Analyst Perspectives

Automation uses technology to perform tasks or functions that would otherwise require human intervention or effort. Automation has existed for decades, and it takes many forms. It handles routine tasks, freeing time for knowledge workers to perform other activities that require creativity, subjectivity or empathy. Automation can also improve the quality, efficiency and consistency of business...

The publication of Ventana Research’s 2023 Operational Data Platforms Value Index earlier this year highlighted the importance of incorporating analytic processing into operational applications to deliver personalization and recommendations for workers, partners and customers. This importance is being accelerated by interest in generative AI, especially large language models. The emergence of...

Increasing threats and challenges from cyberattacks, data breaches and other incidents have made digital security a critical concern for organizations. These dangers have devastating consequences, including financial loss, reputational damage, legal liabilities and operational disruption. Adopting effective and efficient digital security strategies is key to protecting data, assets and customers...

I recently attended Sage Software’s Partner Summit. Implementation partners account for most of the sales and implementation of finance and accounting applications designed for small and midsize businesses, so they are important to the success of the software vendor. These events are designed to inform partners of product enhancements and the product and technology roadmap as well as provide a...

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...

Verint came to its Engage customer conference in June with the goal of changing the industry’s conversation around Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). The industry commonly considers CCaaS to be equivalent to cloud-based voice routing, an old and perhaps outdated way of thinking about provisioning contact centers. Verint wants to flip the narrative: voice routing is not special enough anymore to...

Despite best intentions, many organizations still struggle with some fundamental aspects of data processing and analytics. Taking data from operational applications and making it available for analysis is a first step, but data management remains a perennial challenge. Data movement and transformation difficulties can lead to delays and data quality problems that prevent organizations from...

Since acquiring InContact in 2016, NICE has moved far from its roots in call recording and contact center quality optimization. That acquisition birthed what was effectively a hybrid that married cloud contact center operations (CCaaS) with a focus on advanced customer experience (CX) analytics. NICE held its annual customer event, Interactions 2023, in June in New York, gathering end users to...

Cloud computing has emerged as the catalyst for a shift from digital transformation to digital modernization. This technology offers many advantages, including heightened agility, cost reduction, improved collaboration, enhanced security and accelerated innovation. Hybrid and multi-cloud strategies offer distinctive strengths that enable organizations to optimize the IT infrastructure necessary...

Maintaining data quality and trust is a perennial data management challenge, often preventing organizations from operating at the speed of business. Recent years have seen the emergence of data observability as a category of DataOps focused on monitoring the quality and reliability of data used for analytics and governance projects and associated data pipelines. There is clear overlap with data...

Organizations increasingly rely on real-time analytics to make informed decisions and stay competitive in today’s data-driven business landscape. As the complexity of data grows with the continuous addition of diverse sources, customers and workers alike expect real-time responsiveness. Accelerated query performance is crucial to process and extract valuable insights from data in a timely manner....

A lot has changed in business over the past ten years. The rise of e-commerce and omnichannel buying and engagement, the increasing digitization of the economy and the broader adoption of pricing and revenue models such as subscription and usage. And these are all having an impact on how business leaders need to think about their organizations.

Organizations engage in collaborative supply chain planning in order to have more accurate, timely and actionable information, including forecasts and stock-on-hand. The objective is to achieve lower costs and reduce risk while ensuring order fulfillment to achieve optimal supplier and customer relationships. Unfortunately, our research shows that that few companies manage collaboration well in...

With the growing threat landscape and increasing reliance on technology, digital security has become a critical concern. What constitutes digital security, and how is it different from cybersecurity? How are the roles of the chief information officer and chief information security officer evolving to meet digital security needs? To explore these questions, we must understand the impact of digital...

PROS has been in business since 1985, but over the past 10 years, the company has transformed itself from being primarily a vendor of on-premises price optimization software supporting the airline industry to providing a cloud-based set of applications that use data and artificial intelligence (AI) to aid in price determination. PROS also offers a scalable configure, price, quote (CPQ)...

I previously explained the arguments in favor of adoption of distributed SQL databases, the new generation of operational data platforms designed to combine the benefits of the relational database model and native support for distributed cloud architecture. It is critical for distributed SQL vendors to engage with developers to ensure they are considering the importance of resilience that spans...

The underlying idea behind trying to manage customer experiences is that of the journey: that customers follow a path through distinct stages, with different needs and modes of contact at each stage. The default mode for controlling experiences has long been to react to what the customer does and, to a great extent, build an enormous and costly infrastructure around having to wait for customers...

A lot has been written about the definition of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), though less has been written about the business considerations for an organization to evaluate adopting and implementing these technologies. And more importantly, does the technology align with the Office of the CIO objectives and the goals of the business? The value of...

Data fabric has grown in popularity as organizations struggle to manage data spread across multiple data centers, systems and applications. By providing a technology-driven approach to automating data management and governance across distributed environments, data fabric is attractive to organizations seeking to simplify and standardize data management. I assert that by 2025, more than 6 in 10...

Planful, a financial planning and consolidation software vendor, held its annual Perform23 user conference in May. The event showcased the company’s ongoing investments to provide finance and accounting departments with the means to improve effectiveness by enhancing efficiency.