Analyst Perspectives

It’s likely that finance analytics trace back to when people first began to record transactions on clay tablets. Financial analytics were given a boost with the codification of double-entry bookkeeping, an elegant system for recording transactions that facilitate the assessment of the performance and health of an organization. Further advances were achieved with the first mechanical – and then...

I have written a few times in recent months about vendors offering functionality that addresses data orchestration. This is a concept that has been growing in popularity in the past five years amid the rise of Data Operations (DataOps), which describes more agile approaches to data integration and data management. In a nutshell, data orchestration is the process of combining data from multiple...

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are valuable to data and analytics activities. Our research shows that organizations using AI/ML report gaining competitive advantage, improving customer experiences, responding faster to opportunities and threats and improving the bottom line with increased sales and lower costs. No wonder nearly 9 in 10 (87%) research participants report using AI/ML...

Planful recently acquired Plannuh, a marketing-performance management application, to integrate into the Planful platform so that organizations can connect their marketing planning and analysis group with the finance department. There’s the old story of a CEO who said, “I know half my marketing spend is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” Plannuh is designed to answer that question.

Ventana Research’s Data Lakes Dynamics Insights research illustrates that while data lakes are fulfilling their promise of enabling organizations to economically store and process large volumes of raw data, data lake environments continue to evolve. Data lakes were initially based primarily on Apache Hadoop deployed on-premises but are now increasingly based on cloud object storage. Adopters are...

Much has been written in recent years on the emergence of subscription management as a new revenue model that both vendors and buyers are embracing as the future. The benefits speak to the value of a predictable revenue stream for the vendor, but more importantly, the advantages to the customer who needs a lower initial outlay, predetermined expense over the lifetime of usage and the ability to...

As I recently pointed out, process mining has emerged as a pivotal technology for data-driven organizations to discover, monitor and improve processes through use of real-time event data, transactional data and log files. With recent advancements, process mining has become more efficient at discovering insights in complex processes using algorithms and visualizations. Organizations use it to...

I have written before about the continued use of specialist operational and analytic data platforms. Most database products can be used for operational or analytic workloads, and the number of use cases for hybrid data processing is growing. However, a general-purpose database is unlikely to meet the most demanding operational or analytic data platform requirements. Factors including performance,...

A year ago, I wrote about how technology could be useful in an inflationary period, correctly anticipating the world we live in now. Responding effectively to changes in costs is always challenging, but even more so because of the choppy and chaotic nature of the current environment. Many organizations have a limited or no ability to raise prices, and are forced to find ways to minimize the...

Through 2025, establishing customer experience application suites on a common platform will be the focal point of the drive to optimize customer and organizational engagement. Organizations that are passionate about improving the customer experience are choosing to empower processes and people with intelligence through smarter applications that embrace analytics, artificial intelligence and...

Earlier this year I described the growing use-cases for hybrid data processing. Although it is anticipated that the majority of database workloads will continue to be served by specialist data platforms targeting operational and analytic workloads respectively, there is increased demand for intelligent operational applications infused with the results of analytic processes, such as...

A predictive finance department is one that can command technology to be more forward-looking and action-oriented while still fulfilling its core role of handling the financial elements of its organization including accounting, treasury and corporate finance. Beyond just automating rote tasks, technology also facilitates a shift toward becoming a predictive finance organization. Greater amounts...

Process mining is defined as the analysis of application telemetry including log files, transaction data and other instrumentation to understand and improve operational processes. Log data provides an abundance of information about what operations are occurring, the sequences involved in the processes, how long the processes are taking and whether or not the processes are completed successfully....

The learning management system technology market has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Learning management systems, now commonly referred to as learning experience platforms, are an integral resource for any organization concerned about productivity, organizational agility and operational excellence. These technologies enable organizations to demonstrate an investment in people, as...

I have recently written about the organizational and cultural aspects of being data-driven, and the potential advantages data-driven organizations stand to gain by responding faster to worker and customer demands for more innovative, data-rich applications and personalized experiences. I have also explained that data-driven processes require more agile, continuous data processing, with an...

Workday held its first in-person Rising user group meeting since 2019 in Orlando. Three topics are worth commenting on: Workday’s Extend offering, its industry accelerators and its progress with the Workday Adaptive Planning offering.

In my first perspective on cloud computing realities, I covered some of the cost considerations associated with cloud computing and how the cloud costing model may be different enough from on-premises models that some organizations are taken by surprise. In this perspective. I’d like to focus on realities of hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

Organizations are collecting data from multiple data sources and a variety of systems to enrich their analytics and business intelligence (BI). But collecting data is only half of the equation. As the data grows, it becomes challenging to find the right data at the right time. Many organizations can’t take full advantage of their data lakes because they don’t know what data actually exists. Also,...

Kinaxis recently announced it has acquired a Netherlands-based company, MPO, a cloud-based software offering that orchestrates multiparty supply chain execution. The combination is designed to enable Kinaxis to extend its concurrent planning platform to handle core elements of supply chain execution. Kinaxis acquired all the shares of MPO for approximately US$45 million, with some of the final...

The data catalog has become an integral component of organizational data strategies over the past decade, serving as a conduit for good data governance and facilitating self-service analytics initiatives. The data catalog has become so important, in fact, that it is easy to forget that just 10 years ago it did not exist in terms of a standalone product category. Metadata-based data management...