Analyst Perspectives

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.

Workforce management software is used to automate and streamline core processes that organizations use to optimize their hourly workforce. These include capabilities like labor forecasting, scheduling, time tracking, absence management and compliance. In today’s competitive labor market with the complexities that accompany hyper-localized workforce rules and regulations, workforce management...

The digital transformation movement was about making wholesale changes in the use of technology across all lines of business and functions. It required organizational change on a large scale, including adapting the organization’s culture, retraining or rehiring the workforce and process realignment. Change management and a significant time commitment to implement change were necessary while...

While many vendors have focused on developing new technologies and features to improve sales execution through more personalized and targeted sales enablement, lead and sales opportunity progress tracking and scoring, manager coaching and conversational intelligence, it seems that sales and revenue teams are realizing that this is not, in and of itself, enough to arrest the decline in quota...

The Office of Finance can be compared to a numbers factory where the main raw material, data, is transformed into financial statements, management accounting, analyses, forecasts, budgets, regulatory filings, tax returns and all kinds of reports. Data is the strategic raw material of the finance and accounting department. It is the key ingredient in every sale and purchase as well as every...

I am happy to announce that I have taken on a new role at Ventana Research to lead the firm’s overall research and advisory for the CIO and technology leader practice. The area focuses on digital modernization and the transformation necessary for IT teams to be successful across an organization. The market coverage spans Cloud Computing, Digital Security, Generative AI and the technologies...

The data and analytics sector rightly places great importance on data quality: Almost two-thirds (64%) of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research cite reviewing data for quality and consistency issues as the most time-consuming task in analyzing data. Data and analytics vendors would not recommend that customers use tools known to have data quality problems. It is...

I wrote last year about how interest in pricing management is now expanding from the traditional use cases in industries such as manufacturing and chemicals. In part, this has been helped by technology changes that are allowing vendors to offer the advantages of pricing optimization and management without the “science project” approach, which has previously convinced many that the returns did not...

Zendesk held its customer conference – Relate – along with a session for industry analysts in May. Zendesk develops software primarily for customer service and support and automating aspects of the sales process through customer relationship management. The conference presented an opportunity for Zendesk to showcase several new technology developments that it hopes will solidify its position in...

Ventana Research expanded its core Office of Finance focus areas this year to reflect new and important opportunities to use technology to gain effectiveness through greater efficiency. The focus area we caption as “Purchasing, Sourcing and Payments” also includes receivables. Doing a better job of record-keeping and organizing paperwork, especially in a minutiae-laden process like order-to-cash,...

In early 2019, I first wrote about the escalating strategic challenges facing organizations resulting from the decade-long dismantling of the liberal global trade environment and the shift to more restrictive regimes. Supply chain management was upended in 2020 as a series of extraordinary events, especially the pandemic-induced supply chain shocks, compounded the tactical challenges facing...

MicroStrategy is a long-standing business intelligence and analytics vendor that operates worldwide. Founded in 1989, this publicly traded company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue recently held its first in-person conference since prior to the pandemic. Similar to previous in-person events, the event was well attended by about 2,000 attendees and exhibitors. The theme,...

Master data management may not attract the same level of excitement as fashionable topics such as DataOps or Data Platforms, but it remains one of the most significant aspects of an organization’s strategic approach to data management. Having trust in data is critical to the ability of an organization to make data-driven business decisions. Along with data quality, MDM enables organizations to...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved from a highly specialized niche technology to a worldwide phenomenon. Nearly 9 in 10 organizations use or plan to adopt AI technology. Several factors have contributed to this evolution. First, the amount of data they can collect and store has increased dramatically while the cost of analyzing these large amounts of data has decreased dramatically....

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous in discussions of contact center technology. Vendors are rushing to incorporate it into platforms and applications. And end users have understandably mixed feelings about where it makes sense to use and what its impacts will be. No one should be surprised that AI has arrived, especially for customer support: Software companies have been working...

The past five years have witnessed unprecedented innovation and investment in HCM technology. As quickly as the world of work has changed, so too have new technologies emerged to support those changes to optimize human engagement and business outcomes. Point solutions and platform providers alike have made headlines with advances in talent intelligence, personalization within the flow of work,...

The data platforms market has traditionally been divided between products specifically designed to support operational or analytic workloads, with other market segments having emerged in recent years for data platforms targeted specifically at data science and machine learning (ML), as well as real-time analytics. More recently, we have seen vendor strategies evolving to provide a more...

We’ve experienced an unusual, decades-long monetary policy in the developed world that emphasized interest rate repression as well as supply chain practices designed for lowest cost. This has produced a generation of chief financial officers likely unprepared to address the impact of fundamental changes now shaping a new, technology-driven approach to working capital optimization. Today’s CFOs...

Organizations are constantly striving for agility and efficiency to stay competitive. From a human-capital standpoint, a logical way to achieve this is by moving away from a job title and education-based workforce and transitioning to one that is skills-based. This approach emphasizes the skills and capabilities of individuals rather than their prior job titles or education, enabling...

Organizations are increasingly seeing the strategic benefits of enhanced customer engagement. But many are struggling to understand how to put a broader customer experience strategy into practice amid siloed processes and departments. Particularly in contact centers, new technology has to be melded onto existing platforms in ways that enhance experiences without disrupting operations.