Analyst Perspectives

A professional services automation application marries front- and back-office functions, helping services organizations address core business challenges by ensuring that:

Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 research agenda for the Office of Revenue, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for nearly two decades to help organizations realize their optimal value from applying technology to improve business outcomes. Chief Sales and Revenue Officers face an imperative to manage their sales and revenue organizations, but they don’t always have the guidance they...

Ventana Research recently announced its Market Agenda in the expertise area of Customer Experience. CX has emerged as a way for organizations 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. This allows organizations to build great...

I am happy to share insights from our latest Ventana Research Value Index, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2023 Data Platforms Value Index is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect real-world criteria...

Since 2021, Verint’s message to the customer experience community has focused on the “engagement capacity gap,” a way of describing how the available resources for CX clash with the high level of customer expectations. The argument is that efforts to close that gap require a rethink of how contact centers (and their parent organizations) operate and plan.

I’m proud to share Ventana Research’s 2023 Market Agenda for Digital Technology. Our focus in this agenda is to deliver expertise to help organizations prioritize technology investments that improve customer, partner and workforce experiences while also increasing organizational effectiveness and agility.

Vertical strategies for enterprise resource planning systems are not new. They emerged more than two decades ago as vendors looked for ways to reduce costs and shorten time-to-value in a software category that was notorious for high costs and extended timelines. A vertical-plus strategy – the plus means it’s a platform, not just an application – takes advantage of recently available technology to...

Data observability is a hot topic and trend. I have written about the importance of data observability for ensuring healthy data pipelines, and have covered multiple vendors with data observability capabilities, offered both as standalone and part of a larger data engineering system. Data observability software provides an environment that takes advantage of machine learning and DataOps to...

Having recently completed the 2023 Data Platforms Value Index, I want to share some of my observations about how the market is evolving. Although this is our inaugural assessment of the market for data platforms, the sector is mature and products from many of the vendors we assess can be used to effectively support operational and analytic use cases.

Ventana Research has announced its market agenda for 2023, continuing a 20-year tradition of credibility and trust in our objective efforts to educate and guide the technology market. Our research and insights are backed by our expertise and independence, as we do not share our Market Agenda or our market research – including analyst and market perspectives – with any external party before it is...

As the world of work continues to evolve, so too must the way organizations evaluate talent. Traditional evaluation criteria like education and prior job titles still have a place in hiring, promotion and succession-planning processes. However, organizations that consider transferrable skills first have the opportunity to screen in talent that they may not have otherwise considered, creating a...

Consumer and mobile applications have influenced our expectations. Nearly all of us carry a smartphone, and we interact with a variety of applications on our devices. Those applications have forever influenced what we expect from computing systems. When I search the web for a gas station, I’m not searching for all gas stations. I’m searching for those stations that are near me. Not just near my...

Those of us who have worked in or alongside sales teams have observed that many sales fundamentals have changed over the years. Yet, in many ways, they have not. One essential that has not changed is sales enablement. How do you onboard salespeople and quickly bring them up to speed? Or, how do you introduce new products and services so the sales team is conversant and knowledgeable about them?...

In today’s organization, the myriad of analytics and permutations of dashboards challenge workers’ ability to take contextual actions efficiently. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom for investing in analytics does not recognize the benefits of empowering the workforce to understand the situation, examine options and work together to make the best possible decision.

Since its inception, HCM software has upended how people interact with their workplace. Paper resumes have given way to online applications. Physical time clocks have largely disappeared in favor of apps or clocks housed within a point-of-sale system. Even benefits enrollment has entered the digital age, adding tools like decision-support modeling to help enrollees determine which of the myriad...

The management of work is a focal point for every organization that has people and resources directed to accomplish the smallest to largest of tasks. But many organizations are not easily able to manage complex activities because the details of how people are assigned and complete work are not as simple as they should be. Traditional project management methods and technologies have failed to work...

Organizations conduct data analysis in many ways. The process can include multiple spreadsheets, applications, desktop tools, disparate data systems, data warehouses and analytics solutions. This creates difficulties for management to provide and maintain updated information across multiple departments. Our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research shows that organizations face a variety of...

Workiva offers an environmental, social and governance application that enables organizations to manage the highly distributed tasks necessary for reporting to regulators and stakeholders on ESG matters. ESG issues have grown increasingly pressing over the past few years as investors and government entities urge organizations to measure and disclose relevant metrics. I’ve already covered the...

For far too long, business intelligence technologies have left the rest of the exercise to the reader. Many of these tools do an excellent job providing information in an interactive way that lets organizations dive into the data and learn a lot about what has happened across all aspects of the business. More recently, many of these tools have added augmented intelligence capabilities that help...

The shift from on-premises server infrastructure to cloud-based and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models has had a profound impact on the data and analytics architecture of many organizations in recent years. More than one-half of participants (59%) in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark research are deploying data and analytics workloads in the cloud, and a further 30% plan to do so....