Analyst Perspectives

I previously wrote about the potential for generative artificial intelligence technology to enhance the integration sector by facilitating outcome-driven approaches for automatically generating integration pipelines in response to declared business requirements. The use of GenAI in data and application integration remains nascent, but multiple software providers are embracing the potential for GenAI to improve the productivity of integration experts and facilitate self-service integration by...

Embracing artificial intelligence technologies opens doors for innovation and efficiency. Alongside these opportunities, however, come risks. Threat actors are keenly aware of the potential impact of AI systems and are actively exploring ways to manipulate them. In this Analyst Perspective, I explore the world of adversarial machine-learning threats and provide practical guidance for securing AI systems.

I recently wrote about the role data observability plays in generating value from data by providing an environment for monitoring its quality and reliability. Data observability is a critical functional aspect of Data Operations, alongside the development, testing and deployment of data pipelines and data orchestration, as I explained in our Data Observability Buyers Guide. Maintaining data quality and trust is a perennial data management challenge, often preventing organizations from operating...

Self-service has changed immensely in recent years. It has gotten better, qualitatively, in delivering answers and resolutions to customers. But it has also gotten extremely complex, relying on a basket of new technologies to achieve results. It helps to look at it through the eyes of the three main constituencies that are affected by it: customers, contact centers and the businesses they sit in.

ServiceNow is a global software provider that has developed a cloud computing platform that helps organizations manage digital workflows for enterprise operations. The provider uses its annual Knowledge user conference to educate customers and showcase product announcements. Ventana Research had the opportunity to attend the Knowledge 2024 event and provides this analyst perspective to summarize what transpired.

Verint held its analyst conference recently, using the opportunity to flesh out how it is responding to the rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and data-related technologies and to changes in the way enterprises consider the purchasing process for contact center-related tools. 

Enterprises are embracing the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver improvements in productivity and efficiency. As they move from initial pilots and trial projects to deployment into production at scale, many are realizing the importance of agile and responsive data processes, as well as tools and platforms that facilitate data management, with the goal of improving trust in the data used to fuel analytics and AI. This has led to increased attention on the role of data...

Until recently, dedicated consolidation software had been a sleepy category. First introduced in the 1980s as a tool designed to run on personal computers (freeing the accounting department from reliance on its IT department), offerings basically achieved feature and function parity by the next decade. The last major technology innovation—moving the software to the cloud—began in the mid-2000s. Cloud-based software reduces the cost and complexity of ownership, making dedicated software a more...

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has significant implications at all levels of the technology stack, not least analytics and data products, which serve to support the development, training and deployment of GenAI models, and also stand to benefit from the advances in automation enabled by GenAI. The intersection of analytics and data and GenAI was a significant focus of the recent Google Cloud Next ’24 event. My colleague David Menninger has already outlined the key...

Rebalancing supply chains to improve resiliency has been a focus of enterprises with even moderately complex and long supply chains for the past four years. One aspect of this rebalancing is that it almost always involves higher costs. Volume discounts and bargaining power are reduced when more suppliers are used, or an alternate supplier may have higher factor costs and therefore must charge more. Logistics costs might increase, and when an enterprise moves from just-in-time to just-in-case...