ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives (98)

Platfora Aims to Remake the Foundation of Business Intelligence for Big Data

Posted by ISG Research on 07 March 2013

Platfora has gained a lot of buzz in the Big Data analytics market primarily through word of mouth. Late last year the company took the covers off of some impressive and potentially disruptive technology that takes aim at the broad BI and business analytics ecosystem, including the very foundation on which the industry is built. It recently demonstrated its software at the Strata Conference where... Read More

Topics: Big Data, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Information Applications, Platfora, Strata+Hadoop

Three Unified Communications Trends in Evidence at UCExpo 2013

Posted by ISG Research on 07 March 2013

I recently attended the Unified Communication Expo exhibition and conference in London to find out how much communications has been changing. As I entered the exhibition center the first thing I noticed was the huge variety of vendors on show, everything from major brands in the telecommunications industry (Aspect, AT&T, BT, Cisco, Mitel, Nokia and Siemens Enterprise Communications) to some major... Read More

Topics: Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Mobile Apps, Self-service, Analytics, Business Collaboration, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics, Unified Communications, Vendor(s), Workforce Force Optimization

Make XBRL Data from EDGAR More Accessible

Posted by Robert Kugel on 07 March 2013

I was discussing the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) mandate with a former head of investor relations at a Fortune 100 company. His take on it is much the same as that of everyone else involved with corporate reporting: it doesn’t produce much value and costs a bundle to comply. I related to him my thoughts on the lack of... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Reporting, extended close, US-GAAP, XBRL, Analytics, Business Performance, Financial Performance, CFO, compliance, financial reporting, FPM, SEC, Digital Technology

EMC Looks to Be Pivotal for Big Data

Posted by Mark Smith on 06 March 2013

The big-data landscape just got a little more interesting with the release of EMC’s Pivotal HD distribution of Hadoop. Pivotal HD takes Apache Hadoop and extends it with a data loader and command center capabilities to configure, deploy, monitor and manage Hadoop. Pivotal HD, from EMC’s Pivotal Labs division, integrates with Greenplum Database, a massively parallel processing (MPP) database from... Read More

Topics: EMC, MapR, HAWQ, HDFS, Pivotal HD, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Information Applications, Information Management, Location Intelligence, Cirro, Hive, Tableau Software, Strata+Hadoop

OrcaEyes Delivers a Whale of Workforce Analytics and Planning

Posted by ISG Research on 05 March 2013

Human capital analytics used to be simple. It focused on compliance reporting, showed basic information and was an afterthought in most applications. Today analytics is the centerpiece of many human capital management applications and involves many sophisticated tools, because it delivers the some of the greatest value of any process in all HCM. Our next-generation workforce management benchmark... Read More

Topics: HCM, OrcaEyes, Analytics, Business Analytics, Cloud Computing, Information Applications, Workforce Performance, Talent Management, Workforce Planning

SiSense Performance Makes Business Analytics Provider an Award-Winner

Posted by ISG Research on 05 March 2013

SiSense gained a lot of traction last week at the Strata conference in San Jose as it broke records in the so-called 10x10x10 Challenge – analyzing 10 terabytes of data in 10 seconds on a $10,000 commodity machine – and earned the company’s Prism product the Audience Choice Award. The Israel-based company, founded in 2005, has venture capital backing and is currently running at a profit with... Read More

Topics: Big Data, Sales Performance, Tableau, elasticube, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Information Applications, Information Management, Qlik

Hortonworks Takes Hadoop to the Windows of Microsoft

Posted by Mark Smith on 01 March 2013

Business is starting to realize that taking advantage of big data is not just technically feasible but affordable by organizations of all sizes. However, as outlined in our agenda on big data and information optimization, the technology must be engineered to the information needs of business. HortonWorks has been steadily advancing its big data technology called Hadoop and contributing its... Read More

Topics: Big Data, Microsoft, Talend, Teradata, Simba, Business Analytics, Cloud Computing, Hortonworks, Informatica, Information Applications, Information Management, HDP, Hive, Tez, Strata+Hadoop

SnapLogic is Making Big Data Integration as a Service a Hadoop Reality

Posted by Mark Smith on 01 March 2013

SnapLogic, a provider of data integration in the cloud, this week announced Big Data-as-a-Service to address businesses’ needs to integrate and process data across Hadoop big data environments. As our research agenda for 2013 outlines, dealing with data in the cloud is very important to organizations. At the same time, businesses need to be able to integrate their big data with all their... Read More

Topics: Big Data, R, Sales Performance, Salesforce.com, SnapLogic, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Cloud Computing, Cloudera, Customer & Contact Center, Data Integration, Information Applications, Information Management

Genesys Acquires Angel.com to Advance Contact Centers

Posted by ISG Research on 01 March 2013

The first positive signs for the “the new Genesys” emerged just 100 days after its sale by Alcatel was completed last year, and those positive signs have continued. The company has not only maintained strong development of its core products but has also made an aggressive move into the contact center mid-market, the contact center in the cloud market, and the multichannel communications... Read More

Topics: Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Genesys, Mobile Apps, Self-service, Analytics, Business Analytics, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics, Unified Communications, Workforce Force Optimization

Spreadsheet Denial is a Big Issue

Posted by Robert Kugel on 01 March 2013

Our recent benchmark research project, Spreadsheet Use in Today’s Enterprise, demonstrated that some companies have made modest progress in addressing spreadsheet issues, but there’s still much left to be done. Desktop spreadsheets can be an important source of productivity but, as I’ve noted, you need to understand their limitations and understand the practical alternatives. Users underestimate... Read More

Topics: Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Office of Finance, Reporting, enterprise spreadsheet, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Visualization, Workforce Performance, Risk, benchmark, Financial Performance Management

LogiXML Capitalizes on Embedded Business Intelligence

Posted by ISG Research on 27 February 2013

LogiXML has been around for more than a decade, but has seen particularly robust growth in the past year. Recent announcements show the company with better than 100-percent year-over-year growth, driven by a 97 percent license renewal rate and new customer growth in SMB, departmental and OEM deployments. The 158-percent growth for the embedded analytics group for the fourth quarter on a... Read More

Topics: Sales Performance, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Information Applications, agile, LogiXML

Cornerstone Making Talent Management Simpler to Use

Posted by ISG Research on 26 February 2013

Improving how employees and managers can improve talent management activities through changes in process, technology and better access to information is both a theme of my research agenda this year. It is also what the key technology vendors in this space have been focused on developing products to do. Cornerstone OnDemand is one of those vendors that has been in the talent management space since... Read More

Topics: Sales Performance, Salesforce.com, Social Media, HCM, Learning, Performance, Recruiting, Business Collaboration, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Workforce Performance, Cornerstone OnDemand, HR

Big Data Analytics Faces a Chasm of Understanding

Posted by ISG Research on 22 February 2013

The challenge with discussing big data analytics is in cutting through the ambiguity that surrounds the term. People often focus on the 3 Vs of big data – volume, variety and velocity – which provides a good lens for big data technology, but only gets us part of the way to understanding big data analytics, and provides even less guidance on how to take advantage of big data analytics to unlock... Read More

Topics: Big Data, Microsoft, SAP, SAS, Excel, designed data, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), IBM, Information Applications, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Oracle, SPSS

Transera Uses Big Data for Customer Engagement Analytics

Posted by ISG Research on 22 February 2013

Transera is an established contact center in the cloud vendor with in-depth interaction routing capabilities. During a recent briefing I learned that it has now supplemented these capabilities by launching a new product that it calls Adaptive Customer Engagement. Although it’s not entirely obvious from the name, the product uses big data analytics to analyze past customer interactions, profile... Read More

Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Speech Analytics, Analytics, Business Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics, Transera

Big Data is Broken Without Integration

Posted by Mark Smith on 21 February 2013

Big data involves interplay between different data management approaches and business intelligence and operational systems, which makes it imperative that all sources of business data be integrated efficiently and that organizations be able to easily adapt to new data types and sources. Our recent big data benchmark research confirmed that big data storage technologies continue to follow many... Read More

Topics: Big Data, Data Quality, Master Data Management, Business Technology Innovation, IT Performance, IT Research, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Data Integration, Information Applications, Information Management, Operational Intelligence

Cisco Advances Customer Interactions and Collaboration in Contact Center

Posted by ISG Research on 21 February 2013

Cisco is without doubt best known as a supplier of networking systems. Its products have been used by companies large and small to build local and wide area networks. It has played in the contact center space as a provider of network and call management systems that sit between public networks and contact center agents to manage the delivery of interactions to the right extensions and provide... Read More

Topics: Sales Performance, Social Media, Customer Experience, Logitech, Mobile Apps, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Cisco, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Unified Communications, Upstream Works, Social, Workforce Force Optimization

Use – Don’t Abuse – Spreadsheets

Posted by Robert Kugel on 21 February 2013

I’ve been using electronic spreadsheets for more than 30 years. I consider this technology among the 20th century’s top five most important advances in business management. Spreadsheets have revolutionized every aspect of running any organization. A spreadsheet (specifically, VisiCalc) was the original “killer app” that made business people feel the necessity to buy a personal computer. Yet, as... Read More

Topics: Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Office of Finance, Reporting, enterprise spreadsheet, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Information Applications, Information Management, Visualization, Workforce Performance, Risk, benchmark, Financial Performance Management

Big Data Search is Getting Better with LucidWorks

Posted by Mark Smith on 20 February 2013

LucidWorks addresses the growing volume of information now being stored in the enterprise and in big data with two products aimed at the enterprise with search technology. Though you may not be familiar with LucidWorks (previously known as Lucid Imagination), the company has for many years contributed to Apache Lucene, an open source search project, and commercialized and supported for it for... Read More

Topics: Big Data, MapR, Sales Performance, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Cloudera, Customer & Contact Center, Hortonworks, Information Applications, Information Management, Operational Intelligence, Search, Strata+Hadoop

Profit Velocity’s New Dimension in Managing Profitability

Posted by Robert Kugel on 20 February 2013

Profit Velocity Solutions’ PV Accelerator is an analytic application designed to enable capital-intensive companies to consistently achieve substantially wider margins and higher return on assets (ROA). Companies in industries such as specialty chemicals, building materials, integrated steel mills and silicon chip fabrication (to name just four) routinely fail to make the right decisions about... Read More

Topics: Performance Management, Sales, Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Human Capital Management, Office of Finance, PV Accelerator, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Financial Performance, Price Optimization, Profit Velocity, Profitability, Software, S&OP

Why Business Intelligence Software is Failing Business

Posted by Mark Smith on 15 February 2013

Business intelligence software is supposed to help businesses access and analyze data and communicate analytics and metrics. I have witnessed improvements to BI software over the years, from mobile and collaboration to interactive discovery and visualization, and our Value Index for Business Intelligence finds a mature set of technology vendors and products. But even as these products mature in... Read More

Topics: Big Data, Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Mobile Technology, Natural Language, Business Technology Innovation, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Mobility, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Information Management, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, Discovery