Analyst Perspectives

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 for digital transformation and modernization efforts.

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 quality, which is more established as both a discipline and product category for improving trust in...

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. Traditional analytics applications are often insufficient for managing the scale, velocity and...

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 their sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes. Today, S&OP software has become more accessible...

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 transformation and modernization and identify strategies for success. I’ll also set the stage for...

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) application. 

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 multiple data centers and/or cloud regions as they choose the databases that will underpin...

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 to decide to engage. Contact centers do a fine job of handling incoming communications, sorting them...

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 generative AI software must be put into terms that all stakeholders can relate to. And organizations cannot...