Analyst Perspectives

Ventana Research coined the term intercompany financial management (IFM) to define a discipline for structuring and handling transactions within a corporation and between its legal entities designed to maximize staff efficiency and accounting accuracy while optimizing tax exposure, minimizing tax leakage and ensuring consistent tax and regulatory compliance. Technology has advanced to a point where this approach is feasible and cost effective. For that reason, Ventana Research asserts that by...

The Internet of Things describes machines and objects that are enhanced with sensors and communication connections, enabling them to report on their operational status, including outages, faults or threshold conditions that require attention. The technology has gradually made its way into business and consumer systems over the past decade. Today, these connected devices are playing an important role in customer experience processes such as field service.

In January of 2020, I was head of product innovation for a newly launched product in the human capital management technology space, targeting high-volume hiring. We had big ambitions for that year, tied to product development and sales, all documented during our annual goal-setting and performance review process. And then the pandemic hit, and everything changed overnight. Everything, that is, except for my annual goals, or those of my team, which had already been set in stone. When the annual...

Despite the emphasis on organizations being more data-driven and making an increasing proportion of business decisions based on data and analytics, it remains the case that some of the most fundamental questions about an organization are difficult to answer using data and analytics. Ostensibly simple questions such as, “how many customers does the organization have?” can be fiendishly difficult to answer, especially for organizations with multiple business entities, regions, departments and...

FinancialForce offers cloud-based ERP and professional services automation (PSA) software. The company targets midsize and larger services companies, especially those that provide professional services (such as consultants or field service organizations) as well as those that offer subscription-based or recurring revenue services and products. FinancialForce’s key point of differentiation is that it is built natively on the Salesforce platform, ensuring that CRM data is already located on the...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 Market Agenda for Human Capital Management, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for two decades to help organizations derive maximum potential from workforce- and people-related technology investments and initiatives. In crafting this Market Agenda, we focused on three critical themes top-of-mind for both HCM vendors and buyers: Organizational resiliency, employee engagement and utilizing digital technology to derive deeper insights into the state...

I am happy to share insights from our latest Ventana Research Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2023 Analytic 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 incorporated in a request for proposal to data platform vendors supporting the...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2023 Ventana Research Value Index: Customer Experience Management 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 derived from RFP responses submitted by customer experience (CX) vendors. These categories reflect...

With Ventana Research’s 2023 Market Agenda, we continue the guidance we’ve offered for two decades to help organizations derive maximum value from digital business technology investments. Through our market research and expertise, we identify trends and best practices and share insights on how to achieve technological effectiveness, particularly in key processes and systems to engage the workforce.

Markets have been more volatile than ever. It creates a need for decision makers to utilize technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to better understand the external factors that impact their business. By identifying these factors, organizations can better plan for changing market environments and seize market opportunities. However, manual modeling is a time-consuming process and results in a limited number of models and tests. Also, updating those models is...