Analyst Perspectives

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...

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 Lensresearch 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda for Artificial Intelligence, continuing the guidance we have offered for two decades to help enterprises derive optimal value from technology and improve business outcomes.

Alteryx was founded in 1997 and initially focused on analyzing demographic and geographically organized data. In 2006, the company released its eponymous product that established its direction for what the product is today. In 2017, it went public in an IPO on the NYSE. At the time of the IPO, Alteryx was focusing much of its marketing efforts on the data preparation market, particularly to...

In my past perspectives, I’ve written about the evolution from data at rest to data in motion and the fact that you can’t rely on dashboards for real-time analytics. Organizations are becoming more and more event-driven and operating based on streaming data. As well, analytics are becoming more and more intertwined with operations. More than one-fifth of organizations (22%) describe their...