Analyst Perspectives

Databricks recently announced its Series J funding round, successfully raising $10 billion at a valuation of $62 billion. Led by Thrive Capital alongside high-profile investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners, the company intends to invest this capital towards new artificial intelligence (AI) products, acquisitions and significant expansion of its international operations. In the...

Despite all the interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI), ISG’s Buyers Guide for Data Platforms serves as a reminder of the ongoing importance of product experience functionality to address adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. While new and emerging capabilities might catch the eye, features that address data platform security, performance and...

Too often, enterprises find that data is distributed across multiple silos on-premises and in the cloud. More than two-thirds of participants in ISG’s Market Lens Cloud Study are using a hybrid architecture involving both on-premises and cloud infrastructure for analytics and artificial intelligence deployments. Unifying data to achieve operational and analytic objectives requires complex data...

I previously explained that data observability software has become a critical component of data-driven decision-making. Data observability addresses one of the most significant impediments to generating value from data by providing an environment for monitoring the quality and reliability of data on a continual basis. Maintaining quality and trust is a perennial data management challenge, the...

Oracle announced significant updates to its Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) software at the recently held Oracle Cloud World. The application suite includes procurement, inventory management, warehouse management, order management and transportation management. SCM tasks are mostly small-scale and repetitive, yet the processes they support are far from simple. They involve the...

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) governance has emerged as a critical ingredient for successful AI deployments. It helps build trust in the results of AI models, it helps ensure compliance with regulations and it is necessary to meet internal governance requirements. Effective AI governance must encompass various dimensions, including data privacy,...

As I’ve written recently, artificial intelligence governance is a concern for many enterprises. In our recent ISG Market Lens study on generative AI, 39% of participants cited data privacy and security among the biggest inhibitors to adopting AI. Nearly a third (32%) identified performance and quality (e.g., erroneous results), and an equal amount (32%) mentioned legal risk.

Having just completed our AI Platforms Buyers Guide assessment of 25 different software providers, I was surprised to see how few provided robust AI governance capabilities. As I’ve written previously, data governance has changed dramatically over the last decade, with nearly twice as many enterprises (71% v. 38%) implementing data governance policies during that time. With all this attention on...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The AI Platforms: Ventana Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research.

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 artificial intelligence (AI) market is exploding with activity, which is part of the reason we recently announced that we have dedicated an entire practice at Ventana Research to the topic. Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) have taken the AI world by storm. In fact, we assert that through 2026, one-half of all AI investments will be based on generative rather than...

Analytics software is used by business analysts and decision-makers to facilitate the generation of insights from data. It encompasses business intelligence and decision intelligence software, including reports and dashboards as well as embedded analytics and the development of intelligent applications infused with the results of analytic processes. Analytics software enables enterprises to...

I recently attended the Salesforce Trailblazer DX event to learn more about Salesforce’s artificial intelligence products and strategy. Fueled by generative AI, awareness and investment in AI seems to be exploding. ISG research shows that enterprises plan to nearly triple the portion of budgets allocated to AI over the next two years. This doesn’t come as a big surprise when you look at the...

Data and analytics have become increasingly important to all aspects of business. The modern data and analytics stack includes many components, which creates challenges for enterprises and software providers alike. As my colleague Matt Aslett points out, a better term might be modern data and analytics smorgasbord. There are arguments for and against using an assortment of tools versus a...

Artificial intelligence seems poised to change everything, although naturally a great deal of attention tends to be paid to the cool things it makes possible. AI can also make the humdrum less tedious and even transform the dullest of back-office operations into something more meaningful. For example, AI can take accounts receivable automation to the next level. 

Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is exploding driven in large part by the widespread interest in generative AI. ISG’s AI Buyer Behavior Survey reported that more than 6 in 10 participants have at least one AI application in production. However, despite the ease with which individuals can use AI as a result of natural language processing, creating and managing AI models is still a...

Cloud computing has had an enormous impact on the analytics and data industry in recent decades, with the on-demand provisioning of computational resources providing new opportunities for enterprises to lower costs and increase efficiency. Two-thirds of participants in Ventana Research’s Data Lakes Dynamic Insightsresearch are using a cloud-based environment as the primary data platform for...

After a year of near-constant AI chatter, the broad strokes of how the technology will roll out in business over the next three to five years are coming into place. It’s almost trite but worth repeating that artificial intelligence will drive a substantial boost in productivity as it’s adopted. Rather than making large swathes of jobs obsolete, it will take the robotic work out of those job...

The first wave of discussions around artificial intelligence (AI) in the contact center was focused on providing software buyers with a general understanding of what the technology could do. Now the conversations are becoming more specific, focused and direct. Buyers are more aware of the spectrum of available use cases and appear to be exploring how to map new tools to the particular business...

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