Analyst Perspectives

Improving data management is at the forefront of my Office of Finance research practice because, when not managed well, it can have a profoundly negative impact on departmental efficiency, individual performance, organizational agility and sustainability. Conversely, straight-through processing (STP), a business process design and data management methodology, reduces process friction throughout an organization and, by minimizing errors, builds trust in the accuracy and reliability of all data,...

Compensation practices are currently experiencing a substantial transformation, driven by evolving workforce expectations and rapid technological innovation. This shift is fundamentally reshaping how organizations approach rewards and recognition for workers. Technologies like data analytics enable more precise and personalized compensation management strategies while also fostering greater transparency and equity in how performance is measured and rewarded. These changes reflect a broader...

At this stage of the development of Generative AI, there’s much we can see clearly (at least we think we can), but there’s even more likely to surprise us. As that great 20th-century philosopher and hall-of-fame catcher, Yogi Berra, famously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The breadth and speed of innovation today in all aspects of GenAI rivals that of the internet in the 1990s, and for the same reason.

Having just completed our AI Platforms Buyers Guide assessment of 25 different software providers, I was surprised to see how few provided robust AI governance capabilities. As I’ve written previously, data governance has changed dramatically over the last decade, with nearly twice as many enterprises (71% v. 38%) implementing data governance policies during that time. With all this attention on data governance, I had expected AI platform software providers would recognize the needs of...

Spring and fall are conference seasons, and this spring I was fortunate to be invited to several software provider events that are part of my coverage of the Office of Revenue.

The artificial intelligence and machine learning landscape was profoundly altered by the emergence of generative AI into the mainstream consciousness during 2023. The widespread availability of GenAI models and cloud services has lowered the barriers to individuals and enterprises engaging with AI for various use cases, including generating content, querying data, writing code, preparing data for analysis, documenting data pipelines and using software products more effectively. The impact that...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Financial Consolidation and Close: ISG and Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG and Ventana Research.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Learning Management Systems: Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Cloud Computing Platforms Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG and Ventana Research.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Subscription Management: Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG and Ventana Research.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The AI Platforms: Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Data Platforms Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG and Ventana Research.

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 analysis and decision-making.

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 GenAI to improve the productivity of integration experts and facilitate self-service integration by...

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 systems.

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 quality and trust is a perennial data management challenge, often preventing organizations from operating...

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 what transpired.

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 data used to fuel analytics and AI. This has led to increased attention on the role of data...

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. Cloud-based software reduces the cost and complexity of ownership, making dedicated software a more...

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 the recent Google Cloud Next ’24 event. My colleague David Menninger has already outlined the key...

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 more. Logistics costs might increase, and when an enterprise moves from just-in-time to just-in-case...

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 observability addresses one of the most significant impediments to generating value from data by providing an...

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 finance-focused applications that are currently available, albeit often in limited release. We are in...

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 modernize its compensation practices and enact a system of processes designed to ensure a fair and...

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 from customers when they sell goods or services and remit the collected VAT to the relevant national or...

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 data orchestration functionality on top of low-cost storage of both structured and unstructured data,...

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 that it presents interesting opportunities for improving customer-related outcomes.

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 they fail a cost/benefit test. In theory, AI’s potential is almost limitless, but so far, little...

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 predictive AI. My colleague Rob Kugel has written about how AI can improve productivity and benefit the...

The tax provision process is an essential part of the close process and a core responsibility of tax departments. This process estimates the amount of income tax an enterprise will have to pay tax authorities in the jurisdictions in which it operates. Tax accountants derive the number by adjusting the reported net income with a variety of permanent differences, such as expenses that are not deductible and temporary differences–for example, using allowable accelerated depreciation for tax...

Many organizations have adopted DataOps to apply agile development, DevOps and lean manufacturing processes to the development, testing, deployment and orchestration of data integration and processing pipelines. The most likely ultimate outcome of these pipelines is the analytics reports and dashboards enterprises rely on to make business decisions.

If you search “for want of a nail” on your browser, you’ll discover the age-old wisdom that seemingly trivial things can have a far-reaching impact. It’s a parable for artificial intelligence used in business. Deconstruct the imagined big-picture impact of AI and there are thousands of minor tasks that soon will require little or no human involvement in the interstices of an end-to-end process. Humans will still be indispensable, but they won’t be doing predictably repetitive work....

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Digital Communications Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research.

There have been a multitude of potential use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) dreamed up over the past 18 months. ISG-Ventana Research describes AI as the development of systems and software capable of automating tasks that have previously required human intelligence. It encompasses machine learning (ML), deep learning and GenAI to deliver capabilities including predictions, recommendations, personalization, speech and visual recognition as well as translation...

It has been a predominant buzzword for several years across all areas of human resources (HR), but artificial intelligence (AI) and learning and development (L&D) are finally beginning to integrate at scale, and it is one of the most transformative evolutions for the function of learning and development in the last 15 years. For a few years, we have been learning more about how AI will impact our daily personal lives, and more recently we have seen widespread evidence of how AI will impact our...

Analytics software is used by business analysts and decision-makers to facilitate the generation of insights from data. It encompasses business intelligence and decision intelligence software, including reports and dashboards as well as embedded analytics and the development of intelligent applications infused with the results of analytic processes. Analytics software enables enterprises to improve business outcomes by operating more efficiently, accelerating product development and enhancing...

The importance of human resources technology in the workplace is growing at a phenomenal pace. While many HR applications like payroll, benefits management and human resource information systems have been perceived as critical, the new sense of criticality is more extensive than ever. HR technology is necessary to power the function of HR, but it also needs to serve as the leading example of how to engage, embrace and include all workers in the workplace experience and community. HR...

I recently wrote about the development, testing and deployment of data pipelines as a fundamental accelerator of data-driven strategies. As I explained in the 2023 Data Orchestration Buyers Guide, today’s analytics environments require agile data pipelines that can traverse multiple data-processing locations and evolve with business needs.

As a business application tech analyst, I tend to focus more on B2B than B2C and the differences between the two. So, when it comes to digital commerce, I am interested in the differences from a process or functional point of view and therefore the potential digital commerce application or platform needs required to support B2B commerce. With more B2B enterprises looking to provide access in a timely manner and when and where the customer chooses, digital commerce is a growing part of the...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Workforce Management Suites Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. 

I previously explained how master data management helps provide trust in data, making it one of the most significant aspects of an enterprise’s strategic approach to data management. More recently, I discussed how it has a role to play in accelerating data democratization as part of data intelligence initiatives. Along with data quality, MDM enables organizations to ensure data is accurate, complete and consistent to fulfill operational business objectives. While it is an established and mature...

Sage Intacct recently held its annual user conference, and while there were plenty of product announcements and roadmap presentations, my focus here is on the artificial intelligence elements. AI–both predictive and generative–is the most important capability and differentiator in software aimed at finance and accounting departments. Ventana Research asserts that by 2027, almost all vendors of ERP software will incorporate AI to reduce workloads, speed processes and decrease errors.

I recently attended the Salesforce Trailblazer DX event to learn more about Salesforce’s artificial intelligence products and strategy. Fueled by generative AI, awareness and investment in AI seems to be exploding. ISG research shows that enterprises plan to nearly triple the portion of budgets allocated to AI over the next two years. This doesn’t come as a big surprise when you look at the outcomes enterprises are achieving: Of those that have invested in AI, more than 8 in 10 (84%) have had...

Enterprises are increasingly recognizing the need to streamline operations for efficiency, agility and innovation. This has led to various “operations” or “Ops” initiatives, each focusing on a specific aspect of enterprise IT. From software development and data analytics to IT and cloud management, these Ops groups are transforming the way enterprises operate and compete.

I wrote recently about the role that data intelligence has in enabling enterprises to facilitate data democratization and the delivery of data as a product. Data intelligence provides a holistic view of how, when, and why data is produced and consumed across an enterprise, and by whom. This information can be used by data teams toensure business users and data analysts are provided with self-service access to data that is pertinent to their roles and requirements. Delivering data as a product...

Data and analytics have become increasingly important to all aspects of business. The modern data and analytics stack includes many components, which creates challenges for enterprises and software providers alike. As my colleague Matt Aslett points out, a better term might be modern data and analytics smorgasbord. There are arguments for and against using an assortment of tools versus a consolidated platform. For example, purchasing, integrating and deploying a variety of tools can be complex....

The development, testing and deployment of data pipelines is a fundamental accelerator of data-driven strategies, enabling enterprises to extract data from the operational applications and data platforms designed to run the business and load, integrate and transform it into the analytic data platforms and tools used to analyze the business. As I explained in our recent Data Pipelines Buyers Guide, data pipelines are essential to generating intelligence from data. Healthy data pipelines are...

As enterprises seek to increase data-driven decision-making, many are investing in strategic data democratization initiatives to provide business users and data analysts with self-service access to data across the enterprise. Such access has long been a goal of many enterprises, but few have achieved it. Only 15% of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research say their organization is very comfortable allowing business users to work with data that has not been...

Smart manufacturing is a strategic operating approach that aligns advanced manufacturing technology with system and process design principles to promote adaptability. It is a digital, event-driven, collaborative orchestration of physical and digital processes designed to increase productivity, efficiency, adaptability and resilience. These systems use technologies to coordinate the planning and execution of even disparate operations within factories and across an entire manufacturing supply...

In the technology industry, 2023 will be remembered as the year of generative artificial intelligence. Yes, the world was made aware of GenAI when ChatGPT was publicly launched in November of 2022, but few knew the impact it would have at that point in time. Since then, GenAI has taken the world by storm, with vendors applying the technology to make it easier to ask questions about data, write code (including SQL), prepare data for analyses, document data pipelines and use software products...

The workforce of today has been very clear with their needs, wants and expectations. They need to feel seen, valued, heard, included and empowered. They want to work in an organization that feels like a community and aligns with their personal value systems. Importantly, they expect access to technology and to be developed and supported as they navigate their careers.

Artificial intelligence seems poised to change everything, although naturally a great deal of attention tends to be paid to the cool things it makes possible. AI can also make the humdrum less tedious and even transform the dullest of back-office operations into something more meaningful. For example, AI can take accounts receivable automation to the next level. 

The next phase of buying for contact centers and adjoining service/customer experience (CX) teams is going to be heavily influenced by how vendors develop tightly integrated ecosystems and define use cases and benefits across enterprise personas. There are more people involved in the work of delivering customer service, and a broader technology landscape from which buyers can choose their software applications. Platforms now function well beyond the communications needs of the contact center,...

By the year 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the generational makeup of our workforce will be:

Is your organization prepared for the increasingly sophisticated and pervasive cyber threats that are challenging enterprise CIOs and IT leaders? Our previous analyst perspective underscored the importance of protecting digital assets and driving business growth with Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) — a proactive approach to identifying and managing cyber threats. In this perspective, we delve into the crucial business and technology considerations that enterprises must weigh when...

Contact centers have collected customer feedback almost as long as there have been telephones. The simple binary question "Did I provide you with good service today," or some variation is a common feature of agent scripts that contact center leadership uses to produce snap assessments of agent performance. Today’s analytic approaches are becoming more common, producing more insightful and nuanced pictures of what customers want, raising the question of whether enterprises understand how best to...

Much development and marketing resource is being directed at technology that supports tracking and managing the customer experience (CX) and identifying prospects. All of this is good for business and highlights some of the exciting potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) to really accelerate the basic need of matching buyers and sellers to create more efficient markets for the benefit of all. But part of the B2B customer experience also revolves around quality and...

Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is exploding driven in large part by the widespread interest in generative AI. ISG’s AI Buyer Behavior Survey reported that more than 6 in 10 participants have at least one AI application in production. However, despite the ease with which individuals can use AI as a result of natural language processing, creating and managing AI models is still a challenge. First, there is a shortage of skills. Second, the process itself involves many parts, each of...

Cloud computing has had an enormous impact on the analytics and data industry in recent decades, with the on-demand provisioning of computational resources providing new opportunities for enterprises to lower costs and increase efficiency. Two-thirds of participants in Ventana Research’s Data Lakes Dynamic Insightsresearch are using a cloud-based environment as the primary data platform for analytics. 

Zoho recently held its annual analyst day to communicate its strategy, objectives and product roadmap. The privately held company, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, has an unconventional approach to the software market. Its self-described corporate philosophy emphasizes making bold moves that challenge assumptions. Its design engineering approach stresses simplicity and cost while aiming to provide easy-to-use software with sufficient capabilities to improve personal and...

It is well known that data integration, transformation and preparation represent a significant proportion of the time and effort required in any analytics project. Traditionally, operational data platforms are designed to store, manage, and process data to support worker-, customer- and partner-facing operational applications, and data is then extracted, transformed, and loaded (or “ETLed”) into a separate analytic data platform, which is designed to store, manage, process, and analyze data....

Cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and pervasive, posing a major challenge for CIOs and IT leaders. To protect their digital assets and drive business growth, they need a new approach to security: Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). CTEM software continuously monitors and manages the enterprise’s exposure to cyber risks, enabling a swift and effective response to any security incident. In this analyst perspective, we will explore how CTEM software works, why it is essential...

After a year of near-constant AI chatter, the broad strokes of how the technology will roll out in business over the next three to five years are coming into place. It’s almost trite but worth repeating that artificial intelligence will drive a substantial boost in productivity as it’s adopted. Rather than making large swathes of jobs obsolete, it will take the robotic work out of those job descriptions, enabling people to focus on tasks with a greater economic return. 

The first wave of discussions around artificial intelligence (AI) in the contact center was focused on providing software buyers with a general understanding of what the technology could do. Now the conversations are becoming more specific, focused and direct. Buyers are more aware of the spectrum of available use cases and appear to be exploring how to map new tools to the particular business problems they face. Contact center buyers are approaching new technology deployments (or enhancements...

With a year of AI-everywhere-all-the-time chatter now in the rearview mirror, finance and accounting department executives appear to be in a state of apprehension and well-tuned skepticism about the impact this technology will have on their organization. There are solid reasons to believe that the next few years will be transformative, making it important for departments to adopt a fast-follower approach to artificial intelligence. Rather than being a laggard, leaders must be ready to take...

I have previously written about the impact of intelligent operational applications on the requirements for data platforms. Intelligent applications are used to run the business but also deliver personalization, recommendations and other features generated by machine learning and artificial intelligence. As such, they require a combination of operational and analytic processing functionality. The emergence of these intelligent applications does not eradicate the need for separate analysis of...

We live in an era of uncertainty, not unpredictability. Managing in uncertain times is always difficult, but tools are available to improve the odds for success by making it easier and faster to plan for contingencies and scenarios. Software makes it possible to manage ahead of any future event, connecting the tactical trees to the strategic forest. The purpose of planning is not just to create a plan: Enterprises spend time thinking ahead because it enables leadership teams, executives and...

Unstructured data has been a significant factor in data lakes and analytics for some time. Twelve years ago, nearly a third of enterprises were working with large amounts of unstructured data. As I’ve pointed out previously, unstructured data is really a misnomer. The data is structured; it's just not structured into rows and columns that fit neatly into a relational table like much of the other information enterprises process. Consequently, it requires different skills, different technology...

Digitally transforming finance operations has been a priority since 2020. For purchasing and the procure-to-pay cycle, software can streamline processes, shorten process times, reduce unnecessary costs, provide greater visibility into cash flows, increase control and improve results. Digitizing operations helps attract and retain the best talent because professionals spend less time on mechanical, repetitive tasks. For all these reasons, beginning this year, Ventana Research’s Office of Finance...

The migration of on-premises applications to the cloud has become more than just a technological shift; it’s a strategic imperative for enterprises. This transition, driven by the need for competitiveness, agility and responsiveness in a rapidly evolving business environment that operates at the speed of digital, is not a simple task. It requires a careful balance between the technology roadmap and the strategic business objectives of the organization.

The increasing importance of intelligent operational applications driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is blurring the lines that have traditionally divided the requirements between operational and analytic data platforms. Operational data platforms have traditionally been deployed to support applications targeted at business users and decision-makers to run the business, with analytic data platforms typically supporting applications used by data and business analysts to analyze the business.

We’ve been saying for years that natural language processing (NLP) and natural language analytics would greatly expand access to analytics. However, prior to the explosion of generative AI (GenAI), software providers had struggled to bring robust natural language capabilities to market. It required considerable manual effort. Many analytics providers had introduced natural language capabilities, but they didn’t really resonate with enterprise requirements. They required significant effort to...

Revenue and sales performance used to be the preserve of a few software providers as many enterprises made do with in-house solutions, often built on the ubiquitous spreadsheet. But increasingly managing revenue and sales performance is becoming too complex as business models are changing in response to customer behavior.

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda for Human Capital Management, continuing the guidance we have offered for two decades to help enterprises derive maximum potential from workforce- and people-related technology investments and initiatives. In crafting this Market Agenda, we focused on essential themes that are critical for HR organizations and for the software providers supporting them. The transformative nature of AI has not just begun to bring intelligence to HCM; it...

We are going through an analytics revolution in and around contact centers. There is more data to analyze and better tools to conduct the analysis. One important advancement is assessing customer sentiment and using it to predict (and influence) behavior. Enterprises are using customer experience programs to identify and act upon hidden "moments of leverage" where customers may be inclined or primed to make a purchase. To do that effectively, enterprises need insight into how the customer...

I am excited to announce that I have joined Ventana Research and ISG to lead coverage of the Human Capital Management technology practice, including Continuous Payroll, Employee Experience, Learning Management, Talent Management, Total Compensation Management and Workforce Management. 

I have previously written about the functional evolution and emerging use cases for NoSQL databases, a category of non-relational databases that first emerged 15 or so years ago and are now well established as potential alternatives to relational databases. NoSQL is a term used to describe a variety of databases that fall into four primary functional categories: key-value stores, wide-column stores, document-oriented databases and graph databases. Each is worthy of further exploration, which is...

With Ventana Research’s 2024 Digital Business Market Agenda, we continue the guidance we have offered for two decades to help enterprises derive maximum value from digital business technology investments. Through our market research and expertise, we identify trends and best practices and share insights on how to achieve technological effectiveness, particularly in key processes and systems to engage the workforce.

Sales and revenue operations teams have for the most part traditionally relied on CRMs for information relating to leads and opportunities. For inside sales (sometimes referred to as high-velocity sales) as well as field sales, relevant product, pricing and customer have been loaded or entered into the CRM to be accessed via reports, dashboards or spreadsheets. For inside sales teams, dialers with prioritized seek lists were an additional need. Yet traditional CRM software providers were...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda in the expertise area of Marketing, continuing the guidance we have offered for nearly two decades to help enterprises derive optimal value from business technology and improve outcomes. 

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda for Artificial Intelligence, continuing the guidance we have offered for two decades to help enterprises derive optimal value from technology and improve business outcomes.

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda for Digital Technology. This agenda is designed to provide expertise to enterprises across various industries, helping them prioritize technology investments that enhance workforce effectiveness, customer engagement and enterprise agility. Digital Technology is especially important for CIO and Chief Digital Officers looking to rationalize and modernize their IT portfolio. Our expertise will see a significant expansion on this topic in...

The speed of innovation and transformation has picked up considerably in the 2020s, thanks to the confluence of artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing and the pandemic. Modern consumers have wildly different expectations than their predecessors when it comes to service delivery, whether that means a preference for digital channels and self-service or a willingness to do their own troubleshooting and research. As a result, buying an operating platform for a contact center is not a simple...

In recent years, many enterprises have migrated data platform workloads from on-premises infrastructure to cloud environments, attracted by the promised benefits of greater agility and lower costs. The scale of cloud data platform adoption is illustrated by Ventana Research’s Data Lakes Dynamic Insights research: For two-thirds (66%) of participants, the primary data platform used for analytics is cloud based. As the quantity and importance of the data platform workloads deployed in the cloud...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 research agenda for the Office of Revenue, continuing the guidance we have offered for nearly two decades to help enterprises across industries derive optimal value and improved outcomes from business technology. Chief Sales and Revenue Officers face an imperative to manage their sales and revenue organizations, but they do not always have the guidance they need to embrace technology. As we look forward to 2024, we are focusing on the entire selling...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 market agenda for Operations and Supply Chain, continuing the guidance we have offered for more than two decades to help enterprises across industries derive optimal value and improved outcomes from business technology.

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda for Analytics and Data, continuing the guidance we have offered for two decades to help enterprises derive optimal value and improve business outcomes.

Ventana Research recently announced its Market Agenda in the expertise area of Customer Experience. CX has emerged as a way for enterprises to demonstrate value and stand out in the marketplace. The technology underlying modern CX is transitioning from tools that are based on communication to those centered on data analysis and process automation. No technology has had as dramatic impact as quickly as Generative AI, which has upended the industry. It allows enterprises to build great...

Since a majority of today’s workforce wasn’t around in the 1990s, it’s worth noting that “business process reengineering” was all the rage. The purpose was to review, restructure and redesign core business processes to achieve substantial improvements in market and customer responsiveness, productivity, cycle times and quality. One reason for its popularity (beyond being a money spinner for consultants) was the promised ability for the newly available enterprise resource planning systems to be...

Imagine a world where artificial intelligence (AI) seamlessly integrates into every facet of your business, only to subtly distort your data and skew your insights. This is the emerging challenge of AI hallucinations, a phenomenon where AI models perceive patterns or objects that do not exist or are beyond human detection.

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...