Analyst Perspectives

I previously wrote about the ongoing importance of event brokers and event management in enabling enterprises to adopt event-driven architecture and event stream processing. Many enterprises adopt EDA as the design pattern for maximizing events to deliver real-time business processes. There are many advantages to using EDA, including a cultural shift away from batch processing towards real-time...

I previously wrote about the potential for generative artificial intelligence technology to enhance the integration sector by facilitating outcome-driven approaches for automatically generating integration pipelines in response to declared business requirements. The use of GenAI in data and application integration remains nascent, but multiple software providers are embracing the potential for...

Embracing artificial intelligence technologies opens doors for innovation and efficiency. Alongside these opportunities, however, come risks. Threat actors are keenly aware of the potential impact of AI systems and are actively exploring ways to manipulate them. In this Analyst Perspective, I explore the world of adversarial machine-learning threats and provide practical guidance for securing AI...

I recently wrote about the role data observability plays in generating value from data by providing an environment for monitoring its quality and reliability. Data observability is a critical functional aspect of Data Operations, alongside the development, testing and deployment of data pipelines and data orchestration, as I explained in our Data Observability Buyers Guide. Maintaining data...

Self-service has changed immensely in recent years. It has gotten better, qualitatively, in delivering answers and resolutions to customers. But it has also gotten extremely complex, relying on a basket of new technologies to achieve results. It helps to look at it through the eyes of the three main constituencies that are affected by it: customers, contact centers and the businesses they sit in.

ServiceNow is a global software provider that has developed a cloud computing platform that helps organizations manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. The provider uses its annual Knowledge user conference to educate customers and showcase product announcements. Ventana Research had the opportunity to attend the Knowledge 2024 event and provides this analyst perspective to summarize...

Verint held its analyst conference recently, using the opportunity to flesh out how it is responding to the rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and data-related technologies and to changes in the way enterprises consider the purchasing process for contact center-related tools. 

Enterprises are embracing the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver improvements in productivity and efficiency. As they move from initial pilots and trial projects to deployment into production at scale, many are realizing the importance of agile and responsive data processes, as well as tools and platforms that facilitate data management, with the goal of improving trust in the...

Until recently, dedicated consolidation software had been a sleepy category. First introduced in the 1980s as a tool designed to run on personal computers (freeing the accounting department from reliance on its IT department), offerings basically achieved feature and function parity by the next decade. The last major technology innovation—moving the software to the cloud—began in the mid-2000s....

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has significant implications at all levels of the technology stack, not least analytics and data products, which serve to support the development, training and deployment of GenAI models, and also stand to benefit from the advances in automation enabled by GenAI. The intersection of analytics and data and GenAI was a significant focus of...

Rebalancing supply chains to improve resiliency has been a focus of enterprises with even moderately complex and long supply chains for the past four years. One aspect of this rebalancing is that it almost always involves higher costs. Volume discounts and bargaining power are reduced when more suppliers are used, or an alternate supplier may have higher factor costs and therefore must charge...

I recently wrote about the development, testing and deployment of data pipelines as a fundamental accelerator of data-driven strategies as well as the importance of data orchestration to accelerate analytics and artificial intelligence. As I explained in the recent Data Observability Buyers Guide, data observability software is also a critical aspect of data-driven decision-making. Data...

The technology landscape for enterprise IT faces a daunting challenge: complexity. As systems grow more intricate, organizations must actively seek ways to simplify the technology stack. This process, known as decomplexification, is crucial for enhancing efficiency, security and collaboration within an enterprise.

Oracle held an industry analyst summit recently where the focus was on artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded AI. At the event, Oracle demonstrated progress in adding useful AI-enabled capabilities to its business applications, especially in finance and accounting, supply chain, HR and revenue management. To put this into context, across the software industry, AI is already at work in many...

Today’s workforce places a high expectation on an enterprise’s commitment to fostering a fair and inclusive workplace. Numerous advances have been made in technology and employment regulations in the past few years, elevating the need and urgency for equitable and transparent operations relative to employee compensation. Technology plays a critical role in unlocking an enterprise’s ability to...

Value-added tax is a consumption tax levied at every point in a supply chain—from production to final sale. It’s based on the difference between the cost of production and the selling price of a product or service, or the value added. Sales taxes are different in that they are generally collected only at the final point of sale to the ultimate consumer. Enterprises collect the value-added tax...

I previously wrote about the potential for rapid adoption of the data lakehouse concept as enterprises combined the benefits of data lakes based on low-cost cloud object storage with the structured data processing functionality normally associated with data warehousing. By layering support for table formats, metadata management and transactional updates and deletes as well as query engine and...

Field service operations are not often discussed as part of enterprise customer experience planning, but there is a strong argument that they should be seen as an important factor driving how customers perceive brands. Like contact centers, field service teams are dealing with the advance of startling new technologies that can be expensive and disruptive. The flip side of disruption, though, is...

We’re quickly approaching the moment when it becomes clear that artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) will not be free. As that happens, we will discover who’s willing to pay how much and for what. After nearly 18 months of unlimited use-case fantasizing, it should be obvious that not all the potential applications of AI can be realized over the next three to five years because...

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