ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives (115)

Managing Customer Communications in a Multichannel World

Posted by ISG Research on 03 July 2011

In the customer service and contact center markets we used to talk about phone calls, letters, faxes and email; now we talk about “communications,” “interactions,” “contacts” and “touch points.”These four terms are used almost interchangeably to talk generally about actions involving customers and can include all forms of communication – calls, documents (letters, email, forms and surveys),...

Topics: Predictive Analytics, Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Operational Performance, Analytics, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics

SHRM Helps Socialize Human Resources

Posted by Mark Smith on 03 July 2011

I had the pleasure to drop into the 63rd annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in Las Vegas where over 18,000 human resources professionals came to learn, engage with peers and also enjoy a variety of entertainment. It was the definitely the place to be if you wanted to mix Hollywood with HR. From Sir Richard Branson in Sunday’s opener to music from Keith Urban to...

Topics: Big Data, Performance Management, Social Media, Human Capital Management, Metrics, Mobile Applications, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Mobility, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Financial Performance, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics

Taxes on Internet Sales Would Drive Software Adoption

Posted by Robert Kugel on 03 July 2011

Many companies have automated their sales and use tax processes to cut the effort required to execute them and to reduce the number of errors and their cost in dealing with a fiendishly complex set of rules and rates. This is one step in bringing tax into the mainstream of finance, which we advocate. Most people are familiar with sales tax; a “use tax” is a form of excise tax assessed on...

Topics: Sales, Office of Finance, Tax, Business Performance, Financial Performance

Two Elephants Face Off: Hadoop and Oracle

Posted by Mark Smith on 03 July 2011

I stopped into the Yahoo Hadoop Summit (Twitter: #HadoopSummit) to see how far the open source Hadoop technology has progressed. This open source community has been advancing for years with support from Internet titans like Yahoo, eBay and Facebook. Hadoop, as my colleague David Menninger has written, is now ready to play a large role as organizations try to cope with data on a large scale and...

Topics: Big Data, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Workforce Performance, Strata+Hadoop

Jacada is Back with a Smarter Agent Desktop

Posted by ISG Research on 29 June 2011

Jacada was one of the first vendors to provide a unified desktop for contact centers. It simplified the agent’s desktop by replacing several application views with a single view that better followed customer conversations. It also interfaced between those applications so agents didn’t have to worry about which fields to update, where to find data or how many applications they had to use. The...

Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Data Management, Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Jacada, Operational Performance, Analytics, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM

Yahoo Spins Out Hadoop to Create Hortonworks

Posted by ISG Research on 29 June 2011

For months the speculation was rampant, and now the rumors have proven to be true. Yahoo has officially announced that it will become a player in the emerging Hadoop market. Hadoop provides distributed computing capabilities that enable organizations to process very large amounts of data quickly. Backed by Yahoo and Benchmark Capital, a new entity called Hortonworks has formed around a team from...

Topics: Big Data, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Workforce Performance, Strata+Hadoop

PeopleFluent Brings New Face and Mobility to Talent Management

Posted by Mark Smith on 28 June 2011

This week the management of Peopleclick Authoria renamed the company PeopleFluent, reoriented its vision and launched a new suite of applications. This effort is intended to hone its focus on the intersecting aspects of talent management and respond to the increasing importance of mobility in this field. This move indicates the dynamic changes that are occurring as the software industry tries to...

Topics: Big Data, Performance Management, Social Media, Human Capital Management, Metrics, Mobile Applications, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Mobility, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Financial Performance, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics

Price Optimization and Sales Incentives Deliver Profitability

Posted by Robert Kugel on 24 June 2011

Two software applications I follow, price and revenue optimization (PRO) and sales compensation and incentives, can be highly complementary when used together. Unfortunately, since they typically are developed and sold by different kinds of software vendors, scant attention has been paid to the value of using them in tandem. I advise companies that have adopted a PRO strategy to use an incentive...

Topics: Predictive Analytics, Sales, Sales Performance, Human Capital Management, Office of Finance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Performance, Financial Performance, Workforce Performance, Price Optimization, Profitability

Business Analysts, Take Control of Your Analytic Destiny

Posted by Mark Smith on 24 June 2011

The recent buzz around business analytics has generated resurgent conversation about what businesses need from their data to optimize business processes and make better decisions. Our benchmark research on business analytics in more than 2,500 organizations produced unprecedented information about business and IT usage and competency with analytics. It confirmed that effective use of business...

Topics: Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Sustainability, Business Technology Innovation, IT Performance, IT Research, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Mobility, Business Performance, CIO, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Information Applications, Information Management, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Uncategorized, Workforce Performance, Business Planning, CFO

InetSoft Advances Business Intelligence to Deliver Business Analytics

Posted by ISG Research on 24 June 2011

InetSoft is a business intelligence vendor that is not well-known but has more than 3,000 customers. Why do you need to know about another BI vendor? As I’ve written in the past, there’s a place in this market for both the megavendors and smaller vendors. InetSoft, one of the latter, has developed a broad set of capabilities over the years that have resonated with its customers. It recently...

Topics: Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, CIO, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, InetSoft, Information Applications

Pentaho 4 Unites Enterprise Business Intelligence and Data Integration

Posted by ISG Research on 22 June 2011

As recently as two years ago, Pentaho was all about open source business intelligence. The company used an open source business model to build a base of more than 1,200 paying customers and establish more than 8,000 production deployments. It still has an open source business model, but the company has created a broad yet integrated product line that deserves to be evaluated on its features, not...

Topics: Pentaho, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, OLAP, Visualization, Workforce Performance

inContact and Siemens Enterprise Communications Working the Contact Center in the Cloud

Posted by ISG Research on 22 June 2011

While the contact center business is not the most dynamic market, it is undergoing more changes than I have ever seen. One of the biggest changes is coming about because of cloud computing. This trend was led by salesforce.com, and the impact is now being felt in the contact center market as more vendors start to provide a “contact center in the cloud.” I recently wrote about inContact , one of...

Topics: Predictive Analytics, Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Data Management, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, InContact, Operational Performance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics, Unified Communications, Workforce Management, Siemens Enterprise Communications

Cloudera Supports Hadoop with New Distribution and Enterprise Version

Posted by ISG Research on 19 June 2011

Cloudera is riding the wave of big data. I first learned about the company while working at Vertica, one of Cloudera’s partners. Customers that managed large amounts of structured relational data also needed to process large amounts of semistructured data such as the type found in web logs and application logs. The emerging channel of social media provided another source of data lacking the...

Topics: Big Data, Predictive Analytics, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, CDH3, Cloudera, Customer & Contact Center, Information Management, Strata+Hadoop

Information Builders Advances Business Intelligence for Smartphones and Tablets

Posted by Mark Smith on 17 June 2011

At this year’s Information Builders Summit, the company’s annual conference for users and analysts (Twitter: #Summit2011) in Dallas, the long-time supplier of business intelligence and information management software showed how it has been able to sustain double-digit revenue growth thanks to highly accessible and scalable software that operates on a variety of platforms and data sources. Its...

Topics: Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Sustainability, Google, Playbook, RIM, Business Technology Innovation, IT Performance, IT Research, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Mobility, Business Performance, CIO, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Information Applications, Information Builders, Information Management, Location Intelligence, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, Uncategorized, Workforce Performance, Digital Technology

IBM Gets Smarter about Predictive Analytics

Posted by ISG Research on 17 June 2011

I recently attended IBM’s analyst summit on business analytics. Since last year’s event was largely a preview of Cognos 10, which was several years in the making, I wondered what this year’s event would be about. IBM focused much of the attention on predictive analytics, strengthened by its acquisition of SPSS. My colleague Robert Kugel covered another theme from the event in his post on Cognos...

Topics: Predictive Analytics, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Workforce Performance

Interactive Intelligence Unveils Process Automation for Customer Service

Posted by ISG Research on 14 June 2011

Providing good customer service has never been easy, but today it’s more challenging than ever, because of three factors. First is the growing overlap between marketing, sales and customer service. This is driven by customers’ increased expectations about the quality of customer service, the consistency of responses they receive during interactions and privacy legislation that limits companies’...

Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Operational Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Voice of the Customer Interactive Intelligence

Attensity Makes Text Analytics Smarter

Posted by ISG Research on 14 June 2011

My research into customer analytics shows three important things: Text analytics are at the early adopter stage; companies still use spreadsheets as their main tool for analysis; and to move companies away from spreadsheets vendors must offer tools that are as easy to use as spreadsheets. That’s no easy task, given the huge volume and varied types of text data companies are generating and the...

Topics: Predictive Analytics, Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Mobility, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics

Pitney Bowes Committed to Customer Communications and Analytics

Posted by Mark Smith on 13 June 2011

The Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) analyst summit and conference this week provided an opportunity to hear about the $5 billion technology provider’s strategy to become “the leader in customer communications.” This term makes sense when applied to a division of the company that brought the efficiency of the postal meter to mailrooms around the world. Of course a lot has changed for the...

Topics: Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Communications, Customer Interaction Technology, Pitney Bowes, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Location Intelligence, Unified Communications

Predictive Analytics Support Human Judgment

Posted by Robert Kugel on 10 June 2011

Predictive analytics can be valuable tools for performance management. When the term is applied to planning or forecasting, many people take it to mean the ability to automate plans or forecasts. It’s true that using predictive analytics correctly is likely to enhance their accuracy, but these techniques do not eliminate the need for judgment; in practice, many organizations may realize more...

Topics: Big Data, Performance Management, Planning, Predictive Analytics, Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Budgeting, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Information Management, Workforce Performance, Financial Performance Management, Integrated Business Planning

Budgeting Is So Unimportant

Posted by Robert Kugel on 08 June 2011

I think one of best epigrams attributed to Mark Twain is, “Everyone talks about the weather but nobody ever does something about it.” This also has relevance to the situation with corporate planning and budgeting. Bemoaning its lack of value and calling for some sort of change goes back a long way, but few companies have matured their process. In the 1970s something called “zero-based budgeting”...

Topics: Planning, Predictive Analytics, Sales, Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Office of Finance, Budgeting, contingency planning, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Performance, Financial Performance, CFO, finance, Financial Performance Management, Integrated Business Planning