Analyst Perspectives

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

One of the key questions that will need to be solved if agentic artificial intelligence is to fulfill its potential is which technologies and providers will serve the role of orchestrating communication and integration between the various models, applications and data repositories involved. ISG Research defines agentic AI as software designed to execute business processes through autonomous...

If a single phrase could sum up the big data craze of a dozen or so years ago, it would be “more data beats better algorithms.” Attributed to Google research director Peter Norvig, the quote effectively summarized a research paper Norvig jointly authored called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data and was embraced by big data enthusiasts as articulating the prevalent thinking that enterprises...

My colleagues have recently described how agentic artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize enterprise computing by automating the handling of static and dynamic complexity to enable software to take action without the need for human intervention. Put simply, agentic AI is the orchestration of the execution of discreet business tasks by a combination of software components...

OneStream offers a platform designed to serve the needs of accounting and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) organizations. The software handles financial close and consolidation, planning and budgeting, analysis and reporting.

The artificial intelligence (AI) landscape is undergoing dramatic transformation, with enterprises rapidly adapting to a world where AI is no longer just a possibility but a necessity. ISG Market Lensresearch of 300 enterprises shows that AI initiatives were the second largest category of IT spending for 2024, behind customer experience initiatives. Furthermore, enterprises plan to increase 2025...

The six costliest words in managing a finance department are, “We’ve always done it this way.” The record-to-report (R2R) cycle describes the process of finalizing and summarizing the financial activities of a business for a specific accounting period—typically a month, quarter or fiscal year. It is important to note that R2R exclusively covers the activities between recording (keeping the books)...

One of the promised benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), Generative AI (GenAI) and agents is that they can make everyone their own financial and business analyst. It’s true that these technologies can make it possible for everyone to access once hard-to-reach data (with suitable permissions), unleash agents to assemble the data into useful tables and charts along with commentary describing...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are comprehensive software platforms designed to integrate and manage all the core processes of an enterprise while recording transactions and their financial consequences to support the accounting and finance functions. ISG Software Research recently completed our Buyers Guide™ for ERP systems, designed to help enterprises that are replacing their...

I recently completed the latest edition of our Business Planning Buyers Guide, which reviews and assesses the offerings of 14 providers of this software. One of the points that I look at is whether and to what extent the software provider offers out-of-the-box external data useful for forecasting, planning, analysis and evaluation. What I discovered is that the availability of this type of vital...

I recently attended Infor’s Velocity Summit, designed to showcase the latest versions of its CloudSuite ERP software. Also center stage were Infor’s advances in artificial intelligence and process mining as well as its environmental, social and governance application and supply chain optimization enhancements.

Artificial Intelligence and generative AI are beginning to change how enterprises do many things, especially planning and budgeting. This technology has the potential to significantly redefine the mission of the financial planning and analysis group. It will do so by substantially reducing the time spent on the purely mechanical aspects of day-to-day tasks. AI is also making it easier for...