Analyst Perspectives

Databricks recently announced its Series J funding round, successfully raising $10 billion at a valuation of $62 billion. Led by Thrive Capital alongside high-profile investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners, the company intends to invest this capital towards new artificial intelligence (AI) products, acquisitions and significant expansion of its international operations. In the...

Metadata management has played a role in data governance and analytics for many years. It wasn’t until the emergence of the data catalog as a product category just over a decade ago that enterprises had a platform for metadata-driven data management that could span multiple departments and use cases across an entire enterprise.

Enterprises have been investing in software to manage their environmental, social and governance (ESG) objectives and compliance requirements. The need to account for these considerations in parallel with financial accounting began growing early in the century and accelerated as governments and regulatory authorities began to require companies to measure and document activities and outcomes....

The degree to which data platforms are critical to efficient business operations cannot be overstated. Without data platforms, enterprises would be reliant on a combination of paper records, time-consuming manual processes and huge libraries of physical files to record, process and store business information. The extent to which that is unthinkable highlights the level at which today’s...

ISG Software Research coined the term intercompany financial management to define a discipline for structuring and handling transactions within an enterprise and between its legal entities. IFM is designed to maximize staff efficiency and accounting accuracy while optimizing tax exposure, minimizing tax leakage and ensuring consistent tax and regulatory compliance. Technology has advanced to a...

Despite all the interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI), ISG’s Buyers Guide for Data Platforms serves as a reminder of the ongoing importance of product experience functionality to address adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. While new and emerging capabilities might catch the eye, features that address data platform security, performance and...

I recently completed the latest edition of our Business Planning Buyers Guide, which reviews and assesses the offerings of 14 providers of this software. One of the points that I look at is whether and to what extent the software provider offers out-of-the-box external data useful for forecasting, planning, analysis and evaluation. What I discovered is that the availability of this type of vital...

Too often, enterprises find that data is distributed across multiple silos on-premises and in the cloud. More than two-thirds of participants in ISG’s Market Lens Cloud Study are using a hybrid architecture involving both on-premises and cloud infrastructure for analytics and artificial intelligence deployments. Unifying data to achieve operational and analytic objectives requires complex data...

Technology should be viewed as an enabler of program success for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, providing extended support that enables teams to expand their reach and ability to execute more complex business processes. AI-powered recruiting platforms, for example, help remove bias from the hiring process by analyzing job descriptions and identifying language that may unintentionally...

The breadth of customer experience (CX) solutions created by software providers in recent years has expanded into new areas, usually related or adjacent to existing, more traditional toolkits. Most providers in the space began as more-or-less pure play contact center software providers, so the CX toolset starts with that set of technologies. Products are grounded in core functions for service...

When considered at all, unintended consequences are expected to be negative. As enterprises and institutions rush to adopt artificial intelligence and generative AI, the focus is on the potentially unforeseen—and unforecastable—unfavorable outcomes. However, one very likely positive impact of AI investments in business computing is the near-effortless availability of consistently reliable data...

The subscription and recurring revenue business models became a significant part of the economy this century with the advent of streaming services for entertainment and software as a service. They have grown in popularity because they enhance customer lifetime value by evolving what had previously been a one-time-sale relationship into a delivery of ongoing services, which can create a more loyal...

Field service is an often-overlooked area of the service equation, in part because managing its operations involves tools and activities outside of normal contact center models. Field service has a communications component, which is partly handled by contact centers. However, the bulk of field service management activity has to do with organizing the work of technicians and dispatchers. It also...