Analyst Perspectives

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...

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...

Human resources has long been stereotyped as the department that relies on intuition and experience in decision-making. Enterprises have evolved to understand the importance of their workforce to achieving business outcomes and not just as a line item in the expense column of a balance sheet, earning HR executives a seat in Lin Manuel Miranda’s eponymous “room where it happens.” In doing so,...

When my father entered the workforce in the 1950s, his path was relatively clear. He graduated high school, went to work in his chosen trade, did a stint in the Navy Reserves, and continued in the same or adjacent career until he retired. The same was true for my uncle, who chose to go to college but joined a firm working in his field, worked hard to be promoted, and changed companies one time...

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...

The world of human capital management (HCM) technology, and tech in general, is buzzing with excitement over the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Startups, especially, are releasing software at seemingly breakneck speed, and larger vendors, specifically the platform providers, have been releasing their own net-new or enhanced features and functionality. We’ve all read that...

In recent years, the corporate landscape has witnessed a notable shift towards prioritizing employee experience. Organizations have recognized that a content and engaged workforce translates to higher productivity, reduced turnover and improved profitability, as I previously wrote about. Consequently, companies have invested considerable resources in creating a positive work environment and...

Talent acquisition remains a focal point for most organizations in this dynamic and highly competitive corporate environment. Unfortunately, the pivotal process of offboarding often takes a back seat. An efficient employment separation process plays a key role in enhancing the employee experience, protecting the company's reputation and mitigating potential legal and financial risks associated...

For decades, most organizations thought of onboarding as a basic housekeeping item, akin to filling out tax withholding paperwork, having a picture taken for a badge, getting a uniform or signing for a handbook. In reality, true onboarding encompasses much more. It’s considerably more strategic than tactical, including all processes required to successfully integrate a new employee into an...

Perhaps no human capital management-related topic has been more widely examined in recent years than the struggle to find and retain top talent. Software has flooded the market to address the challenge from every angle — automated sourcing and stack ranking of candidates; artificial intelligence-powered employee sentiment analysis for identifying and reducing the risk of attrition; and internal...

Workforce management software is used to automate and streamline core processes that organizations use to optimize their hourly workforce. These include capabilities like labor forecasting, scheduling, time tracking, absence management and compliance. In today’s competitive labor market with the complexities that accompany hyper-localized workforce rules and regulations, workforce management...

Organizations are constantly striving for agility and efficiency to stay competitive. From a human-capital standpoint, a logical way to achieve this is by moving away from a job title and education-based workforce and transitioning to one that is skills-based. This approach emphasizes the skills and capabilities of individuals rather than their prior job titles or education, enabling...

The world is witnessing a long overdue and significant shift in the realm of pay equity and transparency. On March 30, the European Parliament passed the Pay Transparency Directive, mandating pay transparency and equity within organizations in an effort to close the gender pay gap and ensure equal pay for equal work. This legislation comes with teeth, providing strict mechanisms for enforcement...

In recent years, organizations have struggled to find and retain the right talent to fill critical roles. This can be attributed to a combination of factors, including an aging workforce, a lack of critical skills needed for current and future organizational needs, and increased competition for talent from other organizations seeking similar skills. Our research shows that, within the next five...

People analytics is the application of data and statistical methods to better understand and optimize the human capital within an organization. It has become a crucial aspect of business strategy as organizations seek to make data-driven decisions about the workforce. In the past decade, the people analytics market has experienced substantial growth, as businesses look for ways to gain insight...

We are happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Total Compensation Management 2023 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...

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Total Compensation Management, We want to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced since our assessment three years ago. For more than two decades, Ventana Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of related areas including Total Compensation Management (TCM) as well as broader HCM areas ranging...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Learning Management Value Index 2023 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...

Having recently completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Learning Management Systems (LMS), I’d like to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced since our assessment three years ago.

A decade ago, organizations were sold on best-of-breed technology stacks. In the world of human capital management, that meant a separate system for each of the myriad processes that make up a worker's life span with a company. The approach seemed to make sense because a single system cannot be the best at everything, can it? Is it realistic for a single provider to create the most advanced...

Recruiting is hard. The best candidate often isn’t even actively looking for a new role, and yet recruiters are expected to find the perfect match of skills, experience and fit at exactly the right time and somehow convince that individual to leave a familiar role and work community to join a new organization. Those who are already in the market have gone to considerable lengths to ensure their...

Compensation management is the practice of strategically aligning worker pay with job roles, responsibilities and organizational objectives. It involves setting pay levels to ensure employees are adequately rewarded for their work while considering factors such as external economic trends, internal equity, budget constraints, tax regulations and compliance requirements.

In January of 2020, I was head of product innovation for a newly launched product in the human capital management technology space, targeting high-volume hiring. We had big ambitions for that year, tied to product development and sales, all documented during our annual goal-setting and performance review process. And then the pandemic hit, and everything changed overnight. Everything, that is,...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 Market Agenda for Human Capital Management, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for two decades to help organizations derive maximum potential from workforce- and people-related technology investments and initiatives. In crafting this Market Agenda, we focused on three critical themes top-of-mind for both HCM vendors and buyers: Organizational...

As the world of work continues to evolve, so too must the way organizations evaluate talent. Traditional evaluation criteria like education and prior job titles still have a place in hiring, promotion and succession-planning processes. However, organizations that consider transferrable skills first have the opportunity to screen in talent that they may not have otherwise considered, creating a...

Since its inception, HCM software has upended how people interact with their workplace. Paper resumes have given way to online applications. Physical time clocks have largely disappeared in favor of apps or clocks housed within a point-of-sale system. Even benefits enrollment has entered the digital age, adding tools like decision-support modeling to help enrollees determine which of the myriad...

The pandemic years saw an exponential rise in organizational investment in digital learning, and for good reason. With in-person learning no longer an option, organizations were forced to quickly adapt to the changing world of work in order to ensure workers were prepared with the knowledge and training necessary to operate in ways they had never before seen. Beyond operational imperatives,...

It has been three years since Oracle hosted a CloudWorld event live in Las Vegas, and it is clear the time has not been wasted. With 12 new releases since the last event, the Oracle human capital management product team has made significant advances in both product and service. Three areas of note: Oracle HCM’s continued focus on personalization of experience, meeting the HCM needs of the...

Some weeks back I published my thoughts about the traditional applicant tracking system and how that technology is no longer sufficient to support organizations’ complex recruiting needs. This is particularly true when trying to take a one-size-fits-all approach to hiring processes. Having identical hiring processes and requirements for professional hires as for low-complexity, low...

The learning management system technology market has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Learning management systems, now commonly referred to as learning experience platforms, are an integral resource for any organization concerned about productivity, organizational agility and operational excellence. These technologies enable organizations to demonstrate an investment in people, as...

Payroll Management is one of the six major focus areas in the Human Capital Management research and advisory practice at Ventana Research. “Continuous payroll” is a hot topic in this area, with much discussion about the always-on nature of this enhanced payroll function and its related demands for supporting technologies. Advancements in payroll technologies and practices have paved the way for...

People analytics enable organizations to gain data-driven insights that optimize the impact and value of the workforce. For decades, human capital management (HCM) leaders have been sold tools marketed as analytics that were no more than dashboards filled with nice visualizations of historic data with no context as to what each individual data point meant to their strategic objectives and...

It has been nearly two and a half years since the world was thrust into one of the most dramatic eras of workforce transformation in the modern era. Organizations have been forced to reevaluate everything about the workforce, from the physical spaces in which work is done, to compensation, to non-traditional benefits and work/life enhancement offerings. Even so, many continue to struggle to...

The applicant tracking system, for all its shortcomings, revolutionized the way people found and applied for jobs when it first hit the market in the mid-1990s. Electronic applications quickly became the norm, resume or application review became more accessible for hiring teams and compliance was much more trackable and achievable, thanks to streamlined application processes. Today, tracking and...

I spent years in the talent acquisition space, and I think that at least several months of that time – cumulatively – was spent just trying to get people to calm down. Talent acquisition is a critically important business process, but if I had a dollar for every time I had to remind someone that there really are no recruiting emergencies, I’d be a wealthy woman.

In my more than two decades in the world of human resources and human capital management technology, I have never seen a topic become so completely ubiquitous so quickly as has employee experience. This is great news from my perspective. As I addressed in this recent analyst perspective, market factors have forced organizations to acknowledge the tremendous bottom-line value of an engaged...

Compensation management is a key talent management process involving all workers and managers within an organization. Determining and providing the appropriate compensation for each person — whether it involves base pay, merit pay, or variable pay and incentives such as bonuses — is critical to being able to attract and retain productive members of the workforce, including full- and part-time...

Personalization is everywhere, from clothes that are selected for us and delivered to our homes, to the ads we see, to the movies we stream. It’s no surprise that employees expect that same level of curated experience in the workplace. And yet, evidence abounds to the contrary. The proverbial black hole of recruiting is still the bane of existence of everyone who has applied for a job online and...

Data from human capital management systems has delivered significant value to organizations for decades. The value continuum has included ensuring compliance with workforce-related laws and regulations around the globe; optimizing human resources’ processes (when combined with various other elements such as change management); maintaining a historical record of key employee activities and...

Many of us can recall the excitement generated by the first Applicant Tracking Systems or ATS’s hitting the market in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After all, activities related to sourcing, screening, selecting and offering jobs to candidates was perennially a very manually intensive endeavor that also produced many false positives (unsuccessful hires) as well as false negatives (potentially...

The pandemic has had many profound impacts on organizations and their workforces, particularly the need to manage workers differently. Fewer face-to-face interactions make it difficult to “read” employee sentiments and reactions, even with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Employers are faced with the challenge of managing engagement more closely given unprecedented levels of change in...

In my recently published Analyst Perspective “Selecting an HCM System? Include the Tougher Use Cases in Evaluations,” I highlighted a few HCM systems use cases that have historically been under-supported across the vendor/product landscape. My view on “critical HCM use cases” is the same today as when I led global HR and HR technology initiatives: use cases flow from the business imperatives...

It’s no secret that many large organizations operate in a somewhat insular and siloed manner. This dynamic applies to corporate functions where value-creation from taking advantage of operational synergies could otherwise be quite significant. Historically, human resources and finance departments, for example, were among the operating areas known to closely collaborate only when absolutely...

The annual Ventana Research Digital Innovation Awards showcase advances in the productivity and potential of business applications, as well as technology that contributes significantly to the improved processes and performance of an organization. Our goal is to recognize technology and vendors that have introduced noteworthy digital innovations to advance business and IT.

One of the many things I learned while I was accountable for multiple HCM systems and tools deployments in my pre-analyst and advisor days relates to crafting what I referred to as a “winning business case.” In this context, I define “winning” as not just securing the funds, but actually realizing the expected benefits and ROI that underpinned the major elements highlighted in the business case....

"Configurable" has historically been used to describe the degree to which enterprise software, such as HCM systems, can readily adapt to a customer’s business and process requirements, ideally with no (or only modest) involvement from software experts or IT teams. The term will likely always have considerable value when evaluating HCM systems because, while not always top of mind with buyers, the...

Payroll management is one of the six major focus areas in the Human Capital Management research and advisory practice at Ventana Research. The umbrella term “continuous payroll” is used to connote the always-on nature of a modern payroll function and related demands of supporting technologies. It’s an appropriate term, especially considering that one of the most significant advances in payroll...

Many organizations are having a difficult time selecting what they believe to be the “best fit” HCM system for their particular strategic workforce goals and priorities. This is due in some cases to the very different evaluation lenses or criteria used by IT and HR teams involved in the process. The former tends to emphasize technology-specific selection considerations such as whether the system...

There is a sea change happening in the Human Capital Management systems market. Historically, the predominant orientation of human resources departments has been about mission and goals from an employer’s perspective, spanning areas such as regulatory compliance, workforce costs, efficiency and effectiveness levels, and actions needed to improve skills and overall impact. This rather one-sided...

The joining forces of two sizable companies, in this case totaling over 12,000 employees, can be expected to elevate both business risk and business opportunity. The risk side of the ledger typically impacts employees and customers. Employees become distracted or have their productivity dip until they know exactly how they will be impacted and what is changing, or even leaving voluntarily....

Many of us who have operated within the human resources profession or been involved in strategic initiatives aimed at placing the workforce at the center of competitive advantage (aka human capital management endeavors), thought we were at least conversational about predictive HCM tools. We were aware that industrial and organizational psychologists have, for decades, been creating skill- and...

Simply defined, an “HR-M&A lifecycle” is the sequence of critical workforce and HR-related activities and decisions that span due diligence through business integration after an M&A event is announced. Until recently, these potentially game-changing events were not the province or focus of HR technology offerings. This is due in part to HCM systems that, historically, were designed primarily to...

Even the most casual observer of HR Technology trends and associated vendor marketing themes will have noticed that the notion of “putting people first” has become ubiquitous as a way for vendors to distinguish themselves. This has become a double-edged sword. Customers ultimately benefit from the intense competition to add functionality that supports this claim, resulting in richer and more...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2021 research agenda for Human Capital Management, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for two decades to help organizations derive maximum value from workforce-related technology investments and initiatives. In crafting this research agenda, we focused on three critical themes top-of-mind for both HCM vendors and buyers: Organizational agility and...

People analytics is a specific focus in Human Capital Management (HCM) that enables organizations to have data-driven insights that optimize the impact and value of the workforce. These analytics are essential for addressing a broad scope of HCM objectives, but while reducing compliance risks and highlighting demographic trends have dominated the people analytics landscape for decades, various...

Determining and providing the appropriate compensation for each person — whether it involves base pay, variable pay such as commissions or bonuses or longer-term incentives in the form of cash or equity or other rewards — is critical to being able to attract and retain productive members of the workforce, whether full- or part-time employees, contingent workers or contractors. The complexities of...

This analyst perspective (presentation) covers how Compensation Management, related enabling technologies and data strategies continue to evolve, particularly in the context of prominent business issues facing all organizations today.

Here are some insights on Cegid drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on D2L drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on SumTotal Systems drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on...

Here are some insights on Workday drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on Skillsoft drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on Infor drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on Docebo drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on PeopleFluent drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on...

Here are some insights on Oracle drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on SAP SuccessFactors drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on...

Here are some insights on Saba drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index on Learning...

Here are some insights on Cornerstone OnDemand drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides a balanced perspective of Learning Management Systems (LMS) vendors and products that’s rooted in an understanding of business drivers and needs. Our continuous research and analysis of the market for business applications and technologies guide our comprehensive approach to this Value Index...

I am happy to share some insights from our latest Value Index research, which rates how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ performance requirements in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). The Ventana Research Value Index on Learning Management Systems...

Over the last two decades, the learning management system (LMS) technology market has evolved more dramatically than any other HR or HCM technology area, and for good reason. Organizations use learning applications across every department every day, thus these systems are an integral part of any organization concerned about productivity, organizational agility and operational excellence. These...

Contact centers play a substantial role in an organization’s success. The customer journey is engaged here, at each moment of interaction. Agents, whether human or machine-driven, are intrinsic to the customer experience and the value of the contact center. Customers are essential to an organizations’ overall business potential because they generate revenue. In a black-swan event, demand for...

In this video I discuss strategies for effectively engaging candidates to win the war for talent, particularly “passive talent,” or those who are not seeking a new opportunity because they are likely well cared for where they are. Even in economic downturns, candidate engagement is essential for success. I also include some recommendations for assessing and optimizing a candidate engagement...

The employee experience is about more than just the technology an organization uses. While it’s certainly important that an organization provide convenient and efficient systems, the employee experience is much broader than this. People want to feel valued, productive and that they are doing meaningful work; people desire a line of sight into career growth and how the organization supports it and...

Here are some insights on Ultimate Software drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Ultimate...

Here are some insights on SAP SuccessFactors drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated SAP...

Here are some insights on ADP drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated ADP and six other...

Here are some insights on beqom drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated beqom and six other...

Here are some insights on PeopleFluent drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated PeopleFluent...

Here are some insights on Workday drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation management vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Workday and six...

Here are some insights on Oracle drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well total compensation vendors’ offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Oracle and six other vendors...

I am happy to share some insights from our latest Value Index research, which rates how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ performance requirements in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). The Ventana Research Value Index on Total Compensation Management...

Compensation management is a critical part of human capital and talent management processes. Organizations must determine and provide the appropriate compensation for each person — whether it involves base pay, short or long-term incentives, cash or equity-based compensation — to attract and retain productive members of the workforce. However, the complexities of compensation can make it...

Here are some insights on Paychex drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Paychex and seven other vendors in seven...

Here are some insights on Workday drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Workday and seven other vendors in seven...

Here are some insights on Kronos drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Kronos and seven other vendors in seven...

Here are some insights on SAP SuccessFactors drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated SAP SuccessFactors and seven other...

Here are some insights on Ultimate Software drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Ultimate Software Group and seven...

Here are some insights on Oracle drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Oracle and seven other vendors in seven...

Here are some insights on Ceridian drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic assessment of how well payroll software vendor offerings address buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We evaluated Ceridian and seven other vendors in seven...

ADP, a longtime leader in the payroll software market, ranks first overall in this Value Index evaluation. The vendor is a Value Index Leader in the aggregated Product categories thanks to a robust set of capabilities and payroll coverage in more than 100 countries. It manages more HCM-related customer data in the cloud than any HCM vendor and offers valuable analytics for benchmarking and...

I am happy to share some insights from our latest Value Index research, which rates how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ performance requirements in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). The Ventana Research Value Index on Payroll Software 2020 is the...

Many decision-makers in HR believe the main function of an HCM system is to track and report on the sequence of events that form an employee life cycle. However, this perspective is misguided because it’s centered on transactions rather than experiences.

The payroll preparation process has long been a labor-intensive set of administrative tasks designed to ensure that everyone is paid correctly and on time. This historically has been a transaction- and compliance-centered function that involves manual adjustments, reconciliations and answering routine questions. However, things are changing. With the help of new digital technologies and delivery...

On February 24th Cornerstone OnDemand announced their plan to acquire rival Saba Software for approximately $1.4 billion in cash and stock. Each of the enterprise software companies went to market about twenty years ago with learning management solutions and over time broadened their product portfolios with other talent management offerings including performance management and talent acquisition....

On February 20th Kronos Incorporated and Ultimate Softwareannounced their agreement to merge in an all-stock deal. The companies’ boards have approved the deal, which is expected to close in late March. This union will create one of the world’s largest cloud software entities, one that company representatives are valuing at $22 billion. Aron Ain, long-time Kronos CEO who has overseen Kronos’...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2020 research agenda for human capital management, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for nearly two decades to help organizations derive optimal value from business technology and improve outcomes. A major consideration in crafting this HCM research agenda is balance. HR and business leaders must achieve a meaningful balance in supporting the needs,...

Organizations universally desire the business outcome of improved organizational agility — in other words, the ability to quickly and effectively identify and respond to business risks and opportunities, typically through workforce-related actions. Being agile requires that an organization be adept at two things: harnessing cognitive assets, the knowledge and ideas that comprise the intellectual...

I am happy to share some insights on NOVAtime Technology drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured...

I am happy to share some insights on Reflexis drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research...

I am happy to share some insights on Infor drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research...

I am happy to share some insights on Workday drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research...

Human resources and recruiting departments, and most job candidates, are well aware that we are firmly in a seller’s market when it comes to finding and hiring high-quality talent. Primary reasons for this include record low unemployment, the need to fill a variety of digital-age jobs across all industries that did not exist a few years ago and organizations competing fiercely to make their value...

I am happy to share some insights on SumTotal Systems drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research...

I am happy to share some insights on JDA drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology...

I am happy to share some insights on Ultimate Software drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured...

We are happy to offer some insights on Qlik drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and...

I am happy to share some insights on SAP SuccessFactors drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured...

We are happy to offer some insights on Microsoft drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics...

We are happy to offer some insights on Looker drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and...

I am happy to share some insights on ADP drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology...

We are happy to offer some insights on Tableau drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We then developed three additional Value...

I am happy to share some insights on Oracle drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research...

We are happy to offer some insights on Oracle drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and...

We are happy to offer some insights on Salesforce drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We then developed three additional Value...

I am happy to share some insights on Ceridian drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research...

We are happy to offer some insights on SAS drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We then developed three additional Value Indexes...

I am happy to share some insights on WorkForce Software drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured...

We are happy to offer some insights on Yellowfin drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We then developed three additional Value...

We are happy to share some insight on Domo drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and BI...

I am happy to share some insights on Kronos drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research...

We are happy to offer some insights on SAP drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and BI...

I am happy to share some insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, which provides our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Workforce Management 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. Drawing on our benchmark research and expertise, we apply a structured research...

We are happy to share some insight on BOARD drawn from our Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics and BI...

We are happy to share some insights on Infor based on our latest market Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on Analytics...

We are happy to share some insights about IBM drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

As modern workforce management (WFM) takes hold, employees are seeing changes in how they account for their time and how they access information on payroll, benefits, time off, company policies and improving their knowledge and skills. Over time they additionally will benefit from the deployment of new digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and predictive tools that help both them...

We are happy to offer some insights on MicroStrategy drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on...

We are happy to offer some insights on Information Builders drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. Earlier this year we published the Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019, the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts. We then developed three additional Value Indexes on...

It’s no secret that employees are overwhelmed. They’re having to use an array of systems and enterprise tools in the flow of work and deal with an explosion of email messages and other communications requiring some response or action and mountains of content to consume and retain. On top of these time demands, employees must try to keep up with a staggering amount of organizational change.

In January 2019 SAP SuccessFactors and Kronos announced a global reseller agreement under which SAP SuccessFactors will sell Kronos Workforce Dimensions under the name SAP Time Management by Kronos.

Roughly half of my more than 30-year career in human capital management was spent as a line manager responsible for HR technology strategy, selection and deployment. I learned a number of lessons during these years — some just in time, some after the fact. If I had to identify one common thread that unites these insights, it would be that inadequate attention to change management is an ROI-killer...

Learning management technology, either as part of a larger HCM software suite or as a standalone niche solution, has evolved from its classroom-based, instructor-led origins. Modern systems deliver information the way many employees learn best, through informal social learning that is personalized and engaging. Some of these new, often mobile-enabled approaches deliver education via short (three...

The early days of my career were spent in HR and payroll systems inside brokerage houses and investment banks. The first CHRO I reported to thought the best way to develop a plan for automating payroll management was for me to run the function’s day-to-day operations. I had no previous experience in payroll but it was a good call, as the trenches of any operations area typically reveal a...

Recent advances in workforce management (WFM) software are rewriting the way organizations tackle hourly workforce management and related administrative challenges. This is largely due to improvements in the design of business processes and a focus on enabling more hassle-free user experiences. The result is fundamental changes in how workers account for their time and request PTO, as well as how...

Over the last two years, investments in digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) by nearly every major provider of HCM systems and tools have transformed the HR technology landscape. Many of the investments have gone into developing distinctive product capabilities, particularly capabilities that rely on machine learning technology.

Employee engagement has been a dominant theme in both human capital management (HCM) and the systems to manage it in recent years; lately (though not necessarily appropriately) it is a topic often equated with the notion of the employee experience. On a related point, Gallup’s annual employee engagement survey has consistently found the majority of today’s workforce to be disengaged, defined as...

The HCM software market continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace. The innovations we’re seeing are exciting new features and capabilities, but many have more profound impacts: They provide organizations with more effective ways to serve their customers and enhance their experience. HR’s customers –employees, managers, retirees, candidates, leadership and external partners – can now access and...

Two of the most impactful contributions of any HR department are driving employee engagement and employee productivity, outcomes that are highly correlated of course. These contributions are meaningful because, for an organization of any appreciable size, even fairly small upticks in employee productivity translate into significant financial benefit. The math is simple: Increase revenue per...

2017 has been a year of major changes in the contact center market: several significant acquisitions, vendors expanding their capabilities to support more channels of engagement, a continued trend to move products to the cloud and, as a result, more vendors expanding their global presence. One such vendor is NewVoiceMedia. When I last wrote about the company I pointed out that when it was founded...

2017 has been a year of major changes in the contact center market. There have been more acquisitions than in any year I can remember. There have also been more partnerships announced, which have at least in part been enabled by the advance of cloud-based systems. The move to the cloud has continued apace, along with the addition of new capabilities that allow employees to access systems from...

I’m thrilled to announce to my HCM vendor and practitioner network as well as the ever-expanding Ventana Research community that I’m now directing Ventana’s HCM practice. I will be working closely with our CEO and Chief Research Officer Mark Smith, who is a fellow HCM enthusiast and thought leader.

A few years ago, we carried out benchmark research into customer service best practices. A key element of the research was to compare the approaches of the nearly three-fifths (58%) of organizations that described themselves as very customer-focused and the remaining two-fifths (42%) that are not so focused on their customers.

At the recent Zuora Subscribed17 London event, Founder and CEO Tien Tzuo took about 10 minutes to demonstrate that over the last 12 months the subscription economy has grown considerably and assert that Zuora is committed to supporting organizations that make the transition to such a business model. The numbers Tzuo presented were impressive but more striking still was the understanding that...

A lot is being written and said about the omnichannel customer experience and the role contact center agents play in providing such experiences. From the customer’s perspective, I think it boils down to four things: that the interaction is easy, personal to them, within the context of the relationship and previous interactions, and consistent no matter with whom or what technology they interact....

Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows the telephone is far from dead as a channel of customer engagement. Although the research shows other channels are likely to grow more quickly over the next two years, nearly half (46%) of organizations said they expect to see significant or some growth in the volume of calls they need to handle. So, as well as supporting...

Our benchmark research over the last couple of years confirms what we all instinctively know: Consumers engage with each other and organizations using an increasing number of engagement channels. Indeed, our latest research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud shows the average number of channels organizations now support has grown to almost eight. The same research confirms that...

Not many years ago, building and running a contact center was a complex task. Organizations typically had to license all the systems they required (most of them proprietary and on-premises), customize them to meet their requirements and integrate them into a workable architecture. But beyond all the systems issues, the key to running the center was forecasting the right number of skilled agents...

Customer engagement is undergoing its biggest transformation in decades. Consumers now use a significantly greater number and variety of channels to engage with organizations – everything from phone, email and the corporate website to social media, text messaging, chat, mobile apps and video. This is forcing organizations to change in order not to miss out on business opportunities.

I have been involved in the call center market for around 30 years, first as a consultant building call centers for organizations and later as an analyst covering developments in organizations’ customer engagement best practices and vendor product developments. Looking back over the first 20, maybe even 25 years, it has been a slowly developing market. Early call centers essentially included an...

Customer engagement is nothing new – organizations have been engaging with customers in one way or another ever since business began. Over the years, however, the nature of this engagement has changed dramatically, from largely face-to-face encounters and the written word to telephone, email, fax and text messaging and now to text-based applications, social media, mobile apps and video. These...

Today many conversations about contact centers and CRM focus on customer engagement and the customer experience. Customer engagement should be relatively straightforward, addressing how organizations interact with customers through different channels of engagement. However, when it comes to customer experience, I believe many miss the point. The key word is experience, which means it is...

Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement finds that three-quarters (77%) of organizations participating in the research said it is very important to improve the way they engage with customers. The two main drivers behind this are improving the customer experience (cited by 74%) and improving performance of the customer service organization (70%). This is important because...

Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows that companies use, on average, seven channels of communication to engage customers. It also finds that supporting multiple channels leads to several challenges for organizations, chiefly difficulty of integrating systems (49%), channels managed as silos (47%) and inconsistent responses across channels (33%). Today’s customers...

I recently discussed how NICE continues to invest in its core products while creating a full customer experience platform, combining its core offerings with products newly acquired from inContact and Nexidia. During two recent briefings, I learned that these investments continue at quite a pace; the company announced a new product to address the ever-increasing number of channels of engagement,...

Our benchmark research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud shows that organizations are supporting more and more channels of engagement; an emerging one is video. Adoption rates suggest that use of this technology for customer service is still in its early days, but as more consumers make video calls using mobile apps such as FaceTime, WhatsApp and Skype, we expect adoption rates...

Not long ago, organizations engaged with customers by meeting them in person, speaking with them on the telephone or writing to them. To be competitive today, however, organizations cannot confine customer service to those forms of engagement. Customers now engage with each other and organizations through a variety of digital channels that include email, corporate websites, text messaging,...

Our benchmark research into next-generation contact centers in the cloud confirms what many others are writing and talking about – that customer experience is now the business differentiator. This means that organizations need to get customer engagement right at every touch point, be it assisted by employees or digital. The same research shows that while organizations are supporting more channels...

Ever since I became involved in the CRM and customer service markets, everyone – businesses, vendors, consultants and analysts – has been talking and writing about the “360-degree view of the customer”. Despite claims from several vendors, I haven’t seen any products that produce a full 360-degree view, and user organizations haven’t had the time or resources to develop the technology themselves....

In tracking Genesys for several years I have seen it grow through a series of product developments and acquisitions – from predominantly selling call routing and computer/telephony integration (CTI) software to providing a suite of products that manage inbound and outbound, assisted and digital channels of customer engagement. Continuing this expansion Genesys recently acquired Interactive...

Until recently, the contact center technology systems market was straightforward. Vendors typically provided on-premises systems that fell into four broad categories: telephony management, workforce optimization, business applications (most noticeably CRM) and analytics. The advent of more digital channels of engagement – the cloud, mobile devices, and artificial intelligence – has muddied the...

In tracking NICE for a decade I have seen the company grow, through a series of acquisitions and product developments, from a vendor largely of workforce management systems to one that offers a full suite of workforce optimization products. It is now advancing what I call a customer experience platform that builds on top of my last coverage of it advancing its efforts. This includes systems to...

Until recently most organizations deployed systems on their own premises to build communications and contact center infrastructures, which often required them to integrate products from several vendors. In the past few years many vendors have moved their systems to the cloud, and others have begun as cloud-based suppliers. This trend has opened up the opportunity for more organizations to take...

One of the first applications I learned about in the contact center market was customer relationship management (CRM). The core capabilities of a CRM system were to manage customer data, marketing campaigns, sales opportunities and service requests. Vendors also touted them as the source for a comprehensive “360 degree” view of the customer, which they could never actually deliver because they...

In 2016 Ventana Research saw a significant shift in the customer engagement and contact center software markets. Our benchmark research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud shows that for 70 percent of companies, customer experience is and will be an important way of competing; the largest growth in ways of competing is to introduce digital self-service, which will increase by 12...

NICE is a longstanding provider of contact center systems. At the beginning of 2016 NICE acquired Nexidia, a provider of customer analytics, which raised questions about the future of the acquired company, its products and its customers. During a recent briefing SVP of product management Larry Skowronek discussed these issues. Nexidia now trades as “a NICE analytics company,” which is unusual...

Over the last few years the telecommunications and call center industries have undergone radical changes. Telecommunications was mainly in the hands of national and regional telecom companies, which essentially owned all the cables in the ground. The call center market was dominated by a small number of vendors that provided on-premises systems to manage and route calls when they arrived at a...

Our benchmark research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud shows that the telephone and other nondigital communication channels are far from obsolete: Participating organizations expect growth in all channels. As a consequence, contact centers are likely to remain a key channel to handle customer interactions, and it is likely that contact center agents will have to handle...

Our benchmark research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud confirms what most people intuitively know – that consumers now engage with each other and organizations through more communication channels than a few years ago and that many of these are speech- and text-based. Companies are therefore generating large volumes of voice recordings and textual records. They contain vital...

Zuora provides software that supports the rapidly expanding subscription economy. I recently attended the company’s user event in London, called subscribe16. During his keynote speech CEO Tien Tzuo insisted that the subscription economy is not only here to stay but is likely to grow substantially. In the U.K. alone, he said, 40 million users are using subscription services, including 14 million...

Verint is an established vendor of contact center systems. Its portfolio of products includes digital customer engagement, knowledge management, agent desktop, workforce optimization (for which it was recently rated the top vendor in the Ventana Research 2016 Value Index), voice of the customer and multiple forms of analytics - including text. Verint has built its portfolio through internal...

Robotics is nothing new to some aspects of manufacturing and the IT industry, but it is relatively new in the customer experience (CX) market. The term often conjures up images of little gray machines taking over tasks previously handled by humans – machines making cars, programmed vacuum cleaners and the like. In the CX space, however, we are not talking about machines but about software that...

Analysts have been talking and writing about a “360 degree” view of the customer for years. Our own benchmark research into customer relationship management shows that only37 percent of organizations are able to produce analysis and reports that yield such a comprehensive view. Other research into next-generation customer analytics reveals that the main issue in this area for nearly two-thirds...

In the late 1990s, CRM systems were launched to help organizations become customer-centric, to manage customer relationships from end to end, through marketing to sales to customer service, and to provide a “360-degree view of the customer.” For a variety of reasons (overselling, lack of proper adoption, missing functionality), they never lived up to many companies’ expectations, and so CRM got a...

During a recent briefing with NGData, I was initially put off by excessive “marketing speak.” The team began by describing its product, Lily Enterprise, as a “customer experience operating system.” Being used to having operating systems run entire computers, I wasn’t sure what this meant. This term was followed by a statement that NGData’s products help companies transition from being “B2C to...

Over the years, our benchmark research studies on contact center systems have shown that larger centers use dedicated contact center systems to support their operations nearly twice as often as centers that have fewer than 250 seats. Smaller centers typically lack budgets and technical skills to deploy and operate such systems. This situation is evident in the tools commonly used to support...

Evaluagent is a U.K.-based company founded in 2012 that is carving out a niche in the workforce optimization market. Whereas most WFO vendors offer broad portfolios of products that focus on operational efficiency to reduce the cost of agents, Evaluagent’s narrower portfolio focuses on the people side of interaction handling, particularly agent engagement and satisfaction. The company’s founders...

I recently attended Oracle OpenWorld for the first time in several years. The message at this year’s event was clear: Oracle is all in on the cloud. I had heard the message, but I didn’t get the full impact until I arrived at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. All signage at the event contained the word “cloud,” and Oracle issued 18 press releases in conjunction with OpenWorld related to cloud...

Effective capital planning and capital investment are vital to a company’s long-term success. The choices a company makes in this regard – how much to invest and in which facilities or projects – almost always have a profound impact on its competitiveness and performance. Because they have limited financial resources, well-managed companies take pains to ensure that these decisions support their...

I have been involved in the call center and customer engagement market for more than 25 years, first as a consultant and systems integrator and for the past 11 years as an industry analyst. There have been lots of changes in that time but never as many as in the last 12 to 18 months. A simple illustration of the change is how I group vendors.

Aspect is a well-established global provider of contact center systems. Its portfolio of products includes applications for contact centers, self-service, workforce optimization and analytics. In May the company announced it has gained clearance for restructuring its debt, which means it is in a better financial position to invest in its products and global ecosystem of partners, to the benefit...

Like many other industry observers I’ve heard overblown claims for information technology for decades. However, I’ve also observed that – eventually – reality catches up with vision. Finance and accounting departments are particularly resistant to change, yet because almost no corporations use adding machines or typewriters any more, it’s clear that transformative change can happen. Nonetheless,...

Teradata recently held its annual Partners conference, at which gather several thousand customers and partners from around the world. This was the first Partners event since Vic Lund was appointed president and CEO in May. Year on year, Teradata’s revenues are down about 5 percent, which likely prompted some changes at the company. Over the past few years Teradata made several technology...

Ventana Research has published its Workforce Optimization 2016 Value Index. The Value Index provides a comprehensive evaluation of contact center workforce optimization vendors based on responses to our RFP-like questionnaire, which was constructed using insights gained from our recent benchmark research into workforce optimization and our knowledge of the market. In our definition workforce...

Ventana Research coined the term “enterprise spreadsheet” in 2004 to describe a variety of software applications that add a desktop spreadsheet’s user interface (usually that of Microsoft Excel) to components that address the issues that arise when desktop spreadsheets are used in repetitive, collaborative enterprise processes. Enterprise spreadsheets are designed to provide the best of both...

It strikes me that the motto of successful salespeople – “ABC: Always Be Closing!” – could apply equally to corporate controllers, albeit in the accounting sense. For a while now I’ve been advocating continuous accounting, a holistic approach to managing the finance and accounting function that, in part, emphasizes using technology to distribute workloads more evenly over an accounting period –...

Verint is an established vendor of workforce optimization products that was the top-ranked vendor in our 2015 Workforce optimization Value Index. However, like many other large vendors in this category, its product portfolio and capabilities extend beyond workforce optimization; indeed, from a glance at its home page it is not immediately obvious that workforce optimization is a main part of its...

Ventana Research has newly published its Mobile Analytics and Business Intelligence 2016 Value Index. The Value Index provides a comprehensive evaluation of vendors and their product offerings across seven categories. In performing that analysis, I realized that this software category is at a crossroads. Once an optional capability often reserved for executives, mobile analytics is becoming a...

Imagine how the third Monday in next January looks to leaders in the sales department. That’s the first day of the annual sales kickoff and the excitement level won’t get any higher. New products and services are in the works, lucrative customer contracts are up for renewal, alliance partners are in the house, and qualified opportunities are already flowing through your pipeline. The executive...

Five9 provides contact center in the cloud systems. Its Virtual Contact Center is essentially communication infrastructure software deployed through cloud computing. At the heart of its products is cloud-based telephony software that replaces on-premises ACD and PBX technology. The software connects to public telephone systems and helps users receive, make and manage telephone calls while...

Vendavo is a vendor of business-to-business (B2B) price and revenue optimization software, which I have written about. A major focus of the conference sessions this year at the company’s annual user group meeting was on practical approaches to successful price optimization initiatives. While this category of software has been achieving increasing acceptance, penetration is still limited in the...

Unit4, a Netherlands-based vendor of financial management software focused mainly on midsize companies, recently acquired prevero, a German vendor of performance management and business intelligence software. The acquisition reflects a convergence of transactional and analytic business applications, which I have written about. ERP and financial management software vendors increasingly are adding...

Since I last wrote about Upstream Works it has expanded its focus on contact center agent efficiency and effectiveness to include omnichannel customer experience. Each of its core products has undergone a number of developments. Its main product now is Upstream Works for Finesse, which it classifies as a smart agent desktop. This is a desktop application that enables users of contact center...

It’s part of my job to cover the ecosystem of Hadoop, the open source big data technology, but sometimes it makes my head spin. If this is not your primary job, how can you possibly keep up? I hope that a discussion of what I’ve found to be most important will help those who don’t have the time and energy to devote to this wide-ranging topic.

It often seems to business-to-business (B2B) marketers as if the only people who understand them are other B2B marketers. They feel that salespeople don’t get what they do day-to-day, that friends and family don’t understand what they do for a living, and most of all that the executives to whom they report have no interest in what they do – that is, until the last day of the quarter. Then they...

Data virtualization is not new, but it has changed over the years. The term describes a process of combining data on the fly from multiple sources rather than copying that data into a common repository such as a data warehouse or a data lake, which I have written about. There are many reasons for an organization concerned with managing its data to consider data virtualization, most stemming from...

Invoicing and billing are mundane business activities that hardly anyone outside of the accounting department cares about, but they are where the back office meets the front office. How well a company handles the process of getting paid by its customers can have an impact on its relationships with them. Like most of the details of business process execution, the impact of substandard invoicing...

In July Salesforce officially closed on its purchase of digital commerce platform provider Demandware for US$2.8 billion. Salesforce’s executives were interested in acquiring a digital commerce platform, and they claim that Demandware was routinely mentioned in their due diligence of the market. So out came Marc Benioff’s and Salesforce checkbook, and they paid. Handsomely. For that sizeable...

Today’s proponents of artificial intelligence (AI) tend to focus on its spectacular uses such as self-driving cars and uplifting ones such as medical treatment. AI also has the potential to aid humanity in more modest ways such as eliminating the need for individuals to do tedious repetitive work in white-collar areas. Along these lines, at its recent Vision users conference, IBM displayed an...

I recently wrote that companies are struggling to provide omnichannel customer experiences and digital customer service is now seen as a business differentiator. To address these issues, organizations need to change how they use people and processes, and deploy innovative technologies that can support new initiatives. To provide an enterprise-wide solution, contact center systems fall into four...

In today’s intensely competitive markets, companies must strive to meet customer expectations during every interaction, and interactions occur through many channels. Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement finds that customers use up to 17 channels of engagement. Some channels involve assisted service from employees of the company, and some use self-service technologies...

Predictive analytics is a rewarding yet challenging subject. In our benchmark research on next-generation predictive analytics at least half the participants reported that predictive analytics allows them to achieve competitive advantage (57%) and create new revenue opportunities (50%). Yet even more participants said that users of predictive analytics don’t have enough skills training to produce...

Businesses and customers are ready for a new generation of digital commerce technology, but implementing it is challenged by significant barriers in two basic categories: technology commoditization and the lack of an IT and business framework for delivering great customer experiences. Regarding the first, for some companies making large IT purchases, the way an enterprise employs CAPEX and OPEX...

The blockchain distributed database was invented to create the peer-to-peer digital cash called bitcoin in 2008. Although the future potential of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has been debated, the distributed ledger structure using a blockchain database that supports bitcoin is likely to be adopted for a range of commercial and governmental purposes. Distributed ledgers are a secure and...

My colleague David Menninger recently wrote about the SAS Analyst Summit, concluding that “the SAS analytics juggernaut keeps on truckin’.” He observed, as I have done in the past, that SAS has a vast array of products that it regularly updates to keep up with market demand, ensuring it remains one of the premier vendors of data management and analytics systems. Dave’s perspectives provide...

I recently wrote about the challenge some companies will face in planning and budgeting when new revenue recognition rules go into effect in most countries in 2018. It’s important for companies that will be affected to be sure they have the appropriate systems, processes and training to handle the more difficult demands imposed by the new rules. With the change in accounting, the time lag between...

One aspect of living in downtown Chicago is that there’s always something going on. But as distasteful as the subject matter of certain local events can be, some proceedings can inspire perspectives on a number of topics. One that occurs to me is how the retail industry can apply the new generation of mobile and location-based technologies not only to shape the customer experience but even rescue...

New standards governing accounting for contracts will go into effect for most companies in 2018. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which administers Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the U.S. (US-GAAP), has issued ASC 606, and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which administers International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) used in most other...

In our benchmark research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud more than two-thirds (69%) of organizations said they need to improve customer service, and market dynamics require them to do this is in new ways. Whereas today most (83%) compete on the services they offer, over the next two years 70 percent said they expect customer experience to be the top way they will compete,...

Qlik helped pioneer the visual discovery market with its QlikView product. In some respects, Qlik and its competitors also spawned the self-service trend rippling through the analytics market today. Their aim was to enable business users to perform analytics for themselves rather than building a product with the perfect set of features for IT. After establishing success with end users the company...

NICE Systems was one of the first vendors I started to cover when I joined Ventana Research more than 11 years ago. Back then it was a pure-play vendor of workforce optimization (WFO) systems and was creating a portfolio of products by developing its own systems and acquiring niche vendors of call recording, quality management, workforce management, performance management and analytics. Over the...

The relevance of marketing to an organization depends on planning and performance measured against it. In writing about marketing management I have observed the marketing mayhem that can occur but also have noted that organizations that take marketing performance management seriously are in better position to assess their efforts in relation to goals and outcomes. I have a little experience in...

Workiva offers Wdesk, a cloud-based productivity application for handling composite documents. I use the term “composite document” to refer to those in which text is created and edited collaboratively by multiple contributors and which incorporates tabular and numerical data from multiple sources in a controlled process. Composite documents often have formats defined by law, regulation or...

As global business increases competitive pressures, marketing departments face new challenges. They must anticipate and respond to frequently changing customer preferences and produce effective programs and campaigns to attract them. In the online world where customers can jump instantly from one company to another, Marketing must develop new ways to catch and hold their attention. Doing this...

Cloud-based computing has become widespread, particularly in line-of-business applications from vendors such as Salesforce and SuccessFactors. Our benchmark research also suggests a rise in the acceptance of cloud-based analytics. We’ve seen the emergence and growth of cloud-only analytics vendors such as Domo and GoodData as well as cloud-based delivery by nearly all the on-premises analytics...

I have been involved in the contact center industry for more than 25 years and often see organizations that are slow in keeping up with consumers’ expectations; many of them seem reluctant to change, regardless of the need to do so. For example, agents of my cell phone operator ask the same four questions at the start of a call as they did 30 years ago; my bank supports several channels of...

Information technology enables a data-driven management style that was not feasible until powerful, affordable computers became generally available. There’s no bright line marking when this became possible; the process is ongoing. People were using financial analytics long before ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer, appeared, but the metrics available were not especially timely, broadly...

For some people in sales and marketing who struggle to meet their quarterly targets, the blockbuster announcement that Microsoft will buy LinkedIn for US$26.2 billion may seem like a midyear holiday present: a digital business Rolodex filled with new global connections that can make the task of generating revenue dramatically easier. Problem is, sales leaders and revenue-focused marketers worth...

I recently attended the Interactive Intelligence Interactions 2016 conference and came away with four key insights regarding the company’s plans and progress in providing contact centers in the cloud. These include the short-term success of PureCloud, the company’s financial performance, the importance of customer support and dealing with change.

There were two noteworthy themes in SAP CEO Bill McDermott’s keynote at this year’s Sapphire conference. One was customer assurance; that is, placing greater emphasis on making the implementation of even complex business software more predictable and less of an effort. This theme reflects the maturing of the enterprise applications business as it transitions from producing highly customized...

Managing marketing performance is anything but simple. It requires establishing a unified approach to assess the outcomes of initiatives and projects and compare results with investments in marketing people and campaigns. In general, while performance management has been conducted effectively at the corporate levels, it has been a challenge for most lines of business, marketing departments...

In our Office of Finance benchmark research 60 percent of participants said it takes their companies six or more business days to complete their quarterly close; that exceeds the best practice benchmark of five days. Consultants, academics and vendors have stressed the importance of shortening the close for almost a quarter of a century. The main reason for doing so is to provide executives and...

If you’re a sales or marketing executive or manager, your window of business opportunity is closing rapidly. In fact it started closing the day you began your job. Time is not on your side – and your career may well hang in the balance. I want to help you shift that balance to your advantage.

New rules governing revenue recognition for contracts will go into effect for most companies in 2018. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), which administers Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the U.S. (US-GAAP) has issued ASC 606, and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which administers International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) used in most other...

It’s widely agreed that customer experience is now the most important dynamic for business. Any organization that wants to retain loyal and even vocal customers should do everything possible to ensure and maintain customer satisfaction. Software companies, especially those that promise to provide CRM and effective interactions across any channel at any time, should be good examples of embracing...

Organizations in all industries face various difficulties in managing product information. The most serious is providing complete, engaging information to consumers and customers on the internet. Newly developed products, mergers and acquisitions, changes to pricing and promotions in online commerce spur business growth, but these factors also increase the amount and complexity of product-related...

Through a federal rule referred to as “Overtime Rule” and part of Title 29 regulations was issued on May 18^th, 2016 by the Department of Labor (DOL), the Obama administration now mandates that unless they meet criteria for exemption, employees paid less than $47,476 ($22.825 per hour) are entitled to overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours per week. The rule change, which goes into...

Infor recently held its annual Innovation Summit at its New York City headquarters. The company has shown leadership and creativity in business applications on two fronts: focusing its development efforts on enhancing the user experience and collaboration and building an application architecture that will deliver a rich set of functionality for ERP, financial management, CRM and HRMS and business...

I have been meaning to write about Salesforce since its Dreamforce 2015 conference. Salesforce provides a platform, tools and applications for business and IT who claims to be the ‘no software’ company which as you will read is exactly what happened on May 10^th. Heck, Salesforce is making a lot of advances on its platform, its applications and even with Analytics and the Internet of Things. These...

It has been more than five years since James Dixon of Pentaho coined the term “data lake.” His original post suggests, “If you think of a data mart as a store of bottled water – cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption – the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state.” The analogy is a simple one, but in my experience talking with many end users there is still...

Organizations are facing a digital transformation, as I have written, that is rapidly changing the applications and services that businesses use to operate and deliver information. This new digital generation addresses the expectations of consumers and business partners for information and service in real time. One example of it is enterprise messaging. Recently I wrote about the shift to this...

Compensation management is a key activity for engaging all employees and thus for human capital management. I discussed this connection in my perspective on unifying human capital management. In a further step in that direction, I am excited to announce the launch of our next-generation compensation management benchmark research. Determining and providing the appropriate compensation for each...

Enterprise messaging is the technology backbone of communications for applications and systems within and between organizations. Both its importance and its complexity are growing as organizations increasingly have to provide real-time responses to business customers and consumers as well as their own business professionals who support them and their internal supply chains. The variety of use...

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is an extension of digital connectivity to devices and sensors in homes, businesses, vehicles and potentially almost anywhere. This innovation means that virtually any device can generate and transmit data about its operations – data to which analytics can be applied to facilitate monitoring and a range of automatic functions. To do these tasks IoT requires...

As the global economy transforms into a world of digital services that cross industries, including those that provide value-added services for physical products, managing the complications that arise from digital browsing, selection and purchasing of goods, as well as activation, billing and servicing of accounts, becomes a challenge. Organizations have to not just engage customers but provide...

I recently attended the SAPinsider Financials 2016 conference, a regular event that focuses on the interests and practical needs of people in the finance function of corporations. In several sessions SAP presenters continued to stress its theme of “Simple Finance” as well as making the wry observation that in finance, simple is hard to achieve. To support its theme, the company highlighted...

The learning management system (LMS) offers opportunity for organizations to progressively enhance the effectiveness of their workforce. An advanced LMS can be more than a digital version of an organization’s training programs for specific jobs or to achieve compliance with policies and regulations. It can provide dynamic yet informal learning that business units can create, deploy and sustain...

In this highly competitive age, optimizing the potential of workers is essential. A learning management system (LMS) can increase both knowledge and engagement. Our benchmark research on next-generation learning management systems finds that adopting one can help almost half (46%) of organizations gain a competitive advantage, and more than one-third (35%) said it assists in helping customers....

I hope this title captures your attention; I’m trying to make a point about the chaos going on in managing and operating marketing. What marketing needs in 2016 is to manage and optimize its efforts in a more unified manner. This perspective kicks off a new series on the challenges for marketing to automate or execute tasks and manage toward maximum performance. We all know that the craft of...

For several years I have been advocating that sales organizations adapt their processes and applications to optimize both sales performance and the customer experience. For details see my research agenda for last year. However, it appears that not many sales organizations have responded to this challenge; many can barely maintain their quarterly sales forecasts and monthly pipeline, track...

At the 2015 technology analyst summit in Austin, Texas, analytics and business intelligence software vendor Qlik discussed recent market and product developments and explained its roadmap and strategy for 2016. Discussion topics included its Qlik Analytics Platform and QlikView 12.0, Qlik Sense and Qlik DataMarket, applications built on the platform but also how it is expanding its analytics...

I coined the term “cryptic data” to mean information that isn’t easy to find or access by people who could make use of it. In one instance, cryptic data offers professional investors – portfolio managers and securities analysts – a source of proprietary information that can improve their ability to pick stocks and achieve superior performance relative to their benchmarks. Automation through...

On Monday, March 21, Informatica, a vendor of information management software, announced Big Data Management version 10.1. My colleague Mark Smith covered the introduction of v. 10.0 late last year, along with Informatica’s expansion from data integration to broader data management. Informatica’s Big Data Management 10.1 release offers new capabilities, including for the hot topic of self-service...

Verint is an established vendor of workforce optimization, advanced analytics and self-service products for customer experience management. Recently it announced its acquisition of Contact Solutions, whose products complement Verint’s. The acquisition adds analytics capabilities and fraud detection software, both of Verint will incorporate into its existing products. Contact Solutions also brings...

The evolutionary pace of technologies that shape the design of ERP systems has been accelerating over the last couple of years. In addition to cloud computing there is the increasing availability of analytics and reporting integrated into transaction processing systems, which I have noted; support for mobile users; in-context collaboration; and more intuitive user interface (UI) design. Each of...

Businesses and their human resource organizations feel pressure to maximize the value of their human capital in today’s intensely competitive world. Many have made or considered investments in new applications that better exploit information to efficiently recruit, engage and retain the best talent. Advanced applications not only advance these processes but also help management assess the...

Six months ago I wrote that Interactive Intelligence bases its product strategy on continued support of its three core products: CIC, CaaS and PureCloud. During a recent briefing CMO Jeff Platón made it clear that although the company continues to support all three, its main focus will be PureCloud Engage that is also certified and available on the Salesforce AppExchange. When the company first...

I recently attended the SAS Analyst Summit in Steamboat Springs, Colo. (Twitter Hashtag #SASSB) The event offers an occasion for the company to discuss its direction and to assess its strengths and potential weaknesses. SAS is privately held, so customers and prospects cannot subject its performance to the same level of scrutiny as public companies, and thus events like this one provide a...

Technology innovation is accelerating faster than companies can keep up with. Many feel pressure to adopt new strategies that technology makes possible and find the resources required for necessary investments. In 2015 our research and analysis revealed many organizations upgrading key business applications to operate in the cloud and some enabling access to information for employees through...

During a recent analyst briefing, I learned that Genesys finished 2015 with a bang and enters 2016 with high expectations. Last year it made several changes at the top of the organization, naming a new president, Tom Eggemeier; a new chief marketing officer, Merijn te Booij; and a new head of global sales and field operations, Mark Turner. Their mandate is to stimulate sales of the company’s core...

Financial planning and analysis (FP&A) is one of the core functions of any finance department. Preparing a budget, measuring performance to financial objectives and forecasting the company’s financial position are three of the main tasks for the FP&A organization within Finance. A key challenge for today’s FP&A organization is increasing the business value and relevance of budgeting and planning....

Last week I attended Spark Summit East 2016 at the New York Hilton Midtown. It revealed several ways in which Spark technology might impact the big data market.

TelStrat is a company with a long history. Founded in 1993 it initially resold products of Nortel, Cisco and other telecom equipment vendors. The first product it developed and brought to market was a call recording system deployed on the customer’s premises.  It expanded its portfolio over the years, and today its product suite Engage offers all the key pieces of workforce optimization: call...

The big data market continues to expand and enable new types of analyses, new business models and new revenues streams for organizations that implement these capabilities. Following our previous research into big data and information optimization, we’ll investigate the technology trends affecting both of these domains as part of our 2016 research agenda.

Throughout the course of our research in 2016, we’ll be exploring ways in which organizations can maximize the value of their data. Ventana Research believes that analytics is the engine and data is the fuel to power better business decisions. Several themes emerged from our benchmark research on incorporating data and analytics into organizational processes, and we will follow them in our 2016...

Some followers of Ventana Research may recall my work here several years ago. Here and elsewhere I have spent most of my career in the data and analytics markets matching user requirements with technologies to meet those needs. I’m happy to be returning to Ventana Research to resume investigating ways in which organizations can make the most of their data to improve their business processes; for...

I have been involved in the contact center, CRM and customer engagement business for more than 25 years. Yet only in the past few years have I seen much change. Until recently nearly all organizations focused on handling customer interactions as efficiently and inexpensively as possible; few made much effort to manage customer relationships over the complete customer life cycle. However, over the...

A new company has emerged in the market for real-time analytics software. Anodot came out of stealth mode in late 2015 with $3 million in funding. It is led by three founders: CEO David Drai, whose company Cotendo was acquired by networking company Akamai Technologies in 2012; Ira Cohen, chief data scientist, who previously held that position at Hewlett-Packard; and Shay Lang, who serves as VP of...

There were significant technology developments in customer experience management during 2015. Multichannel contact centers in the cloud took hold of the contact center infrastructure market; I counted 21 vendors offering such services. A variety of vendors entered the market for customer analytics, combining analysis of structured data, speech recordings, text, desktop data, Web contacts, and...

Based in the U.K., mplsystems is a relatively small vendor of contact center in the cloud systems, having fewer than 200 employees, but it has a distinct portfolio of products. Its core product, intelligentContact, is designed for omnichannel customer engagement. Its two other products, Customer Service CRM and Field Service Management, are not typically supported by other vendors in this space....

IBM redesigned its business intelligence platform, now called IBM Cognos Analytics. Expected to be released by the end of 2015, the new version includes features to help end users model their own data without IT assistance while maintaining the centralized governance and security that the platform already has. Our benchmark research into information optimization shows that simplifying access to...

In our benchmark research into contact centers in the cloud, nearly two-thirds (63%) of companies said that adopting applications in the cloud would enable them to improve how they handle customer interactions, and slightly fewer than half (44%) said that adopting communication systems in the cloud would deliver similar benefits. Several vendors now provide such systems. Diabolocom is the latest...

Oracle has built one of the world’s largest software portfolios through a combination of developing products in-house and acquisitions. In the last few years it has put great effort into transitioning from providing its applications as on-premises products to making them available in the cloud. It also has worked to add customer experience capabilities to its range of business applications....

Tableau Software’s annual conference, which company spokespeople reported had more than 10,000 attendees, filled the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Various product announcements supported the company’s strategy to deliver value to analysts and users of visualization tools. Advances include new data preparation and integration features, advanced analytics and mapping. The company also announced the...

When I last wrote about Intradiem, its focus was on using numerous sources of data as input for a rules engine that enables companies to make better use of customer service agents’ idle time by allocating tasks to fill those gaps. Although that fundamental concept hasn’t changed, the latest versions of its products also take on a bigger challenge: automating the handling of interactions by...

Supply and demand chain planning and execution have grown in importance over the past decade as companies have recognized that software can meaningfully enhance their competitiveness and improve their financial performance. Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is an integrated business management process first developed in the 1980s aimed at achieving better alignment and synchronization between...

Having covered workforce optimization systems for more than 10 years, recently I was contacted for a briefing by dvsAnalytics. I quickly learned that the analytics mentioned in the company’s name are focused on workforce optimization. Founded in 1983, dvsAnalytics is headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., and has thousands of customers in various industry sectors. Its Encore suite of products...

Over the last few years, through a combination of acquisitions and internal development, Enghouse Interactive has developed a portfolio of contact center products and services. Recently it announced its product portfolio for 2016. This consists of three core products: CCE, CCSP and EICC. These are updated and rebranded versions of the products I recently wrote about, and each is designed to help...

Transera is an established vendor of contact center in the cloud systems and analytics, and as I discovered at the Salesforce Dreamforce ’15 conference and during a recent briefing, it has added support for managing voice interactions for users of salesforce.com Service Cloud. Its core product, Global Omni-Channel Contact Center, now supports voice, email, chat and Twitter, which are managed...

PentahoWorld 2015, Pentaho’s second annual user conference, held in mid-October, centered on the general availability of release 6.0 of its data integration and analytics platform and its acquisition by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) earlier this year. Company spokespeople detailed the development of the product in relation to the roadmap laid out in 2014 and outlined plans for its integration with...

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) extends digital connectivity to devices and sensors in homes, businesses, vehicles and potentially almost anywhere. This innovation enables devices designed for it to generate and transmit data about their operations; analytics using this data can facilitate monitoring and a range of automatic functions.

Founded in 2000, LiveOps has evolved a unique two-sided business model. On one side is LiveOps Agents on Demand, an Uber-like business in which home-based workers sign-up as LiveOps agents, and the company uses them to provide outsourced contact center services. This model enables LiveOps to provide flexible levels of service; customers can scale up and down as needed while the provider is able...

Much is written about omnichannel customer experience, and various software vendors now claim to focus on the customer experience. With various degrees of credibility they range from providers of communication channel management to workforce optimization, voice of the customer, self-service, analytics and even CRM. This bandwagon raisesthe question of what omnichannel customer experience really...

Ventana Research defines a human resources management system (HRMS) as the set of applications and associated processes that store and manage the employee information used by an organization’s human resources department. New technologies make it possible for the HRMS to perform better and be easier to use by HR professionals and members of the workforce. The range of evolving technologies...

The importance of product information management (PIM) has become clear in recent years and especially as it relates to master data management. As I recently wrote handling this business process effectively and using capable software should be priorities for any organization in marketing and selling its products and services but also interconnecting the distributed supply chain. Our research on...

Ventana Research defines product information management (PIM) as the practice of using information, applications and other technology to effectively support product-related processes across the customer, commerce and supply chain. As organizations increase the number and diversity of products and services they offer to customers and partners, they increasingly need to address limitations in the...

The digital economy has changed the way many companies provide products. Some no longer deliver packaged products but provide them as services over a network, typically the Internet. Telecommunications providers in particular are familiar with this business model and have developed processes and systems that use innovations such as product bundles that include elements of fixed charges (such as...

Splunk’s annual gathering, this year called .conf 2015, in late September hosted almost 4,000 Splunk customers, partners and employees. It is one of the fastest-growing user conferences in the technology industry. The area dedicated to Splunk partners has grown from a handful of booths a few years ago to a vast showroom floor many times larger. While the conference’s main announcement was the ...

I recently joined more than 1,000 users, partners, consultants and other analysts at the first global G-Force 2015 conference, held in Miami. Sponsor Genesys put together an agenda that not only educated but entertained the attendees. For an example of the latter, Sekou Andrews, a poet, actor, musician and voice-over artist, preceded the main keynotes with a wonderful sketch that put customer...

Whatever Oracle’s cloud strategy had been the past, this year’s OpenWorld conference and trade show made it clear that the company is now all in. In his keynote address, co-CEO Mark Hurd presented predictions for the world of information technology in 2025, when the cloud will be central to companies’ IT environments. While his forecast that two (unnamed) companies will account for 80 percent of...

The concept and implementation of what is called big data are no longer new, and many organizations, especially larger ones, view it as a way to manage and understand the flood of data they receive. Our benchmark research on big data analytics shows that business intelligence (BI) is the most common type of system to which organizations deliver big data. However, BI systems aren’t a good fit for...

Many senior finance executives say they want their department to play a more strategic role in the management and operations of their company. They want Finance to shift its focus from processing transactions to higher-value functions in order to make more substantial contributions to the success of the organization. I use the term “continuous accounting” to represent an approach to managing the...

One of the key findings in our latest benchmark research into predictive analytics is that companies are incorporating predictive analytics into their operational systems more often than was the case three years ago. The research found that companies are less inclined to purchase stand-alone predictive analytics tools (29% vs 44% three years ago) and more inclined to purchase predictive analytics...

I recently attended my first U.S. Dreamforce, the annual salesforce.com event designed to showcase its products and services as well as those of its partners, and I was impressed. I was told that Dreamforce ‘15 would be big, and it was – just about every hotel, restaurant, meeting room in San Francisco seemed to have been taken over for the week, and still the company had to bring in a cruise...

Our benchmark research into predictive analytics shows that lack of resources, including budget and skills, is the number-one business barrier to the effective deployment and use of predictive analytics; awareness – that is, an understanding of how to apply predictive analytics to business problems – is second. In order to secure resources and address awareness problems a business case needs to...

ResponseTek is a software vendor whose platform and services help companies collect and act on feedback from their customers. It supports a closed-loop process that collects feedback, analyzes it, provides customizable reports and analysis dependent on the user, and most importantly enables taking action based on the information. This allows companies to understand product and service issues,...

As I discussed in the state of data and analytics in the cloud recently, usability is a top evaluation criterion for organizations in selecting cloud-based analytics software. Data access of cloud and on-premises systems are essential antecedents of usability. They can help business people perform analytic tasks themselves without having to rely on IT. Some tools allow data integration by...

Calabrio is a vendor of workforce optimization software whose core product is Calabrio ONE. It includes the common workforce optimization applications: call recording, quality management, workforce management and analytics. The company is rated Hot in our 2015 Workforce Optimization Value Index, and its product suite is the highest rated in the Usability category. Since our assessment, each of...

Through a continuing program of acquisitions and internal development, NICE Systems has transitioned from being a vendor of workforce optimization systems to one focused on aspects of the customer experience, notably voice of the customer (VOC), customer engagement analytics and customer journey mapping. It is also moving to cloud-based services from products installed on customers’ premises and...

The theme of transforming the finance organization is hot again. The term “finance transformation” refers to the longstanding objective of shifting the focus of finance departments from transaction processing to more strategic activities such as providing the rest of the organization with forward-looking analysis. I focus on the technology and data aspects of this type of business issue in these...

From its history of managing postal mail, Pitney Bowes has expanded into products for data management, analytics and location intelligence, as my colleague Mark Smith noted. Continuing this expansion through internal development and acquisitions of vendors such as Portrait Software and RTC, it has added to its portfolio products that include customer information management and customer engagement.

Our recently completed benchmark research on data and analytics in the cloud shows that analytics deployed in cloud-based systems is gaining widespread adoption. Almost half (48%) of participating organizations are using cloud-based analytics, another 19 percent said they plan to begin using it within 12 months, and 31 percent said they will begin to use cloud-based analytics but do not know...

Tagetik is a long-established vendor of financial performance management (FPM) software. Its full-featured suite includes planning, budgeting, consolidation, close management, disclosure management, analysis, dashboards and reporting. The software can be deployed on premises or in the cloud as multitenant software as a service or in a private cloud. Tagetik also offers pre-built integration with ...

At the end of last year, I wrote about Interactive Intelligence’s release of a new service, PureCloud. It was the company’s first step into the multitenant cloud computing market, using Amazon Web Services and aimed at small-to-midsize contact centers. To help companies understand the different cloud-computing models, I provided answers to Interactive Intelligence questions on the advancements of...

Optimization is the application of algorithms to sets of data to guide executives and managers in making the best decisions. It’s a trending topic because using optimization technologies and techniques to better manage a variety of day-to-day business issues is becoming easier. I expect optimization, once the preserve of data scientists and operations research specialists will become mainstream...

Our research into next-generation predictive analytics shows that along with not having enough skilled resources, which I discussed in my previous analysis, the inability to readily access and integrate data is a primary reason for dissatisfaction with predictive analytics (in 62% of participating organizations). Furthermore, this area consumes the most time in the predictive analytics process:...

Longview’s recent Dialog user group meeting highlighted the company’s continued commitment to providing much needed automation tools for improving tax department performance – tools that enable the tax function to play a more strategic role in the management of a company. The sessions also covered the capabilities contained in the company’s latest release, Longview 7.2 Update 2 and gave customers...

Recently my colleague Tony Cosentino wrote an analyst perspective asserting that big data analytics will displace net promoter score (NPS) for more effectively measuring the entire customer experience. This prompted a response from Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, asserting that big data and NPS aren’t the only ways to measure customer experience success. The main point of Tony’s piece, as I interpret...