Analyst Perspectives

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...