ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives (119)

SAS Institute: The Multi-Billion Dollar Business Analytics Supplier

Posted by ISG Research on 15 March 2011

The just-concluded SAS Institute analyst summit (Twitter: #SASSB) provided the annual update on the company’s performance, strategy, products and customers. My analysis of last year’s event talked about its continuation of its product roadmap to new customer acquisition and the broadening of its underlying platform, applications and vertical solutions. SAS is no small-time mover and shaker when...

Topics: Sales Performance, SAS, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Fraud, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Business Technology, CIO, Collaboration, Customer & Contact Center, Enterprise Software, Financial Performance, Information Management, Information Technology, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, Risk

SAP Enterprise Information Management 4.0: A Technology Secret

Posted by ISG Research on 13 March 2011

SAP has launched its Enterprise Information Management (EIM) 4.0 release as part of its “Run Better Tour.” It includes a broad range of information management components spanning data integration, data quality, data profiling, metadata management and more. The launch was done in conjunction with SAP Business Intelligence (BI) 4.0, which got much bigger billing at the event –to the point where one...

Topics: Data Quality, SAP, Social Media, IT Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Technology, CIO, Complex Event Processing, Data Governance, Data Integration, Information Management, Information Technology, Operational Intelligence

CallTower Powers Communications in the Cloud

Posted by ISG Research on 13 March 2011

The contact center market is buzzing with talk about cloud-based computing. It began with applications such as CRM from salesforce.com, then came IBM with services based on hardware in the cloud and recently vendors such as Contactual, inContact, and LiveOps have brought nearly complete contact centers into the cloud. As well, vendors such as Interactive Intelligence have announced communications...

Topics: Customer Experience, CallTower, Operational Performance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM

When It Rains, …

Posted by ISG Research on 13 March 2011

A colleague had written a piece about disaster recovery and business continuity – motivated not by the horrors that exploded over the television last night after an 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Japan triggered a tsunami, but by unexpectedly heavy rain and snow in the northeast. Should he hold off publishing it, he asked, so as not to be seen as exploiting the disaster?

Topics: Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, IT Performance, CIO

Aquire Brings Fresh Face to Workforce Analytics

Posted by ISG Research on 10 March 2011

The state of the economy has intensified scrutiny of organizations’ people assets, and so we’re seeing new dialogues about human capital management. Deriving full value from the people in a workforce requires more than just HR managing annual performance reviews or occasional scrutiny of the compensation processes for increases to merit pay or incremental incentives. Investing wisely in...

Topics: Sales Performance, Learning, Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Mobility, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Mobility, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics

On Becoming Part of the Ventana Research Team

Posted by ISG Research on 10 March 2011

Hello there! Starting this week, I’m part of the best independent research team in the business – the Ventana Research team – and I couldn’t be more thrilled. As the song goes, “What a long, strange trip it’s been” to get here.

Topics: Human Capital Management, Learning, Performance, Recruiting, Onboarding, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Performance, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Hiring, Talent Management, Workforce Performance Management

VPI Makes Contact Center Operations Suite and Simple

Posted by ISG Research on 09 March 2011

Running a contact center has never been easy, and today it is harder than ever. Customers have become more demanding of good service and less tolerant of errors and are inclined to communicate over multiple channels of communications. Companies not only have to get all the technology together to handle all these forms of interactions but must also ensure that their contact center agents are...

Topics: Customer Experience, VPI, Operational Performance, Cloud Computing, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM

SAS Institute: The Multi-Billion Dollar Business Analytics Supplier

Posted by Mark Smith on 09 March 2011

The just-concluded SAS Institute analyst summit (Twitter: #SASSB) provided the annual update on the company’s performance, strategy, products and customers. My analysis of last year’s event talked about its continuation of its product roadmap to new customer acquisition and the broadening of its underlying platform, applications and vertical solutions. SAS is no small-time mover and shaker when...

Topics: Sales Performance, SAS, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Fraud, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Business Technology, CIO, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Financial Performance, Information Management, Information Technology, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, Risk

The Contact Center Technology Revolution in 2011

Posted by ISG Research on 09 March 2011

With the new year has come a significant advance in contact center technologies, enabling enterprises to roll out new applications and interaction-handling processes in record time. What used to take six months to a year to develop and deploy – and that was considered fast! – can now be done in a week or two, creating more potential for innovation in contact centers than I have seen in the last...

Topics: Customer Experience, Operational Performance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM

Aster Data is Now Part of the New Teradata

Posted by ISG Research on 04 March 2011

There has been a spate of acquisitions in the data warehousing and business analytics market in recent months. In May 2010 SAP announced an agreement to acquire Sybase, primarily for its mobility technology and had already been advancing its efforts with SAP HANA and BI. In July 2010 EMC agreed to acquire data warehouse appliance vendor Greenplum. In September 2010 IBM countered by acquiring...

Topics: Data Warehousing, Microsoft, RDBMS, SAS, Teradata, IT Performance, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, HP, IBM, Information Management, Oracle

Secrets Revealed in Columnar Database Technology

Posted by ISG Research on 03 March 2011

This is the second in a series of posts on the architectures of analytic databases. The first post addressed massively parallel processing (MPP) and database technology. In this post, we’ll look at columnar database technology. Given the recent announcement of HP’s plan to acquire Vertica, a columnar database vendor, there is likely to be even more interest in columnar database technology, how it...

Topics: Data Warehousing, RDBMS, IT Performance, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Information Management

Human Concepts Brings Workforce Analytics and Mobility to the Cloud

Posted by ISG Research on 03 March 2011

Recently Human Concepts sold its personal organizational structure software OrgPlus to Administaff . Since it retains other products with the OrgPlus name, this step might seem puzzling, but it makes sense in terms of the company’s developing product strategy. The sale also frees Human Concepts to focus on organizations with more than 1,000 employees, where growth is more readily available. Human...

Topics: Learning, Performance, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics

Living in the Era of Hadoop and Large-Scale Data

Posted by ISG Research on 02 March 2011

It’s clear that now we are living in the era of big data. The stores of data on which modern businesses rely are already vast and increasing at an unprecedented pace. Organizations are capturing data at deeper levels of detail and keeping more history than they ever have before. Managing all of the data is thus emerging as one of the key challenges of the new decade.

Topics: Data Warehousing, RDBMS, IT Performance, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Information Management, Strata+Hadoop

SAP Business Intelligence 4.0

Posted by ISG Research on 01 March 2011

Last week SAP launched the 4.0 Release of its Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management products in conjunction with the New York City stop on its “SAP Run Better Tour”. My colleague Mark Smith has already covered the announcement in the context of some of today’s major technology trends. In this post, I’ll focus on the specifics of the product announcements.

Topics: Sales Performance, SAP, Social Media, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Business Technology, CIO, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Financial Performance, Information Management, Information Technology, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance

Bringing Tax Into Mainstream Finance

Posted by ISG Research on 01 March 2011

Taxes are a big expense for most companies, profitable or not. Many larger and midsize companies must traverse a complex and constantly shifting landscape of tax rules, rates, and jurisdictions. I’ve previously written about the need for corporations to manage their taxes more intelligently, and that that may require someone in the tax department who understands both the department’s functional...

Topics: Tax, Business Performance, Financial Performance, CFO, Corporate Finance, Financial Performance Management

Informatica Stays with Its Strengths in Data Integration

Posted by ISG Research on 27 February 2011

At Informatica’s recent industry analyst summit, Chris Boorman, the company’s chief marketing officer, opened the event by describing Informatica as expanding beyond its core offering in data integration in a broader sense. He compared this growth to Amazon expanding from being an online bookseller to offering computing resources via Amazon Web Services. I see it almost the opposite way....

Topics: Sales Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Data Integration, Informatica, Information Management, Workforce Performance

SAP Retrofits Business Intelligence and Information Management to meet IT and Business Needs

Posted by Mark Smith on 25 February 2011

SAP has reached a critical milestone in launching version 4 of its business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) product suite from its SAP BusinessObjects portfolio. These offerings, currently in final beta testing, will be released as a collection of software products by midyear.

Topics: Sales Performance, SAP, Social Media, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Business Technology, CIO, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Financial Performance, Information Management, Information Technology, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance

Talent Technology Makes Generating Talent Efficient and Social

Posted by Mark Smith on 22 February 2011

The talent management software market has and continues to consolidate dramatically through acquisitions. The trend is to bring together processes and applications for hiring, onboarding, performance assessment, compensation, succession planning and analytics. As the race continues to attract customers and users by presenting the most integrated suite of applications, a new market segment has...

Topics: Human Capital Management, Learning, Performance, Recruiting, Operational Performance, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Hiring, Talent Generation, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics

Your Company Needs a Tax Technology Expert

Posted by Robert Kugel on 21 February 2011

To manage taxes more intelligently tax departments need to focus more on execution than compliance. I’ll confess that this observation is based on informal rather than rigorous research, so I’ll leave it up to individuals that work in these departments and in the finance function generally to consider whether this applies to their company.

Topics: Tax, Business Performance, CFO, Corporate Finance, Financial Performance Management

The Diminishing Science of Research in Technology Analyst Firms

Posted by Mark Smith on 18 February 2011

The technology analyst industry has ended its barrage of exuberant predictions for the new year. After digesting all of these commentaries (some were a challenge, I admit), we need to stop our predicting and instead start a discussion about what all of us ought to be doing. From my perspective, that should be an annual statement of direction, what we here call the research agenda. I have decided...

Topics: Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Market Research, IT Performance, IT Research, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Business Technology, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Information Applications, Information Management, Information Technology, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, Industry Analyst