Analyst Perspectives

I have written before about the rising popularity of the data fabric approach for managing and governing data spread across distributed environments comprised of multiple data centers, systems and applications. I assert that by 2025, more than 6 in 10 organizations will adopt data fabric technologies to facilitate the management and processing of data across multiple data platforms and cloud...

At one point, analytics and business intelligence were considered non-mission critical activities. One of the primary concerns in designing analytics systems was to ensure they didn’t interfere with or draw computing resources away from operational systems. But today, analytical systems are integral to many aspects of operations. More than 9 in 10 participants in our Analytics and Data Benchmark...

I recently wrote about the various technologies used by organizations to process and analyze data in real time. I explained that while the terms streaming data and events and streaming analytics are often used interchangeably, they are separate disciplines that make use of common underlying concepts and technologies such as events, event brokers and event-driven architecture. Confluent’s...

If I had a magic wand, I would want to add scenario evaluation to all business intelligence tools on the market. I have previously written about the need to make intelligent decisions with decision intelligence. The data and analytics markets have evolved so that organizations have far greater capabilities to utilize data in decision-making processes. While there is some convergence around the...

The current market landscape of data and analytics is undergoing rapid evolution, presenting organizations with a wide array of challenges and opportunities. As data sources and warehouses steadily migrate to the cloud, a significant number of organizations still depend on conventional tools. This reliance on legacy systems hinders the seamless accessibility and adoption of analytics and business...

A century ago, the big breakthrough in telephones was the ability to dial your party’s number directly. Dialing became necessary when enough people had telephones to require a shift from people-assisted to fully automated connections. But direct dialing was only a local option – you still needed an operator to make long-distance calls. In the 1920s, commenting on their forecast for the expected...

Real-time business is a modern phenomenon, and business transformation has accelerated many business events in recent years. However, the execution of business events has always occurred in real time. Rather, it is the processing of the data related to business events that has accelerated instead of the event itself.

It is a mark of the rapid, current pace of development in artificial intelligence (AI) that machine learning (ML) models, until recently considered state of the art, are now routinely being referred to by developers and vendors as “traditional.” Generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) in particular, have taken the AI world by storm in the past year, automating and accelerating the...

As I have previously explained, we expect an increased demand for intelligent operational applications infused with the results of analytic processes, such as personalization and artificial intelligence-driven recommendations. These systems rely on the analysis of data in the operational data platform to accelerate worker decision-making or improve customer experience.

The publication of Ventana Research’s 2023 Operational Data Platforms Value Index earlier this year highlighted the importance of incorporating analytic processing into operational applications to deliver personalization and recommendations for workers, partners and customers. This importance is being accelerated by interest in generative AI, especially large language models. The emergence of...

The Office of Finance can be compared to a numbers factory where the main raw material, data, is transformed into financial statements, management accounting, analyses, forecasts, budgets, regulatory filings, tax returns and all kinds of reports. Data is the strategic raw material of the finance and accounting department. It is the key ingredient in every sale and purchase as well as every...

The data and analytics sector rightly places great importance on data quality: Almost two-thirds (64%) of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research cite reviewing data for quality and consistency issues as the most time-consuming task in analyzing data. Data and analytics vendors would not recommend that customers use tools known to have data quality problems. It is...

MicroStrategy is a long-standing business intelligence and analytics vendor that operates worldwide. Founded in 1989, this publicly traded company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue recently held its first in-person conference since prior to the pandemic. Similar to previous in-person events, the event was well attended by about 2,000 attendees and exhibitors. The theme,...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved from a highly specialized niche technology to a worldwide phenomenon. Nearly 9 in 10 organizations use or plan to adopt AI technology. Several factors have contributed to this evolution. First, the amount of data they can collect and store has increased dramatically while the cost of analyzing these large amounts of data has decreased dramatically....

The data platforms market has traditionally been divided between products specifically designed to support operational or analytic workloads, with other market segments having emerged in recent years for data platforms targeted specifically at data science and machine learning (ML), as well as real-time analytics. More recently, we have seen vendor strategies evolving to provide a more...

Generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence used to generate new, seemingly real content. Broadly speaking, AI has traditionally been used to identify patterns in data and apply those patterns to categorize and predict behaviors. For instance, it can organize customers into groups (or clusters) with similar characteristics, or predict which customers are most likely to respond to certain...

The recent publication of our Value Index research highlights the impact of intelligent applications on the operational data platforms sector. While we continue to believe that, for most use cases, there is a clear, functional requirement for either analytic or operational data platforms, recent growth in the development of intelligent applications infused with the results of analytic processes,...

In my perspective on decision intelligence, I lamented the fact that business intelligence technologies have left the rest of the exercise to the reader for too long. Making a decision is a process that involves many steps and many people. Decision-making is so complicated and divorced from day-to-day business processes that organizations have had to create entirely separate teams to focus on the...

Organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the potential value that can be gained by processing big data. As data sources grow, it becomes important to have tools and methods to effectively process, analyze and visualize this information from disparate systems and warehouses.

People analytics is the application of data and statistical methods to better understand and optimize the human capital within an organization. It has become a crucial aspect of business strategy as organizations seek to make data-driven decisions about the workforce. In the past decade, the people analytics market has experienced substantial growth, as businesses look for ways to gain insight...