Analyst Perspectives

The acquisition of Splunk by Cisco marks a significant milestone in the digital security industry. This strategic move combines the strengths of two industry leaders, offering a suite of products and services underpinned by artificial intelligence technologies. However, like any major business decision, it comes with challenges and potential risks. Ventana Research presents an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with this acquisition, offering valuable...

Despite a focus on being data-driven, many organizations find that data and analytics projects fail to deliver on expectations. These initiatives can underwhelm for many reasons, because success requires a delicate balance of people, processes, information and technology. Small deviations from perfection in any of those factors can send projects off the rails.

Customer relationship management systems have been around since Tom Siebel created one while working at Oracle in the late ‘80s and then monetized it founding Siebel Systems that eventually was bought by Oracle. When Salesforce launched its “No Software” slogan in the early 2000s, CRM moved to the cloud, but the concept was still based on a object model centered around an opportunity that represented a potential sale. The user interface allowed entry of data to the opportunity, along with...

In the realm of business process and workflow management, few names stand as tall as ServiceNow. After gaining traction for its cloud-based platform designed to help organizations manage and track IT service requests, the brand has grown into a behemoth, offering a wide range of services aimed at automating and optimizing business processes. Yet, in recent years, there’s been a notable and significant addition to the company's portfolio as it moved firmly into the realm of human capital...

Organizations are continuously combining data from diverse and siloed sources for analytical, artificial intelligence and machine learning projects. As the volume of data grows, it becomes challenging for organizations to manage and keep current to extract valuable insights in a timely manner.

I have written before about the rising popularity of the data fabric approach for managing and governing data spread across distributed environments comprised of multiple data centers, systems and applications. I assert that by 2025, more than 6 in 10 organizations will adopt data fabric technologies to facilitate the management and processing of data across multiple data platforms and cloud environments. The data fabric approach is also proving attractive to vendors, including Microsoft, as a...

Software supply chain digital security is a hot topic, especially after cyberattacks on SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline and Kaseya. These attacks have exposed the vulnerabilities and risks that exist in the software products and services that organizations rely on for their daily operations. How can organizations protect themselves from these threats and ensure the quality and integrity of software products? One possible approach is to adopt a software bill of materials (SBOM).

At one point, analytics and business intelligence were considered non-mission critical activities. One of the primary concerns in designing analytics systems was to ensure they didn’t interfere with or draw computing resources away from operational systems. But today, analytical systems are integral to many aspects of operations. More than 9 in 10 participants in our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research reported analytics had improved activities and processes. However, most analytics and BI...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Contact Centers Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Customer Experience vendors supporting the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Contact Centers research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. In this modern, digital age of customer experience, the journey of engagement across every channel and device must be orchestrated effectively. Organizations, no matter the industry, have inbound and outbound interactions and rely on contact centers to fulfill operational and revenue objectives. The utilization of cloud computing has enabled a new generation...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Agent Management Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Customer Experience vendors supporting the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Agent Management research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Contact Center Suites Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Customer Experience vendors supporting...

In accounting terms, working capital includes current assets (short-term items such as cash, money due from customers and inventory) and current liabilities (typically payments due to suppliers and loan amounts that must be repaid within one year). Working capital management is a prime function of the finance organization, designed to balance often-conflicting objectives related to revenue, liquidity, risk and profitability. The basics of working capital management date back to ancient clay...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Contact Center Suites research enables me to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced.

Organizations today have an ever-increasing appetite for platforms that improve the speed and efficiency of data analytics and business intelligence (BI). The ability to quickly process data enables organizations to make well-informed decisions in real time. This agile approach to data processing is crucial for staying ahead in today's competitive landscape. With the rising need for data-driven insights, organizations face the difficulty of dealing with massive volumes of distributed business...

I recently wrote about the various technologies used by organizations to process and analyze data in real time. I explained that while the terms streaming data and events and streaming analytics are often used interchangeably, they are separate disciplines that make use of common underlying concepts and technologies such as events, event brokers and event-driven architecture. Confluent’s acquisition of Immerok earlier this year provided a reminder of this fact. Confluent is one of the most...

Data is one of the most valuable assets an organization owns, and a robust data backup and recovery system is foundational to protecting it. Weak data protection efforts jeopardize resilience and business continuity. With data residing in multiple places – including on-premises servers and public and private cloud environments – it is difficult to ensure that all data is backed up and recoverable in the event of a disaster.