ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

PivotLink Analyzes Shoppers with Retail Analytics in the Cloud

Posted by ISG Software Research on 16 October 2012

I had the opportunity last week to visit PivotLink in the Bellevue, Washington, office that houses the company’s development team and marketing leadership to see its software. After taking the helm a little more than a year ago and putting a new team in place, CEO Bruce Armstrong has positioned the company above the fray of the crowded business intelligence software set. The company has smartly...

Topics: Retail Analytics, Sales Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Location Intelligence

Putting XBRL to Work in the Mortgage Market

Posted by Robert Kugel on 09 October 2012

Unless you have some combination of a very strong credit rating, a high income-to-debt payment ratio and a relatively low loan-to-value ratio, it’s not especially easy to refinance a mortgage these days. That’s a shame, because there are plenty of people who have stayed current in meeting their credit obligations and whose mortgages are comfortably below current market value who could benefit...

Topics: Office of Finance, XBRL, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Performance, Financial Performance, finance, capital markets

Oracle’s Exalytics Appliance Delivers Business Analytics

Posted by ISG Software Research on 08 October 2012

At Oracle OpenWorld this week I focused on what the company is doing in business analytics, and in particular on what it is doing with its Exalytics In-Memory Machine. The Exalytics appliance is an impressive in-memory hardware approach to putting right-time analytics in the hands of end users by providing a full range of integrated analytic and visualization capabilities. Exalytics fits into the...

Topics: Big Data, SAP, exadata, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Exalytics, IBM, Oracle

Industry Exposé: Technology Vendors Skew Analysts and Influencers

Posted by Mark Smith on 05 October 2012

In my more than a decade of writing on the trends and direction of the technology industry, occasionally I have talked about the dark side of technology industry analysts. In that vein, I wrote about the diminishing science of research in technology analyst firms, which has impacted the quality of the analysis and advice given by analysts. It built on my previous post on Why Bad Research Could...

Topics: Big Data, Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Market Research, Research, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, CIO, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Information Applications, Information Management, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, CMO, Industry Analyst, Influencers, Technology Vendors

Call Centre Expo 2012 Reveals Some Surprising Trends

Posted by ISG Software Research on 04 October 2012

Call Centre & Customer Management Expo has been running for several years now. The event provides an opportunity for contact center and customer service managers in Europe to catch up with all the latest and greatest going on in the market. At this year’s event earlier this week, as usual, I found the normal mix of presentations, vendor exhibition stands and other side events. The vendor show...

Topics: Sales Performance, Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Data Management, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Operational Performance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics, Unified Communications, Vendor(s), Workforce Force Optimization

Confirmit Moves to Voice of Customer and Feedback Management

Posted by ISG Software Research on 28 September 2012

Confirmit is one of the leading vendors of market research services. It has a full range of products that support every step of the market research cycle. Its software lets users create surveys that can be delivered through multiple channels, perform panel management (managing teams of people that contribute to research programs), collect the data from completed surveys, and use a suite of...

Topics: Sales Performance, Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Operational Performance, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics, Confirmit

Enghouse Interactive Contact Center Products Offer a Range of Capabilities

Posted by ISG Software Research on 27 September 2012

Enghouse Systems Ltd. is not one of the best-known brands in the contact center market, but if it keeps acquiring vendors at the rate it has been doing then it might soon be. It was founded in Canada in 1984, and from what I can see it is grown largely by acquisition to revenues of more than $120 million. It has morphed into Enghouse Interactive, which now represents nearly 90 percent of its...

Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Enghouse interactive, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Unified Communications, Workforce Force Optimization

VPI Extends into Multi-channel Analytics

Posted by ISG Software Research on 26 September 2012

Voice Print International recently announced it has selected Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy to deliver speech and multi-channel analytics. This news means VPI joins a small group of vendors that can provide a view of customer interactions across multiple communication channels, which is of growing importance to companies. My research into the contact center in the cloud shows that companies now...

Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, VPI, Management, Analytics, Business Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics

Other Side of the Pond Takeaways from Salesforce Dreamforce

Posted by ISG Software Research on 24 September 2012

Saleforce.com puts on a marketing event that no other software vendor can come close to. Any CEO that can get MC Hammer rapping about your company as an introduction to your keynote has to be admired. The actual content got mixed reviews; my colleague Mark Smith saw some shortfalls in how Salesforce.com supports analytics, while Robert Kugel felt the company’s cloud-based software could help...

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

Salesforce Struggles to Deliver on the Dream of Analytics

Posted by Mark Smith on 21 September 2012

I was at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference this week to hear about the latest advancements from the cloud computing software giant. Salesforce has helped revolutionize cloud computing for business, and its social media and collaborative technologies help advance business processes in sales, customer service and improve the interactions between employees, partners and customers. Salesforce...

Topics: Big Data, Predictive Analytics, QlikView, Sales Performance, Salesforce.com, Social Media, Gooddata, SnapLogic, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, InetSoft, Information Applications, Information Management, KXEN, Operational Intelligence, Cloud9 Analytics, Domo, Information Builder iway, Roambi

Salesforce Dreamforce Keynote: Social is Changing Industry Power Structures

Posted by ISG Software Research on 21 September 2012

With more than 90,000 attendees registered and 100,000 more expected to watch via live stream on Facebook, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce is the biggest technology event of this year. The conference kicked off yesterday morning with MC Hammer letting the packed house know that it was “Chatter time” and leaving little doubt about the theme of the Marc Benioff’s keynote speech: Social. Citing numbers...

Topics: Big Data, Mobile, Sales Performance, Social Media, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Location Intelligence, Workforce Performance, Social

Transforming Three Vs of Big Data into Three Ws of Business Analytics

Posted by ISG Software Research on 19 September 2012

Thinking about big data and the swirling world of analytics that surrounds it can be overwhelming. Broad-based organizational and technological changes are driving a new industrial constitution built on time-to-value and closed-loop systems of organizational and machine learning. As I analyze our next-generation business intelligence benchmark research results, I see trends in collaboration and...

Topics: Big Data, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Information Applications, Information Management, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence

Genesys Advances Customer Service to the Cloud

Posted by ISG Software Research on 19 September 2012

In what will no doubt be one of a host of announcements coming out of Dreamforce, Genesys announced a new set of cloud-based services especially for Salesforce.com customers. Genesys is a well-known brand in the contact center market, but it has undergone significant change of late and is now an independent company in charge of its own destiny. This announcement demonstrates that it intends to...

Topics: Salesforce.com, Customer Experience, Voice of the Customer, Genesys, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, CRM, Unified Communications

Customer Feedback Processes Lagging in Companies Today

Posted by ISG Software Research on 17 September 2012

Many people these days talk about voice of the customer (VOC) programs and how they can improve business performance. The foundation of any VOC program is collecting customer feedback, analyzing it and using the insights to improve customer-focused processes, training and the use of technology. Changes usually focus on customer service, but increasingly companies are focusing on the customer...

Topics: Social Media, Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, Business Collaboration, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics

NewVoiceMedia Provides Contact Center in the Cloud

Posted by ISG Software Research on 14 September 2012

Our recent benchmark research into the adoption of cloud-based systems to support contact center operations shows that around 10 percent of companies have adopted what is commonly termed communications in the cloud – that is, systems in the cloud to manage delivery of telephone calls to the right location, be it an internal extension number within an organization, a branch office number, a...

Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Experience, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, NewVoicemedia, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics

Splunk Bids to be King of Search and Operational Analytics

Posted by ISG Software Research on 14 September 2012

As I listened to the keynote address at, conf2012, the annual Splunk user conference, my initial impression was that the company was spreading itself too thin. The company highlighted four rather formidable areas of organizational focus: Enterprise 5.0, the company’s flagship data platform, which is now in beta; Development, which is support for building applications and integrating Splunk within...

Topics: Big Data, Splunk, data fabric, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Operational Intelligence, Digital Technology

Companies Should Consider Adopting Contact Centers in the Cloud

Posted by ISG Software Research on 05 September 2012

Our recent benchmark research on the contact center in the cloud shows companies are under more pressure than ever to upgrade their contact centers. The large majority of companies (73%) think it is very important to improve the way they handle customer interactions, and only a small percentage are fully satisfied with their current applications (19%) or their communications (14%). Upgrading...

Topics: Customer Analytics, Customer Data Management, Customer Experience, Customer Feedback Management, Social CRM, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics, Unified Communications, Workforce Force Optimization

Jaspersoft 4.7 Shows Big Data Opportunity and Mobile BI Challenges

Posted by ISG Software Research on 31 August 2012

Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite competes in the open source and broader BI market. Its customer base is mostly in the small and midsized business and OEMs and SaaS providers who can embed Jaspersoft code directly into their offerings. Earlier this summer, the company introduced Jaspersoft 4.7, which features advancements in interactive reporting, big data access and mobile business...

Topics: Big Data, Mobile, Jaspersoft, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Information Applications

Gaining Time-to-Value From Big Data

Posted by ISG Software Research on 30 August 2012

I had a refreshing call this morning with a vendor that did not revolve around integration of systems, types of data, and the intricacies of NoSQL approaches. Instead, the discussion was about how its business users analyze an important and complex problem and how the company’s software enables that analysis. The topic of big data never came up, and it was not needed, because the conversation was...

Topics: Big Data, Datameer, Predictive Analytics, Sales Performance, Supply Chain Performance, Planview, SuccessFactors, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Customer & Contact Center, Financial Performance, IBM, Information Management, Operational Intelligence, Workforce Performance, PivotLink

SAS Furthers Cloud Computing for Business

Posted by ISG Software Research on 30 August 2012

After this summer’s SAS European analyst event, I wrote that I came away less than convinced SAS was truly committed to the cloud, based largely on the fact that most other vendors are blowing their cloud trumpets much louder than SAS. It seemed developments in and around customer intelligence and its other products were higher priority to the company than its cloud strategy. However, after a...

Topics: SAS, Customer Analytics, Customer Data Management, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Operational Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Cloud Computing, Customer & Contact Center, Call Center, Contact Center, Contact Center Analytics, Desktop Analytics, Text Analytics