ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Salesforce Tackles the Entire Agent Development Lifecycle

Posted by David Menninger on 05 May 2026

Agentic AI is rapidly emerging as the next phase of enterprise automation, moving beyond static workflows and copilots toward systems capable of autonomous reasoning, decision-making and action. Enterprises are increasingly experimenting with AI agents to augment customer service, IT operations and business processes, yet many struggle to operationalize these systems at scale. The challenge is no... Read More

Topics: Governance, Generative AI, AI & Technologies, AI & Machine Learning

A2A v. MCP: Why AI Agents Need Both

Posted by David Menninger on 16 December 2025

Agentic AI is moving from pilots to production systems that execute work across enterprise applications, data platforms and business processes. As I’ve argued before, the value of AI is realized in action, not just answers, and enterprises are investing accordingly. One of the key questions now is how to coordinate the actions among different agents. My colleague Matt Aslett’s perspective on... Read More

Topics: Governance, Generative AI, AI & Technologies

Cloudera Evolves Its Open Data Lakehouse

Posted by David Menninger on 03 December 2025

Cloudera recently hosted its EVOLVE25 event in New York, introducing updates that reinforce its commitment to open data architectures and hybrid data management. The announcements centered on a unified platform across cloud and on-premises deployments. Cloudera also announced the Iceberg REST Catalog and Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer, both of which extend the provider’s ability to manage and share... Read More

Topics: Governance, Data Platforms, Data Intelligence, AI & Technologies, AI and Machine Learning

Databricks Data+AI Summit

Posted by David Menninger on 24 July 2025

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... Read More

Topics: Governance, Analytics, AI, Data Platforms, Generative AI, Data Intelligence, AI & Technologies, AI and Machine Learning

Google Next Highlights AI Investments

Posted by David Menninger on 03 June 2025

The artificial intelligence (AI) landscape is undergoing dramatic transformation, with enterprises rapidly adapting to a world where AI is no longer just a possibility but a necessity. ISG Market Lens research of 300 enterprises shows that AI initiatives were the second largest category of IT spending for 2024, behind customer experience initiatives. Furthermore, enterprises plan to increase 2025... Read More

Topics: Generative AI, AI & Technologies, AI and Machine Learning, Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle Wants to Be the Database for AI

Posted by David Menninger on 15 May 2025

Founded as Software Development Laboratories in 1977, Oracle is a behemoth in the software industry, generating more than $50 billion in revenue in its fiscal year 2024. Originally focused solely on the relational database market, the software provider operated as Relational Systems, Inc. for several years before adopting the name Oracle in 1982. The company went public in 1986 and became one of... Read More

Topics: Machine Learning, Artificial intelligence, Data Platforms, Generative AI

SAP Unleashes Business Data Cloud for Unified AI Strategy

Posted by David Menninger on 20 March 2025

SAP was formed in 1972 to create standardized business software that would integrate all business processes and enable data processing in real time. Following the success of the initial release and subsequent R/2, the company went public in 1988 and has grown into one of the world’s largest software companies, reporting more than $37 billion in revenues in its most recent annual report. Through... Read More

Topics: Machine Learning, Analytics, AI, Data Intelligence

Agentic AI: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Posted by David Menninger on 04 March 2025

AI, like analytics, must lead to action. Too often, in both cases, too much of the exercise is left to the reader. We have tools to provide sophisticated analyses, including AI platforms that can be used to predict many types of behavior, but we fall short in helping the workforce know what to do with that information. Some examples are more obvious, such as fraud detection. If a transaction is... Read More

Topics: Artificial intelligence

Databricks Scores Massive Funding Round, Continues to Expand Its Offerings

Posted by David Menninger on 29 January 2025

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... Read More

Topics: Analytics, AI, Analytics and Data

Detecting and Preventing Bias: A Crucial Element of AI Governance

Posted by David Menninger on 09 October 2024

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) governance has emerged as a critical ingredient for successful AI deployments. It helps build trust in the results of AI models, it helps ensure compliance with regulations and it is necessary to meet internal governance requirements. Effective AI governance must encompass various dimensions, including data privacy,... Read More

Topics: AI, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning

Avoiding Toxicity in Generative AI

Posted by David Menninger on 24 September 2024

As I’ve written recently, artificial intelligence governance is a concern for many enterprises. In our recent ISG Market Lens study on generative AI, 39% of participants cited data privacy and security among the biggest inhibitors to adopting AI. Nearly a third (32%) identified performance and quality (e.g., erroneous results), and an equal amount (32%) mentioned legal risk. The AI market has... Read More

Topics: AI, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning

Market Observations on AI Governance

Posted by David Menninger on 01 August 2024

Having just completed our AI Platforms Buyers Guide assessment of 25 different software providers, I was surprised to see how few provided robust AI governance capabilities. As I’ve written previously, data governance has changed dramatically over the last decade, with nearly twice as many enterprises (71% v. 38%) implementing data governance policies during that time. With all this attention on... Read More

Topics: AI, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning

The Buyers Guides for AI Platforms Classifies and Rates Software Providers

Posted by David Menninger on 23 July 2024

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The AI Platforms: Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. While Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved over many decades, it is front and center due to a combination of... Read More

Topics: AI

Google Expands AI Capabilities at Cloud Next ’24

Posted by David Menninger on 09 May 2024

The artificial intelligence (AI) market is exploding with activity, which is part of the reason we recently announced that we have dedicated an entire practice at Ventana Research to the topic. Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) have taken the AI world by storm. In fact, we assert that through 2026, one-half of all AI investments will be based on generative rather than... Read More

Topics: AI, natural language processing, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning

Salesforce Wants Everyone to be an Einstein with AI

Posted by David Menninger on 11 April 2024

I recently attended the Salesforce Trailblazer DX event to learn more about Salesforce’s artificial intelligence products and strategy. Fueled by generative AI, awareness and investment in AI seems to be exploding. ISG research shows that enterprises plan to nearly triple the portion of budgets allocated to AI over the next two years. This doesn’t come as a big surprise when you look at the... Read More

Topics: AI, natural language processing, Deep Learning, Model Building and Large Language Models, Computer Vision

AI Innovations in Data and Analytics at SAP

Posted by David Menninger on 09 April 2024

Data and analytics have become increasingly important to all aspects of business. The modern data and analytics stack includes many components, which creates challenges for enterprises and software providers alike. As my colleague Matt Aslett points out, a better term might be modern data and analytics smorgasbord. There are arguments for and against using an assortment of tools versus a... Read More

Topics: Analytics, AI, data operations, Analytics and Data

Refocus on AI, Skill-Building for the Greatest Operational Impact

Posted by David Menninger on 21 March 2024

In the technology industry, 2023 will be remembered as the year of generative artificial intelligence. Yes, the world was made aware of GenAI when ChatGPT was publicly launched in November of 2022, but few knew the impact it would have at that point in time. Since then, GenAI has taken the world by storm, with vendors applying the technology to make it easier to ask questions about data, write... Read More

Topics: Artificial intelligence, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning

As Interest in AI Scales, So Does Domino Data Lab

Posted by David Menninger on 13 March 2024

Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is exploding driven in large part by the widespread interest in generative AI. ISG’s AI Buyer Behavior Survey reported that more than 6 in 10 participants have at least one AI application in production. However, despite the ease with which individuals can use AI as a result of natural language processing, creating and managing AI models is still a... Read More

Topics: Data Science, AI, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning

Look Out: Computer Vision in AI is Coming Into Sight

Posted by David Menninger on 21 February 2024

Unstructured data has been a significant factor in data lakes and analytics for some time. Twelve years ago, nearly a third of enterprises were working with large amounts of unstructured data. As I’ve pointed out previously, unstructured data is really a misnomer. The data is structured; it's just not structured into rows and columns that fit neatly into a relational table like much of the other... Read More

Topics: Artificial intelligence, Computer Vision, Analytics and Data, AI and Machine Learning

Generative AI Makes Natural Language Analytics a Reality

Posted by David Menninger on 13 February 2024

We’ve been saying for years that natural language processing (NLP) and natural language analytics would greatly expand access to analytics. However, prior to the explosion of generative AI (GenAI), software providers had struggled to bring robust natural language capabilities to market. It required considerable manual effort. Many analytics providers had introduced natural language capabilities,... Read More

Topics: business intelligence, Artificial intelligence, natural language processing, Analytics and Data