Analyst Perspectives

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda for the Office of Finance, continuing the guidance we have provided since 2004 on the practical use of technology for the finance and accounting department. Our insights and best practices aim to enable enterprises to operate with agility and resiliency, improving performance and delivering greater value as a strategic partner.

Ventana Research has announced its market agenda for 2024, continuing a 20-year tradition of credibility and trust in our objective efforts to educate and guide the technology industry. Our research and insights are backed by our expertise and independence, and we do not share our Market Agenda or our market research, including analyst and market perspectives, with any external party before it is published. We continuously refine our Market Agenda throughout the year to ensure we offer the...

I recently published an Analyst Perspective on how the rise of omnichannel buyer engagement coupled with subscription pricing is increasing the complexity in achieving corporate targets. An example is the software provider who implemented a new self-service capability to speed fulfillment for existing customers by enabling the direct purchase of additional licenses without assistance from the assigned salesperson. But the desired outcome of faster fulfillment wasn’t realized. The initiative did...

Discussion about potential deployment locations for analytics and data workloads is often based on the assumption that, for enterprise workloads, there is a binary choice between on-premises data centers and public cloud. However, the low-latency performance or sovereignty characteristics of a significant and growing proportion of workloads make them better suited to data and analytics processing where data is generated rather than a centralized on-premises or public cloud environment. ...

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is trending toward becoming more strategic in product-centric companies through the end of the decade. The purpose of S&OP has grown in importance. Since the mid-teens, the trade and economic environment has become less benign and more unpredictable, forcing many enterprises to redesign their supply chains for resiliency while still surmounting the dual challenges of remaining cost competitive and achieving financial targets. Over the past decade, there have...

Every contact center agent represents an incredible investment in time and money even before that person starts working with customers. The costs associated with the labor force — and the need to continually replace agents who leave — have long forced managers to use technology to optimize performance and processes. Much of the technology that was developed decades ago is still relevant and in use for quality management and workforce efficiency. Advances in related areas like artificial...

As articulated in Ventana Research’s Data Platforms Buyer’s Guide and DataOps Buyer’s Guide research, the combination of cloud computing and advanced analytics has lowered the cost of storing and processing large volumes of data, accelerating the emergence of new data platform and data operations products that enable organizations to gain operational efficiency and competitive advantage. The right combination of data platform and data management products is essential to ensure that the right...

In the evolving landscape of business operations, intelligent automation has emerged as a key driver of productivity, operational efficiency and workforce satisfaction. Each facet of an organization perceives the value of automation through the lens of its unique objectives and goals. In a previous perspective, I shared the reasons why enterprise organizations are leaning towards automating business and technology workflows, highlighting three pivotal business and technology trends that are...

The recent launch of the AI Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 corporations and research institutions engaged in artificial intelligence (AI) development (including AMD, CERN, Cornell University, Dell Technologies, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation, Meta, NASA, Oracle, ServiceNow and Sony Group), aims to achieve the following objectives:

The phrase ‘big data’ may have largely gone out of fashion, but the concept of storing and processing all relevant data continues to be important for enterprises seeking to be more data-driven. Doing so requires analytic data platforms capable of storing and processing data in multiple formats and data models. This will be an important focus for the forthcoming Data Platforms Buyer’s Guide 2024.