ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

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...

The Evolution of AI for Data Operations

Posted by Matt Aslett on 23 December 2025

ISG recently published the 2025 ISG Buyers Guides for DataOps, providing an assessment of 51 software providers offering products used by data engineers, data scientists, and data and AI professionals to facilitate the use of data for analytics and AI needs. The DataOps Buyers Guide research generated three reports and five quadrants assessing providers in relation to overall DataOps, Data...

SAP Business Data Cloud Addresses Intelligent Data Products

Posted by Matt Aslett on 11 December 2025

A little over two years ago, I observed that the pendulum of fashion in the data management sector was swinging away from multiple best-of-breed tools and toward consolidated platforms. Enterprise software portfolios take time to evolve, but the trend toward consolidation has clearly been evident in the product strategies of large data management providers since then. Many providers have combined...

Cloudera Evolves Its Open Data Lakehouse

Posted by David Menninger on 03 December 2025

Cloudera recently hosted its EVOLVE25 event in New York, introducing updates that reinforce its commitment to open data architectures and hybrid data management. The announcements centered on a unified platform across cloud and on-premises deployments. Cloudera also announced the Iceberg REST Catalog and Cloudera Lakehouse Optimizer, both of which extend the provider’s ability to manage and share...

DataOps.live Enables Data Engineering Acceleration

Posted by Matt Aslett on 26 November 2025

I have previously written about the critical importance of data management to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications and agentic AI. The importance of data management is nothing new, but automation of business processes and decision-making raises the stakes in terms of the expectations and the risks. The need for enterprises to have trust in their data governance and data...

Why Data Software Providers Are Embracing Model Context Protocol

Posted by Matt Aslett on 19 November 2025

I have written several times this year about Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its importance in enabling agentic artificial intelligence (AI) use cases. Numerous data platform, data management, data operations and real-time data software providers have added support for MCP to their products in recent months. MCP has become so ubiquitous, in fact, that it is easy to forget the protocol was only...

Tokenizing Working Capital to Improve Performance and Efficiency

Posted by Robert Kugel on 13 November 2025

Tokenization is an emerging topic for business software providers. Tokenization is the process of representing something valuable or complex with a simple computer-readable substitute to enhance security or improve the efficiency and usability of a system. Tokens are already widely used in commerce. It’s now common for sensitive data used in a transaction, such as a bank account number or credit...

Oracle AI World 2025: Cloud, Software and Sovereignty

Posted by Jeff Orr on 12 November 2025

Enterprise CIOs are under pressure to operationalize artificial intelligence (AI) while preserving governance, cost control and regulatory compliance. Oracle’s latest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) software announcements from Oracle AI World 2025 focus on unifying data and AI pipelines, simplifying multicloud consumption and strengthening software‑defined networking to deliver predictable...

Oracle Shows Off AI Agents for Performance and Productivity

Posted by Robert Kugel on 05 November 2025

The recent Oracle AI World event did not unveil much that was stunning “new” news for its business applications, because much of what has been evolving was presented already and has been in front of analysts for some months. What was on display, though, was steady progress to its advancing capabilities coming out every quarter. The company has focused on the development of agents and an agentic...

Data Is the Structural Steel of Finance Departments

Posted by Robert Kugel on 15 October 2025

There's a saying among military historians that amateurs debate strategy while professionals talk about logistics. In a similar vein, those rooted deeply in the workings of information technology (IT) pay close attention to data because it is fundamental to the proficiency and effectiveness of any IT system. Visionaries speak of data being the oil or gold of the information economy; practitioners...

Planning for Uncertainty with AI

Posted by Robert Kugel on 10 September 2025

We live in a time of uncertainty, not unpredictability. Planning charts the course of an enterprise through a sea of uncertainties, making fact-based predictions of potential outcomes to inform decision-making by executives and managers. Companies do a lot of planning—some formal but much of it informal. People in companies plan sales, they plan how to produce products and deliver services. They...

IBM Enhances Data Intelligence and Data Integration

Posted by Matt Aslett on 02 September 2025

I previously wrote about IBM’s strategy of consolidating analytics, data and artificial intelligence (AI) functionality from various products under its watsonx brand, which was launched in 2023 to address the AI development life cycle, as well as data storage processing and AI governance. The company has added two more offerings to its watsonx portfolio in recent months, combining established...

Approaches to Data as a Business Discipline for AI

Posted by Matt Aslett on 27 August 2025

The IT department of any enterprise is integral to implementing and managing the execution of its data objectives, just as the finance department is integral to implementing and managing financial objectives. Few enterprises would allow the finance department complete autonomy to define financial strategies; however, too many enterprises allow the IT department to define data strategies. Treating...

Minimize Costs with Supply Chain Agility and AI

Posted by Robert Kugel on 26 August 2025

The era of ever-liberalizing trade that began in earnest in the 1950s (albeit with periodic ups and downs) came to an epochal end in the 2010s. Over the past decade, the ever-more demanding environment for supply chain planning and execution has forced enterprises to take a more strategic approach to managing these processes. The need for resiliency and adaptability in a rapidly changing world...

IT Is at the Heart of the AI-Enabled Economy

Posted by Jeff Orr on 26 August 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept but a current reality, and enterprise leaders are recognizing its profound impact on the IT sector. The development and deployment of AI-driven applications across various industries hinge on a robust IT infrastructure and skilled expertise. The words of industry leaders reinforce this sentiment: Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy indicates that...

Reltio Provides a Platform for AI-Driven Data Unification

Posted by Matt Aslett on 20 August 2025

Fragmentation is a pervasive problem for enterprises seeking to take advantage of data generated by various applications to drive business decision-making. For almost as long as the IT industry has existed enterprises have struggled to combine and integrate information from multiple data siloes created by a variety of applications and business units. Creating a “single version of the truth” that...

PROS Ramps Up Pricing and Revenue Focus

Posted by Stephen Hurrell on 05 August 2025

Earlier this year I was a guest at the PROS 2025 Outperform conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. PROS is a well-established price optimization and revenue management software provider that, although well-known within the airline and hospitality industries, has a lower profile outside of these specific verticals. An original premise of PROS was to offer advanced analytics and pricing as well as...

Oracle Addresses Agentic AI for Fusion and Beyond

Posted by Matt Aslett on 29 July 2025

ISG Software Research’s expertise examines the software provider landscape through two lenses: business applications (including office of finance, human capital management (HCM) and customer experience) and IT and technology (including digital business, digital technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics and data). Most software providers fall into one of these two high-level expertise...

Databricks Data+AI Summit

Posted by David Menninger on 24 July 2025

Databricks recently hosted its Data+AI Summit in San Francisco, an event that attracted 22,000 attendees. That’s a far cry from the Spark Summit I attended in 2016. As pointed out in my coverage of Databricks massive funding round earlier this year, the company was originally founded as a provider of cloud-based Apache Spark services. Since its inception, Spark has been associated with processing...

Confluent Address Unified Stream and Batch Processing with AI

Posted by Matt Aslett on 22 July 2025

I have been saying for several years that success with streaming data requires enterprises to manage data in motion alongside data at rest, rather than treating streaming as a niche activity. Software providers have also been moving in this direction. Many established data management providers have added the ability to manage, store and process streaming data alongside their existing batch data...