ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives (3)

Conga Connect 2026: Why Connected Commercial Execution Is the Next Imperative

Posted by Barika Pace on 08 April 2026

Conga Connect 2026 underscored a shift that revenue leaders can no longer ignore. The core technology challenge facing commercial organizations is not a lack of tools, automation or even artificial intelligence (AI), but the growing fragmentation across the systems and teams responsible for moving deals from initial pricing through contract execution and into revenue realization. New research... Read More

Topics: Revenue Performance Management, Revenue Lifecycle Management, Office of Revenue - Business Technologies

FinOps Dashboards Don’t Fix Cloud Waste

Posted by Jeff Orr on 08 April 2026

Multicloud was supposed to deliver flexibility, leverage and lower costs. Instead, many enterprises are paying a complexity tax that exceeds the savings. Dashboards light up with granular cost data across hyperscalers, yet total spending continues to climb. Visibility is improving. Accountability is not. The multicloud thesis was straightforward: distribute workloads across providers and reduce... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, digital finance, CloudOps, IT & Technologies, FinOps, Business & Technologies, Cloud Infrastructure, IT Management & Operations, Multicloud, Cloud Cost Management, Hyperscaler

Enterprise Connect Shows a CX Industry in Transition

Posted by Keith Dawson on 07 April 2026

Industries change with the times, and so it is with the conferences and events that support those industries. Enterprise Connect is not what it once was, either in terms of attendance or influence, but it is still the place where many (not most) of the key providers in contact centers and customer experience (CX) convene. It’s been described as a place where providers meet with and seek out... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, Verint, Customer Experience Management, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, Salesforce, Enterprise Connect, AWS, Dialpad, UJET, Zoom

AI Agents as the New UI: What Happens to Your HR Stack?

Posted by Matthew Brown on 07 April 2026

A payroll leader gets a message the morning after payday: “Why is my net pay lower than last period?” In many organizations, that question still sends employees into a maze of portals, PDFs, tickets and handoffs. Payroll is not a background utility in the eyes of employees: it is one of the most frequent and emotionally loaded moments of truth. When pay is right, people move on. When it is wrong,... Read More

Topics: Employee Engagement, Learning Management, Talent Management, Workforce Management, Payroll Management, Total Compensation Management, Employees & HCM - Business & Technologies

Three Questions to Evaluate AI-Powered IT Software

Posted by Jeff Orr on 02 April 2026

Enterprise IT leaders are committing seven-figure budgets to "AI-powered" platforms across ITSM, security and cloud management categories. These contracts promise autonomous remediation, intelligent triage and predictive insights. The problem: most CIOs and CISOs can't articulate what the embedded AI actually does or whether it delivers measurable ROI beyond the software provider's deck. The... Read More

Topics: procurement, Generative AI, IT & Technologies, Platforms, Bias, AI & Machine Learning, Due Diligence, Autonomous Decision, Training Data, Time-to-Value

New Contact Center, New Roles to Fill

Posted by Keith Dawson on 01 April 2026

You can’t upend the entire technological infrastructure for an industry without seeing some ramifications in the form of personnel shifting and dislocation. Contact centers are smack in the middle of a transformation that is remaking the toolset and forcing businesses to rethink both the fundamental purpose of their centers and the mix of managerial and operational employees. Let’s consider how... Read More

Topics: WFM, Contact Center, Workforce Management, agent management, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, QM, Quality, CSR

Why Revenue Execution Needs a New Stack Built for Motion

Posted by Barika Pace on 31 March 2026

Revenue Operations (RevOps) was supposed to unify sales, marketing and customer success into a single high-performance go-to-market machine. But for many organizations, it’s turned into another layer of complexity—more dashboards, more meetings, more disconnected tools pretending to collaborate. What’s worse, the metrics are lagging. Sales cycles are longer, buyer trust is thinner and even the... Read More

Topics: Subscription Management, sales engagement, Office of Revenue - Business Technologies

Healthcare CRM Software Innovation with AI

Posted by Mark Smith on 30 March 2026

Healthcare organizations are increasingly investing in customer relationship management (CRM) technologies to support patient engagement, service operations and care coordination across complex healthcare ecosystems. As care delivery expands across hospitals, outpatient services, digital health platforms and virtual care channels, organizations must manage interactions across scheduling systems,... Read More

Topics: Healthcare, AI & Technologies

Healthcare CRM Software Transformation with AI

Posted by Mark Smith on 27 March 2026

The healthcare industry is increasingly modernizing its customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and software investments to support patient engagement, care coordination and service operations. As care delivery expands across hospitals, outpatient services, digital health and payer-provider ecosystems, managing patient relationships across fragmented systems has become more complex.... Read More

Topics: Healthcare, AI & Technologies

The Growing Strategic Importance of Sales and Operations Planning

Posted by Robert Kugel on 26 March 2026

The growing strategic importance of sales and operations planning (S&OP) reflects the confluence of two major trends evolving outside of enterprise operations. One is the ongoing disintegration of the post-World War 2 liberal trade environment that began in the early 2010s and has accelerated since. The second is the increasing sophistication and approachability of S&OP software. These... Read More

Topics: Supply Chain Planning, Analytics, Business Planning, Operations & Supply Chain, Enterprise Resource Planning, supply chain management, Generative AI, AI and Machine Learning

The Potential Benefits and Challenges of Vibe Analytics

Posted by Matt Aslett on 25 March 2026

I previously wrote about the potential for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to change the face of analytics and facilitate data literacy and data democratization by enabling business users without specialist analytic skills to discover and analyze data. At the time of writing, GenAI-based interfaces were already being adopted by business intelligence (BI) software providers to... Read More

Topics: Analytics, Data Platforms, Generative AI, AI & Technologies, AI & Machine Learning

When AIOps and XDR Don't Talk, Your SOC Pays the Price

Posted by Jeff Orr on 25 March 2026

Your artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) platform detects a memory spike in production. Your extended detection and response (XDR) platform flags suspicious lateral movement in the same cluster. But they're not sharing context, so your security operations center (SOC) treats them as two separate incidents. You lose 45 minutes that matter. This isn't a hypothetical scenario. It's the... Read More

Topics: Cybersecurity, Observability, SOC, AIOps, IT & Technologies, XDR, SIEM, SOAR, IT Management & Operations

Payroll Systems: Raising the Bar Above Basic Accuracy

Posted by Matthew Brown on 24 March 2026

Payroll is no longer a single application that runs quietly in the background; it is an ecosystem that spans time capture, scheduling, pay rules, benefits deductions, tax engines, security controls and the employee experience layer. Employees do not see the ecosystem, but they feel it every single payday with total clarity. When it works, it reinforces the belief that the organization keeps its... Read More

Topics: Payroll Management, Employees & HCM - Business & Technologies

Agentic Orchestration: A Governance-First Reference Enterprise Architecture

Posted by Mark Smith on 23 March 2026

As established in my foundational perspective on AI Orchestration, the defining enterprise challenge is no longer model performance but the design of a control plane that governs multi-agent systems, tool access, policy enforcement, and cross-platform interoperability. The realization of Agentic AI depends on the emergence of AI agents as interoperable components that combine deterministic logic... Read More

Topics: AI & Technologies, AgenticAI, Agent Orchestration

AI Orchestration: Agentic Complexity for Enterprises

Posted by Mark Smith on 20 March 2026

The software economy has reached its greatest inflection point since the dawn of the Internet. Enterprise software now operates across dynamic cloud environments, with release cycles accelerating to weekly or even daily in a continuous delivery model. Software providers have evolved into platform ecosystems, seamlessly integrating applications and data while unlocking new opportunities through... Read More

Topics: Orchestration, AI & Technologies

CX Buyers Are Understandably Confused by Pricing

Posted by Keith Dawson on 19 March 2026

There is a growing sense of confusion and uncertainty among buyers when it comes to pricing for customer experience (CX) and contact center technology. Pricing does become more complex when technology innovates, creating broader options for mixing and matching features or more choices of the types of platforms people can use. In this industry, conditions have changed so quickly that the array of... Read More

Topics: Contact Center, agent management, Customer Experience Management, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Conversational Intelligence, Pricing, Resolution-Based, Outcome-Based

Semantic Layers Provide Business Context for BI and AI Agents

Posted by Matt Aslett on 17 March 2026

As I previously described, context is everything for generative (GenAI) and agentic AI. Enterprises moved in large numbers to adopt foundational GenAI since its emergence into mainstream consciousness during 2023. As they did so, it quickly became clear that establishing trust in GenAI output would require enterprises to augment the realistic content generated by foundation models with real-world... Read More

Topics: Analytics, Generative AI, Data Intelligence, AI & Technologies, AI & Machine Learning

Autonomous Healthcare Enterprise Requires AI-Powered Software Strategies

Posted by Mark Smith on 16 March 2026

Healthcare is not simply digitizing. It is reaching a structural inflection point. Rising demand, workforce shortages, regulatory complexity, reimbursement pressure and expanding distributed care models are forcing providers, payers and life sciences organizations to rethink how care is delivered and financed. Enterprise software sits at the center of this transformation for modernization in a... Read More

Topics: Artificial intelligence, Technology Industry Intelligence

Autonomous Enterprise and AI-Powered Software Architecture

Posted by Mark Smith on 13 March 2026

The mission to enable an autonomous enterprise, as I have articulated, remains aspirational for most organizations. Few have aligned business and technology leadership, strategy and execution to support autonomous operations at any scale. A shared definition is essential. An autonomous enterprise follows an operating model in which intelligent systems can sense conditions, decide actions, execute... Read More

Topics: AI & Technologies

ZohoDay Addresses the Tensions Facing CROs

Posted by Barika Pace on 12 March 2026

This year at ZohoDay 2026, the conversation did not center on product features, competitive positioning or even individual applications. Instead, it focused on a tension many CROs are already experiencing. Revenue leaders are being asked to deliver higher forecast confidence, manage margin pressure and incorporate AI into selling motions while simultaneously reducing operational complexity. The... Read More

Topics: Revenue Performance Management, Revenue Lifecycle Management, Office of Revenue - Business Technologies