Analyst Perspectives

As I recently explained, treating data as a business discipline—rather than a technical one—is a critical component of delivering competitive advantage through investment in data processing, analytics and artificial intelligence. As enterprises embrace data as a business discipline, it is increasingly important that the products used for data processing and management enable collaboration between...

I attended Salesforce’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco to learn more about the company’s expanding vision for artificial intelligence (AI) and its newest capability, Agentforce Revenue Management. Salesforce has steadily evolved from being a CRM leader to positioning itself as an AI-first business platform. The introduction of Agentforce marks the company’s most ambitious step yet in...

As an authoritative and trusted source for 92 consecutive quarters, the ISG Index has delivered independent, fact-based insight to Wall Street, service and software providers, and enterprises tracking fundamentals and the quarterly and yearly shifts across technology services and software.

The recent Oracle AI World event did not unveil much that was stunning “new” news for its business applications, because much of what has been evolving was presented already and has been in front of analysts for some months. What was on display, though, was steady progress to its advancing capabilities coming out every quarter. The company has focused on the development of agents and an agentic...

You can’t examine an HR software roadmap today without encountering AI—ubiquitously. Natural language search, skills inference, personalized learning, intelligent automation, adaptive planning, worker twins, conversational agents... These aren’t just new features; they represent a new organizing principle. A new architecture for how platforms structure work and how individuals engage with systems.

I am excited to announce that I have joined ISG as Research Director for the Office of Revenue practice, where I will lead coverage across a spectrum of revenue, sales and product technologies that shape how organizations operate and engage customers, align go-to-market functions and operationalize growth. This includes CRM, Commerce, Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Product Experiences,...

There’s a subtle but important truth I’ve seen play out across dozens of organizations: HR software doesn’t define your strategy—but it will expose whether you have one. Too often, organizations treat the HR software stack as a series of independent decisions: a new ATS here, a learning platform there, maybe a refreshed core HRIS every few years. Each decision is justified on its own. Each serves...

Oracle NetSuite’s presentations and announcements at its recent user group meeting, SuiteWorld, focused on an initiative called NetSuite Next, a set of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI capabilities that will be an inherent part of the NetSuite suite of applications starting in 2026. The company’s objective is to facilitate customers’ transition to this AI-centric...

Enterprises with established Identity Access Management and Privileged Access Management must extend governance to non-human identities to protect APIs, services, automation and agentic AI. Effective evaluation of NHI security software hinges on risk-driven prioritization, integration fidelity and measurable outcomes. CIOs, CISOs and IT leaders should align the identity strategy with enterprise...

I recently explained the significance of data management as an enabler of strategic adoption of artificial intelligence. Data management enables enterprises to ensure that data is valid, consistent and trusted for operational use cases and analytic decision-making. Large volumes of data are required to train models, making data management and data governance critical to AI. Data quality and data...

Skills software is everywhere right now. Talent marketplaces, intelligent learning platforms, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered upskilling tools—the market is saturated with promises of personalized growth, agile workforce planning and dynamic career pathing. And to be clear: the vision is compelling. The idea of surfacing internal talent, guiding career development and aligning skills to...

Enterprises are accelerating digital initiatives powered by APIs, services, IoT and agentic artificial intelligence (AI), expanding non-human identity (NHI) risk faster than legacy Identity Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) can govern. CIOs, CISOs and IT leaders need an identity strategy that treats NHIs as first-class identities, integrates with IAM/PAM and advances...

I previously wrote about the role that data intelligence catalogs play in enabling business leaders to understand the use of data across an enterprise. I also recently wrote about the importance of treating data as a business discipline to ensure that data projects are aligned with business strategy objectives. As I noted, although many data catalog products provide enterprises with information...

For nearly 20 years, I have attended the Human Resources Technology Conference and Expo to take the temperature of the market. This year, the energy felt different—less showy, more grounded. I was able to engage with more than 40 software providers for deeper-dive discussions, and I left with three big takeaways and one nagging concern that I can’t shake.

Verint held its annual Engage conference in September, shortly after it announced the news that it had agreed to be acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $2 billion. The new ownership plans on merging Verint with its competitor, Calabrio, after the deal closes in 2026. That sequence of events raises many important questions about the direction of both companies and the sector...

There's a saying among military historians that amateurs debate strategy while professionals talk about logistics. In a similar vein, those rooted deeply in the workings of information technology (IT) pay close attention to data because it is fundamental to the proficiency and effectiveness of any IT system. Visionaries speak of data being the oil or gold of the information economy; practitioners...

It’s easy to celebrate a go-live. It’s visible, it’s measurable and it comes with a finish line. But anyone who’s been through an HR technology implementation knows that go-live isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.

The idea of customer experience (CX) as a business practice relies heavily on being able to understand and track customer journeys. And that can be tricky because there isn’t a standard definition as to what a journey consists of. For example, inside a contact center the journey is perceived in terms of the steps a customer takes to achieve a particular result. Sometimes that is broadened out to...

When building or outfitting a contact center, the core question that must be answered is: what software provider or system is foundational? For decades, the fundamental element was the routing engine, but as technology moved to the cloud, the primacy of the voice ACD receded. As it did, it became possible to conceive of a tech stack that’s not organized around routing but instead is focused on...

The emergence of natural language analytics interfaces driven by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models has accelerated enterprise initiatives to enable data democratization—making data available to business decision-makers without the need to train them to use business intelligence (BI) tools. It has also heightened the need for agreed semantic models and business metrics, as well as...