Analyst Perspectives

FloQast offers close management, reconciliation and accounting workflow automation software that streamlines processes and achieves reliable accuracy with less effort while providing real-time visibility into financial operations. The word “hack” originally referred to an ordinary horse, and later to a third-rate writer. More recently, it has come to mean—in a business context—a clever strategy...

I am struck by the blizzard of software announcements this year describing new features for CX tools that are “agentic,” meaning autonomous tools take actions without (much) human intervention. Industry conversation about agentic AI has proceeded ahead of clarifying definitions and a sense of how it fits on a continuum of rapid AI development.

The IT department of any enterprise is integral to implementing and managing the execution of its data objectives, just as the finance department is integral to implementing and managing financial objectives. Few enterprises would allow the finance department complete autonomy to define financial strategies; however, too many enterprises allow the IT department to define data strategies. Treating...

The era of ever-liberalizing trade that began in earnest in the 1950s (albeit with periodic ups and downs) came to an epochal end in the 2010s. Over the past decade, the ever-more demanding environment for supply chain planning and execution has forced enterprises to take a more strategic approach to managing these processes. The need for resiliency and adaptability in a rapidly changing world...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept but a current reality, and enterprise leaders are recognizing its profound impact on the IT sector. The development and deployment of AI-driven applications across various industries hinge on a robust IT infrastructure and skilled expertise. The words of industry leaders reinforce this sentiment: Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy indicates that...

Agents offer almost effortless automation, so repetitive and boring tasks get done with the least amount of work and, perhaps, more consistently. Agents are an important evolutionary step in the design of business software, similar to the transition from procedural programming to event-driven programming that accelerated in the late 1980s. That paradigm shift created the business software...

Fragmentation is a pervasive problem for enterprises seeking to take advantage of data generated by various applications to drive business decision-making. For almost as long as the IT industry has existed enterprises have struggled to combine and integrate information from multiple data siloes created by a variety of applications and business units. Creating a “single version of the truth” that...

As we stand precariously at the intersection of technology and business strategy, ServiceNow’s Knowledge ’25 conference unveiled “the art of the possible” for what service automation can mean in our efficiency-seeking world. ServiceNow has long been a champion of transforming the mundane into the extraordinary, and in the era of AI, it aims to harness the potential of intelligent automation. The...

I have written several times recently about the importance of data in supporting artificial intelligence (AI), including generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI. From a data platforms perspective, this is most evident in the role that analytic data platforms play in supporting the training and fine-tuning of AI models. Operational data platforms also have a role to play in supporting enterprise AI...

Organizational change management is the discipline and process of guiding individuals, teams and organizations to a desired future structure. This is frequently an issue when implementing new technology designed to enable new strategies or business models. It is often a challenge because of human resistance to change, which is driven by a desire for stability, fear of personal consequences and...

The need for effective cybersecurity strategies remains a priority as enterprises face ever-increasing complex cyber threats. Nonetheless, the conventional approach in which IT departments, especially Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), exclusively manage the procurement of cybersecurity software, is showing its limitations. A crucial shift is...

ISG Software Research recently published the 2025 Buyers Guide for Real-Time Data, providing an assessment of 43 software providers offering products used by analytics and data professionals to facilitate the use of real-time data. The Real-Time Data Buyers Guide research includes five reports which are focused on overall Real-Time Data, Application Integration, Messaging and Event Processing,...

Earlier this year I was a guest at the PROS 2025 Outperform conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. PROS is a well-established price optimization and revenue management software provider that, although well-known within the airline and hospitality industries, has a lower profile outside of these specific verticals. An original premise of PROS was to offer advanced analytics and pricing as well as...

At its heart, money is an intellectual construct, as demonstrated through its continual shape-shifting over the ages. Since most money today exists in digital form, technology has an outsized impact on advancing innovations, especially in the most mundane corners of finance. Payments—the transmission and receipt of money in commercial transactions—have been an especially fertile area for...

The shift toward a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) framework is a strategic move for enterprises aiming for an enhanced security posture. ZTNA operates on the principle of "never trust, always verify," ensuring that every user and device is authenticated and authorized before accessing resources. In this context, Privileged Access Management (PAM) emerges as a critical enabler for an effective...

There is an industry assumption, call it a consensus, that increasing the degree of personalization in customer interactions is beneficial: it improves loyalty, lifetime value, CSAT and other key metrics. Core to this assumption is that it benefits both the customer and the business. Whether or not that’s actually true is somewhat beside the point. The fact is that the industry has identified a...

ISG Software Research is expanding our ISG Buyers Guide™ coverage to include the topic of sustainability. Our buyers guide will focus on sustainability exclusively rather than the full spectrum of environmental, social and governance topics. One reason is that gathering, managing, analyzing and reporting environmental data under the various frameworks and statutes presents enterprises with...

ISG Software Research’s expertise examines the software provider landscape through two lenses: business applications (including office of finance, human capital management (HCM) and customer experience) and IT and technology (including digital business, digital technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics and data). Most software providers fall into one of these two high-level expertise...

Databricks recently hosted its Data+AI Summit in San Francisco, an event that attracted 22,000 attendees. That’s a far cry from the Spark Summit I attended in 2016. As pointed out in my coverage of Databricks massive funding round earlier this year, the company was originally founded as a provider of cloud-based Apache Spark services. Since its inception, Spark has been associated with processing...

Sage recently held its Future user conference in Atlanta. Our ISG Buyers Guide for Midsize ERP Financial Management (2024) rated Sage Intacct as one of the top three providers, reflecting its strong performance in both product capabilities and customer experience. The event showcased its advances and roadmap aimed at embedding artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI in...