially with the application of artificial intelligence in all its forms, software can streamline purchasing and the procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle, shorten process times, reduce unnecessary costs, provide greater visibility into cash flows, increase control and improve results. The application of AI will increasingly...

Time is a critical element in business decision-making. To make decisions at the speed of business, it is fundamentally important that enterprises have access to relevant data in a timely manner. It is also essential, however, that data is processed and analyzed in the correct time sequence. In order to decide when to buy or sell, a trader needs to be sure that the price data they are analyzing...

Revenue organizations are running out of room to hide. With increasingly complex buyer journeys, longer sales cycles and rising expectations for personalized outreach, today’s CROs face a mounting challenge: deliver predictable growth in a market that’s anything but predictable while simultaneously building a team that doesn’t burn out.

Prophix One is a finance and accounting platform that provides enterprises a single point of entry and common authentication for financial applications. It uses in-memory cube technology to enable enterprises to handle complex planning tasks built on very large datasets to eliminate barriers to integrated business planning. The platform and its dedicated data store support the use of artificial...

I previously described data intelligence as fundamental to providing data analysts and business users with governed self-service access to data across an enterprise by delivering information about how data is produced and consumed across the organization. Data intelligence relies on a combination of technical and business metadata and functionality for knowledge graph, data inventory, data...

Integration has evolved from a technical requirement into a strategic cornerstone in today’s HR technology landscape. Yet many organizations still treat connectivity between systems as a back-end IT concern rather than the foundation of the employee experience. That mindset is rapidly becoming a liability. The reality is simple: If your systems cannot connect, your strategy cannot connect either.

The reason why artificial intelligence (AI) has been the focus of endless keynote speeches, product roadmap announcements by ERP providers and development efforts across all categories of business software is that AI-embedded systems promise (and will ultimately deliver) software that more closely molds its operation to the needs of a specific enterprise and individual user. The technology is...

HR technology is entering a new era, and with it comes a challenge that many leaders underestimate: the need to embrace platform thinking as a core competency. For years, we’ve approached technology decisions as a way to solve pain points—patching gaps, fixing inefficiencies and responding to immediate needs. That mindset is understandable, but it’s also the reason so many organizations are...

Requirements for sustainability reporting have been undergoing a political shift over the past year, including modifications to the EU’s reporting requirements. The difference between European and North American attitudes to sustainability as a priority, which were significant 15 years ago, began to converge toward the end of the ‘teens but now appear to be diverging. In the U.S. in particular,...

As I previously stated, although most enterprises are reliant on batch data processing, it is an artificial construct driven by the historical limitations of computing capabilities to generate and process data at the same time without impacting performance. While real-time data processing has previously been seen as a niche requirement for low-latency applications, it is increasingly being...

ISG recently published the 2025 ISG Buyers Guides for DataOps, providing an assessment of 51 software providers offering products used by data engineers, data scientists, and data and AI professionals to facilitate the use of data for analytics and AI needs. The DataOps Buyers Guide research generated three reports and five quadrants assessing providers in relation to overall DataOps, Data...

I recently wrote about the evolving requirements for operational data platforms to support artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. Operational data platforms providers are rapidly updating their products, driven by the development of intelligent applications infused with contextually relevant recommendations, predictions and forecasting that are in turn driven by machine learning (ML), generative...

Agentic AI is moving from pilots to production systems that execute work across enterprise applications, data platforms and business processes. As I’ve argued before, the value of AI is realized in action, not just answers, and enterprises are investing accordingly. One of the key questions now is how to coordinate the actions among different agents. My colleague Matt Aslett’s perspective on...

It’s clear that the contact center industry is experiencing a generational technological transformation. The effects of artificial intelligence (AI) and the automation it delivers have been extraordinary. But this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. People with long memories can recall the disruptive effects of CTI, for example, which enabled screen pops and integration of...

A little over two years ago, I observed that the pendulum of fashion in the data management sector was swinging away from multiple best-of-breed tools and toward consolidated platforms. Enterprise software portfolios take time to evolve, but the trend toward consolidation has clearly been evident in the product strategies of large data management providers since then. Many providers have combined...

Spectacular accounting frauds happen with enough regularity to beg the question, how did the auditors miss that? In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. established the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB or “peekaboo”) with the aim of protecting investors and lenders by overseeing the audits of public companies to ensure the reports and opinions are accurate, independent...

Revenue leaders face a defining moment, which is why the time to define capabilities is now. As organizations brace for economic uncertainty, margin pressure and board scrutiny, the long-promised ROI of go-to-market technology is under intense evaluation. Sales productivity is declining, seller attrition is rising and CFOs are no longer tolerating technology bloat without measurable performance...