Analyst Perspectives

In the evolving landscape of business operations, intelligent automation has emerged as a key driver of productivity, operational efficiency and workforce satisfaction. Each facet of an organization perceives the value of automation through the lens of its unique objectives and goals. In a previous perspective, I shared the reasons why enterprise organizations are leaning towards automating business and technology workflows, highlighting three pivotal business and technology trends that are...

The recent launch of the AI Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 corporations and research institutions engaged in artificial intelligence (AI) development (including AMD, CERN, Cornell University, Dell Technologies, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation, Meta, NASA, Oracle, ServiceNow and Sony Group), aims to achieve the following objectives:

The phrase ‘big data’ may have largely gone out of fashion, but the concept of storing and processing all relevant data continues to be important for enterprises seeking to be more data-driven. Doing so requires analytic data platforms capable of storing and processing data in multiple formats and data models. This will be an important focus for the forthcoming Data Platforms Buyer’s Guide 2024. 

The pandemic laid bare the tenuous relationship between many contact centers and their agents. The abrupt shift to remote work was just one component of the changes still under way. The past four years have also seen enterprises reckoning with questions about how to hire, what to pay their employees, what skills are needed and how an avalanche of new technology will change their operations. 

I have a phrase I like to use when describing the changing nature of sales: Not all revenue and sales dollars look the same. This is in reference to the changing nature of both how in addition to traditional offerings, organizations are now selling subscription and usage-based products and services through multiple channels. These customer-driven shifts in the approach to buying and selling are also altering the economics of the B2B and B2B business models. 

Ensuring digital effectiveness requires insights into how enterprises can provide the best outcomes through people, processes and technologies. Armed with those insights, business and technology investments can effectively innovate and streamline organizational processes.

Billtrust software manages the full accounts receivable (A/R) cycle, from invoicing to payments, to increase the productivity of the A/R staff while providing customers with a better experience and reducing frictions in their order-to-pay motions. The company’s unified A/R software supports credit application automation, invoice delivery, collections, cash application, payment management and a business payments network (BPN).

I recently discussed how fashion has a surprisingly significant role to play in the data market as various architectural approaches to data storage and processing take turns enjoying a phase in the limelight. Pendulum swing is a theory of fashion that describes the periodic movement of trends between two extremes, such as short and long hemlines or skinny and baggy/flared trousers. Pendulum swing theory is similarly a factor in data technology trends, with an example being the oscillation...

It often takes longer to adopt new technology in the customer service delivery environment than in other business areas. In fact, service operations are among the most efficient and well-organized processes (despite what consumers might think). Because both the processes and the technology that drive them are deeply engrained in many companies, many people resist large-scale transformation projects because of their disruption and the uncertainty of outcomes. 

Doing more by doing less means using artificial intelligence and related technologies to make financial planning and analysis organizations more productive. By eliminating low-value and unproductive work, AI enables FP&A teams to free up considerable time for more useful and consequential forecasting, planning, budgeting, analysis and reporting. 

I previously described how Oracle had positioned its database portfolio to address any and all data platform requirements. The caveat to that statement at the time was that any organization wanting to take advantage of the company’s flagship Oracle Autonomous Database could only do so using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud computing service, their own datacenter or a hybrid cloud environment. The widespread popularity of Oracle Database and the advanced automation capabilities delivered...

We conducted our recent Smart Financial Close Dynamic Insights Research in part to assess to what extent the substantial disruptions of the pandemic have impacted the accounting close. When office lockdowns began in the first quarter of 2020, many finance departments were challenged to conduct the quarterly close remotely without face-to-face interactions. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission was so concerned that corporations would be unable to meet filing deadlines...

insightsoftware offers a portfolio of software designed mainly for the office of finance to handle reporting, budgeting and planning, consolidation and close management, business intelligence (BI) and analytics, as well as compliance. The company’s applications directly address a core issue confronting many finance department executives today: Productivity. The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics reported that 17% of accountants retired or resigned in the 2020-22 period, cutting the available...

Verint’s November analyst conference was an opportunity to flesh out the strategies unveiled earlier in the year on AI deployment and on “Open CCaaS,” a moniker describing how contact centers are provisioned going forward. The company displayed notable progress, particularly in rolling out AI bots for numerous real-world applications. 

There are stark reminders that all is not well in business-to-business sales and marketing land. Many organizations struggle to hit revenue targets, and individuals consistently fail to hit their quotas. Various reasons are put forward, but the more convincing argument is that buyer behavior has transformed over the years, requiring changes to the traditional way of engaging with B2B prospects and customers. Even Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo, has acknowledged that the process on which he...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2023 Global Payroll Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Human Capital Management vendors supporting the spectrum of...

Board offers a platform that enables financial planning and analysis (FP&A) groups to forecast, plan, budget, analyze and report, using a consistent set of data from across the business to speed these processes, improve forecast and planning accuracy, and accelerate analysis and reporting. Board was categorized as an Exemplary Vendor in our Ventana Research Business Planning Value Index, with leading in Manageability and Reliability.  

I recently articulated some of the reasons why IT teams can fail to deliver on the business requirements for data and analytics projects. This is an age-old and multifaceted problem that is not easily solved. Organizations have a role to play in alleviating the issue by ensuring that their business processes and project planning support a collaborative approach in which business and IT professionals work together. Data and analytics product vendors can also help by delivering products that are...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Global Payroll research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2023 Domestic Payroll Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Human Capital Management vendors supporting the spectrum of...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Domestic Payroll research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

The emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues has been growing for some time. I participated in the development of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) as a software industry expert more than a decade ago. The rise of ESG’s profile in corporate reporting is the latest evolution of “responsible investing,” a topic that goes back centuries in the west. The modern era of responsible investing took form in the United States beginning in the 1960s and then...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2023 Payroll Management Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Human Capital Management vendors supporting the spectrum...

For at least five years, it has been clear that innovation in technology for communication and business processes is accelerating. This year, that trend has been especially notable with the explosive emergence of artificial intelligence in the contact center software market. But what tends to get lost in the excitement around innovation is what sits downstream of the development process: the impact of new technology on how buyers organize the processes and the disruption that new technology...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Payroll Management research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I previously wrote about how document-database providers have added support for ACID transactions and the SQL query language, making their products increasingly suitable for use as replacements for applications that previously depended on relational databases. Adoption of non-relational NoSQL databases is by no means reliant on displacing incumbent relational databases, and initial adoption is often driven by differentiating capabilities, such as developer agility and application flexibility....

SuiteWorld, the annual user conference from Oracle NetSuite, focused on three topics: artificial intelligence, a reimagination of the role NetSuite can play in managing an organization and emphasizing the value to existing customers of using more of what NetSuite has to offer.

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...

I previously wrote about the challenge facing distributed SQL database providers to avoid becoming pigeonholed as only being suitable for a niche set of requirements. Factors including performance, reliability, security and scalability provide a focal point for new vendors to differentiate from established providers and get a foot in the door with customer accounts. Expanding and retaining those accounts is not necessarily easy, however, especially as general-purpose data platform providers...

Because artificial intelligence is top-of-mind, Workday spent a great deal of time on the topic at its recent Workday Rising annual user group meeting in San Francisco. It was front and center in the general sessions, in the announcements made at the event and in the product roadmaps.

Alteryx was founded in 1997 and initially focused on analyzing demographic and geographically organized data. In 2006, the company released its eponymous product that established its direction for what the product is today. In 2017, it went public in an IPO on the NYSE. At the time of the IPO, Alteryx was focusing much of its marketing efforts on the data preparation market, particularly to support Tableau. Throughout this time though, Alteryx offered much more than data preparation. As a...

I previously discussed the trust and accuracy limitations of large language models, suggesting that data and analytics vendors provide guidance about potentially inaccurate results and the risks of creating a misplaced level of trust. In the months that have followed, we are seeing some clarity from these vendors about the approaches organizations can take to increase trust and accuracy when developing applications that incorporate generative AI, including fine-tuning and prompt engineering. It...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. TheVentana Research 2023 Data Observability Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to data vendors supporting the spectrum of...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Data Observability research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

NICE held its annual Analyst Summit this month in the magnificent high-altitude mountains of Peru, a fantastic environment in which to hear top executives share insights into the changing company and industry. NICE has been very successful in navigating the industry transition from voice-centric interactions to a digital-first posture. Consumer behavior is one of the underlying causes of this shift, forcing many organizations to rethink customer experience strategies.

In my past perspectives, I’ve written about the evolution from data at rest to data in motion and the fact that you can’t rely on dashboards for real-time analytics. Organizations are becoming more and more event-driven and operating based on streaming data. As well, analytics are becoming more and more intertwined with operations. More than one-fifth of organizations (22%) describe their analytics workloads as real time in our Data and Analytics Benchmark Research and nearly half (47%) of...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Data Orchestration Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to data vendors supporting the spectrum of...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Data Orchestration research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Data Pipelines Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Data vendors supporting the spectrum of Data...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Business Planning Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Office of Finance vendors supporting the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Data Pipelines research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Business Planning research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 DataOps Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Data vendors supporting the spectrum of DataOps....

I previously described how Databricks had positioned its Lakehouse Platform as the basis for data engineering, data science and data warehousing. The lakehouse design pattern provides a flexible environment for storing and processing data from multiple enterprise applications and workloads for multiple use cases. I assert that by 2025, 8 in 10 current data lake adopters will invest in data lakehouse architecture to improve the business value generated from the accumulated data.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Mobile Analytics Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Analytics vendors supporting the spectrum...

Human resources has long been stereotyped as the department that relies on intuition and experience in decision-making. Enterprises have evolved to understand the importance of their workforce to achieving business outcomes and not just as a line item in the expense column of a balance sheet, earning HR executives a seat in Lin Manuel Miranda’s eponymous “room where it happens.” In doing so, those very executives must be armed with the data that ties worker performance to business outcomes;...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for DataOps research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Mobile Analytics research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Collaborative Analytics Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Analytics vendors supporting the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Collaborative Analytics research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

The environment around customer experience is being disrupted by a series of technical and organizational shifts ranging from artificial intelligence to work-from-home to deep customer analytics. When times change, it’s helpful for people to have a framework to organize their thinking and actions. I believe there are two dominant frameworks used to organize business approaches to customers. One is rooted in the efficiency of the contact center (let’s call it “CC thinking”), and the more...

When my father entered the workforce in the 1950s, his path was relatively clear. He graduated high school, went to work in his chosen trade, did a stint in the Navy Reserves, and continued in the same or adjacent career until he retired. The same was true for my uncle, who chose to go to college but joined a firm working in his field, worked hard to be promoted, and changed companies one time before retiring as an executive. But the nature of work and job-hunting has undergone a radical...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Embedded Analytics Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Analytics vendors supporting the spectrum...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Embedded Analytics research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Augmented Analytics Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Analytics and Data vendors supporting...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Augmented Analytics research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

In today’s rapidly evolving digital security landscape, organizations face the challenge of maintaining robust network security resilience. Chief information officers battling increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and the growing complexity of enterprise networks must enhance network security posture with advanced technologies to stay ahead of potential threats. One such technology is DDI – the integration of DNS, DHCP and IPAM.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Analytics and Data Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Analytics vendors supporting the spectrum...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Analytics and Data research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced.

Network security resilience is the ability to withstand and recover from cyber-attacks. To achieve this, organizations need to use DDI technology. DDI stands for DNS, DHCP and IPAM. These are three services that help devices connect and communicate on a network.

The data platforms market may appear to have little or nothing to do with haute couture, but it is one of the data sectors most strongly influenced by the fickle finger of fashion. In recent years, various architectural approaches to data storage and processing have enjoyed a phase in the limelight, including data warehouse, data mart, data hub, data lake, cloud data warehouse, object storage, data lakehouse, data fabric and data mesh. These approaches are often heralded as the next big thing,...

The acquisition of Splunk by Cisco marks a significant milestone in the digital security industry. This strategic move combines the strengths of two industry leaders, offering a suite of products and services underpinned by artificial intelligence technologies. However, like any major business decision, it comes with challenges and potential risks. Ventana Research presents an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with this acquisition, offering valuable...

Despite a focus on being data-driven, many organizations find that data and analytics projects fail to deliver on expectations. These initiatives can underwhelm for many reasons, because success requires a delicate balance of people, processes, information and technology. Small deviations from perfection in any of those factors can send projects off the rails.

Customer relationship management systems have been around since Tom Siebel created one while working at Oracle in the late ‘80s and then monetized it founding Siebel Systems that eventually was bought by Oracle. When Salesforce launched its “No Software” slogan in the early 2000s, CRM moved to the cloud, but the concept was still based on a object model centered around an opportunity that represented a potential sale. The user interface allowed entry of data to the opportunity, along with...

In the realm of business process and workflow management, few names stand as tall as ServiceNow. After gaining traction for its cloud-based platform designed to help organizations manage and track IT service requests, the brand has grown into a behemoth, offering a wide range of services aimed at automating and optimizing business processes. Yet, in recent years, there’s been a notable and significant addition to the company's portfolio as it moved firmly into the realm of human capital...

Organizations are continuously combining data from diverse and siloed sources for analytical, artificial intelligence and machine learning projects. As the volume of data grows, it becomes challenging for organizations to manage and keep current to extract valuable insights in a timely manner.

I have written before about the rising popularity of the data fabric approach for managing and governing data spread across distributed environments comprised of multiple data centers, systems and applications. I assert that by 2025, more than 6 in 10 organizations will adopt data fabric technologies to facilitate the management and processing of data across multiple data platforms and cloud environments. The data fabric approach is also proving attractive to vendors, including Microsoft, as a...

Software supply chain digital security is a hot topic, especially after cyberattacks on SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline and Kaseya. These attacks have exposed the vulnerabilities and risks that exist in the software products and services that organizations rely on for their daily operations. How can organizations protect themselves from these threats and ensure the quality and integrity of software products? One possible approach is to adopt a software bill of materials (SBOM).

At one point, analytics and business intelligence were considered non-mission critical activities. One of the primary concerns in designing analytics systems was to ensure they didn’t interfere with or draw computing resources away from operational systems. But today, analytical systems are integral to many aspects of operations. More than 9 in 10 participants in our Analytics and Data Benchmark Research reported analytics had improved activities and processes. However, most analytics and BI...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Contact Centers Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Customer Experience vendors supporting the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Contact Centers research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. In this modern, digital age of customer experience, the journey of engagement across every channel and device must be orchestrated effectively. Organizations, no matter the industry, have inbound and outbound interactions and rely on contact centers to fulfill operational and revenue objectives. The utilization of cloud computing has enabled a new generation...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Agent Management Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Customer Experience vendors supporting the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Agent Management research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Contact Center Suites Buyers Guide 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Customer Experience vendors supporting...

In accounting terms, working capital includes current assets (short-term items such as cash, money due from customers and inventory) and current liabilities (typically payments due to suppliers and loan amounts that must be repaid within one year). Working capital management is a prime function of the finance organization, designed to balance often-conflicting objectives related to revenue, liquidity, risk and profitability. The basics of working capital management date back to ancient clay...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Contact Center Suites research enables me to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced.

Organizations today have an ever-increasing appetite for platforms that improve the speed and efficiency of data analytics and business intelligence (BI). The ability to quickly process data enables organizations to make well-informed decisions in real time. This agile approach to data processing is crucial for staying ahead in today's competitive landscape. With the rising need for data-driven insights, organizations face the difficulty of dealing with massive volumes of distributed business...

I recently wrote about the various technologies used by organizations to process and analyze data in real time. I explained that while the terms streaming data and events and streaming analytics are often used interchangeably, they are separate disciplines that make use of common underlying concepts and technologies such as events, event brokers and event-driven architecture. Confluent’s acquisition of Immerok earlier this year provided a reminder of this fact. Confluent is one of the most...

Data is one of the most valuable assets an organization owns, and a robust data backup and recovery system is foundational to protecting it. Weak data protection efforts jeopardize resilience and business continuity. With data residing in multiple places – including on-premises servers and public and private cloud environments – it is difficult to ensure that all data is backed up and recoverable in the event of a disaster.

Governance, risk management and compliance are essential tactics for a successful organization. Effective GRC practices help organizations achieve business objectives, mitigate risks and ensure compliance with laws and regulations. As a chief information officer or IT leader, it is important to evaluate new technologies and determine their impact on the business, including whether they fit within the scope of current GRC programs and processes.

This title plays on the now-ancient meme from the 1990s: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” which pointed to a challenge of anonymity posed by new technology. In this case, though, I’m using it to highlight an opportunity that generative artificial intelligence presents in streamlining routine business functions that require some level of individual skill and experience to handle. Ordinary contracts are just one example of work products that require humans to create, edit, analyze,...

If I had a magic wand, I would want to add scenario evaluation to all business intelligence tools on the market. I have previously written about the need to make intelligent decisions with decision intelligence. The data and analytics markets have evolved so that organizations have far greater capabilities to utilize data in decision-making processes. While there is some convergence around the concept of decision intelligence, there are still several “islands” of decision-making. Analyzing...

The world of human capital management (HCM) technology, and tech in general, is buzzing with excitement over the potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Startups, especially, are releasing software at seemingly breakneck speed, and larger vendors, specifically the platform providers, have been releasing their own net-new or enhanced features and functionality. We’ve all read that GenAI, and the practical application of large language models (LLMs), are the technological...

Given the ever-expanding digital footprint of most businesses today, visibility into the performance of distributed systems has become a necessity. There are more data sources and data storage locations than ever before. As organizations continue to expand their data presence and scale their systems and tools, digital security is of greater importance in the architecture and operations. Monitoring is a fundamental enabler of digital security that provides real-time detection of cyber threats...

Over the past three years, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (or PCAOB, sometimes pronounced “peekaboo”) has found an increasing prevalence of auditing deficiencies in its inspections of accounting firms. PCAOB was established as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in the wake of several major accounting scandals. The agency acts as the auditor of auditors with the objective of being a neutral arbiter of the quality of these inspections. It recently indicated that approximately...

In recent years, the corporate landscape has witnessed a notable shift towards prioritizing employee experience. Organizations have recognized that a content and engaged workforce translates to higher productivity, reduced turnover and improved profitability, as I previously wrote about. Consequently, companies have invested considerable resources in creating a positive work environment and enhancing the overall experience of their employees. While this emphasis on employee experience is...

The current market landscape of data and analytics is undergoing rapid evolution, presenting organizations with a wide array of challenges and opportunities. As data sources and warehouses steadily migrate to the cloud, a significant number of organizations still depend on conventional tools. This reliance on legacy systems hinders the seamless accessibility and adoption of analytics and business intelligence within business processes. Organizations are increasingly turning to embedded...

A century ago, the big breakthrough in telephones was the ability to dial your party’s number directly. Dialing became necessary when enough people had telephones to require a shift from people-assisted to fully automated connections. But direct dialing was only a local option – you still needed an operator to make long-distance calls. In the 1920s, commenting on their forecast for the expected growth of long-distance calling, the analysts at Bell Laboratories concluded that by midcentury, the...

A lot of conversations around contact centers deal with automation, particularly how to balance the way humans and automated systems work together. Self-service, the front end of the customer interaction, is where practitioners get a first taste of the marvels of increasingly advanced automation. As customer expectations ramped up and labor became more costly during the pandemic, deflecting interactions away from agents took on new urgency. We continue to see impressive advances in automated...

Having worked at a start-up during the first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) that was predicted to revolutionize sales in the mid-2010s, I guess I am a natural skeptic when it comes to new claims about how AI will change sales forever. In the mid-2010s, vendors were using machine learning (ML) models trained on sets of historical opportunity data that represented closed won and closed lost deals. The ML models were looking for correlation and patterns to see whether they could predict...

Talent acquisition remains a focal point for most organizations in this dynamic and highly competitive corporate environment. Unfortunately, the pivotal process of offboarding often takes a back seat. An efficient employment separation process plays a key role in enhancing the employee experience, protecting the company's reputation and mitigating potential legal and financial risks associated with employee separation. One solution that effectively addresses these complexities is Onwards HR, a...

Enterprise organizations remain vulnerable to a host of security attacks. Cyberattacks are often associated with techniques that have never been seen before, which lead to data breaches if not quickly detected and remediated. However, one of the most common vulnerabilities for an organization is phishing. Phishing lures people to give up confidential information by clicking on a link or opening a file in an email from what appears to be a trusted source but is actually a bad actor....

Real-time business is a modern phenomenon, and business transformation has accelerated many business events in recent years. However, the execution of business events has always occurred in real time. Rather, it is the processing of the data related to business events that has accelerated instead of the event itself.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, a research and assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Revenue Performance Management Ventana Research Buyers Guide: 2023 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 the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Revenue...

It is a mark of the rapid, current pace of development in artificial intelligence (AI) that machine learning (ML) models, until recently considered state of the art, are now routinely being referred to by developers and vendors as “traditional.” Generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) in particular, have taken the AI world by storm in the past year, automating and accelerating the development of content, including text, digital images, audio and video, as well as computer programs and...

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Revenue Performance Management, I want to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced since our assessment one year ago. 

As I have previously explained, we expect an increased demand for intelligent operational applications infused with the results of analytic processes, such as personalization and artificial intelligence-driven recommendations. These systems rely on the analysis of data in the operational data platform to accelerate worker decision-making or improve customer experience.

We added purchasing, sourcing and payments to our core Office of Finance focus areas this year to reflect new and important opportunities to use technology to gain effectiveness through greater efficiency. Technology continues to lubricate the wheels of commerce, aided by a financial services sector that is constantly innovating, responding to market-driven opportunities to reduce costs, increase demand or lower risk. Ventana Research asserts that, in many cases, technology makes new forms or...

The role of the chief information officer has evolved from managing IT to maximizing technology for business value. Many organizations launch digital transformation programs to identify and deliver the desired value but discover that digital transformation is a complex, lengthy process. Budgets and resources can be quickly exhausted with little to show for the investment. Yet business objectives remain.

In a relatively short time, customer data platforms (CDPs) have become default components of the contact center tech stack. This is an important development for contact center practitioners because it reflects the fact that customer data is essential to maintaining productive customer relationships. It also provides an on-ramp for organizations to establish a sensible data strategy if they have not done so already.