ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

The Diminishing Science of Research in Technology Analyst Firms

Posted by Mark Smith on 18 February 2011

The technology analyst industry has ended its barrage of exuberant predictions for the new year. After digesting all of these commentaries (some were a challenge, I admit), we need to stop our predicting and instead start a discussion about what all of us ought to be doing. From my perspective, that should be an annual statement of direction, what we here call the research agenda. I have decided...

The Business Technology Revolution in 2011

Posted by Mark Smith on 17 February 2011

The new year has brought a revolution in business technologies that allows enterprises to roll out new applications, processes and services in record time. What used to take a business six months to a year to develop and deploy – and not too long ago that was considered fast! – can now be done in a week or two, making enterprise application and business intelligence deployments of the recent past...

Informatica Focuses Integration on Lines of Business

Posted by Mark Smith on 08 February 2011

At this year’s Informatica industry analyst conference (Twitter: #INFAAnalyst) to update the research and industry analyst community on its data integration and information infrastructure products. Looking back on my analysis of the company’s 2010 analyst summit, I see Informatica has made significant progress in gaining adoption of its products and influencing the new business technology...

MicroStrategy Combines Actions with Business Intelligence and Mobility

Posted by ISG Software Research on 07 February 2011

Last week I attended MicroStrategy World 2011 in Las Vegas, the North American version of the business intelligence (BI) vendor’s annual user conference. The event was well attended, and the company claimed attendance was up 40% over last year. The purpose of the post is to recap the announcements made, highlight the areas where MicroStrategy is making investments and comment on the overall...

Jaspersoft Releases Version 4 and Tackles Large-Scale Data

Posted by ISG Software Research on 28 January 2011

Open source business intelligence (BI) software vendor Jaspersoft recently announced general availability of its flagship product Jaspersoft 4 and earlier this week announced a new reporting project that provides data connectors to a variety of large-scale data sources.

Social Media Ignorance in the IT Analyst Industry

Posted by Mark Smith on 17 January 2011

Social media, the newest channel of communication across the Internet, is increasingly being used to influence, but also to deliver advice and research. I wrote about this revolution last year (See: “The Social Media Revolution in Industry Analyst Community”), reporting on the transformation that is underway and the work of our firm along with Altimeter Group and dozens of other active industry...

Clouds are Raining Corporate Data

Posted by ISG Software Research on 04 January 2011

Cloud computing is having an increasingly large influence over the IT landscape. It’s likely that, whether you realize it or not, corporate data exists has and or is migrating outside the walls of your organization. Recent research by Ventana Research shows that in areas such as customer services, sales, workforce or human capital management, software as a service (SaaS) or cloud-based...

Can Your Sales Force Trust Salesforce.com?

Posted by Mark Smith on 17 December 2010

At the 2010 Dreamforce conference (Twitter #df10) in San Francisco, about 18,000 people gathered to learn about the latest in salesforce.com’s applications and technology. Attendees from sales organizations might have been looking for some depth on the next generation of applications to support their sales processes or what the vendor will do to help sales managers manage, sales reps sell...

Salesforce Analytics Identify a Break in the Clouds

Posted by ISG Software Research on 15 December 2010

Last week I attended salesforce.com’s Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco (Twitter #DF10). As a user of salesforce applications for the last four years in my previous positions, I was familiar with its analytic capabilities, or lack thereof. Certainly you can accomplish simple reporting and produce dashboards displaying salesforce data, which is adequate for narrowly focused reporting and...

SAP Energizes CRM with Analytics and Interactions, But Will It Work?

Posted by Mark Smith on 14 December 2010

At the SAP Global Influencer Summit (Twitter #SAPSummit) that I just assessed the company addressed, among many other things, its SAP CRM vision and recent advances. SAP has shifted its focus from standard customer relationship management (CRM) to the customer lines of business where professionals increasingly see that the enterprise customer experience should span channels and processes in...

The Technology Stack and Innovation: SAP & The Rest

Posted by ISG Software Research on 14 December 2010

Vishal Sikka raised an important point about the software business during his remarks at the SAP Global Influencer Summit that my colleague just assessed (See: “SAP Elevates Technology Strategy for Enterprise Software and Solutions“). He contrasted the business strategy of consolidation that other companies are pursuing with his view of SAP’s strategy of innovation. In one sense, this assertion...

SAP Elevates Technology Strategy for Enterprise Software and Solutions

Posted by ISG Software Research on 13 December 2010

At this year’s Influencer Summit (Twitter: #SAPSummit) SAP’s executive leadership team summarized the company’s progress in 2010 and described its plans for the coming year in a range of technologies. The event led off with co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe discussing by video from Germany the business and technology areas in which SAP expects growth in 2011. Jim focused SAP’s efforts in on-premises and...

HP Gives Up on Business Intelligence and Analytics Markets

Posted by Mark Smith on 05 December 2010

No one has seemed to notice that in the last several months, Hewlett-Packard has quietly made changes to its participation in the enterprise software market; this will significantly change HP’s value for CIOs and IT organizations in regards to business intelligence (BI) technologies.

Tableau 6 Combines In-Memory Processing and Visualization

Posted by ISG Software Research on 28 November 2010

Tableau Software officially released Version 6 of its product this week. Tableau approaches business intelligence from the end user’s perspective, focusing primarily on delivering tools that allow people to easily interact with data and visualize it. With this release, Tableau has advanced its in-memory processing capabilities significantly. Fundamentally Tableau 6 shifts from the intelligent...

Advantages and Challenges of In-Memory Databases and Processing

Posted by ISG Software Research on 28 November 2010

Interest in and development of in-memory technologies have increased over the last few years, driven in part by widespread availability of affordable 64-bit hardware and operating systems and the performance advantages in-memory operations provide over disk-based operations. Some software vendors, such as SAP with its High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) project has been advancing with...

Happy BIRT Day

Posted by Robert Kugel on 28 November 2010

Actuate held its annual customer day in San Francisco amid the happy chaos of the World Series champion Giants’ ticker-tape celebration, and on that day the company’s ticker symbol changed from ACTU to BIRT (a shift, incidentally, botched by NASDAQ). There was a great deal of focus on its ActuateOne platform (which my colleague reviewed here) and the advancements in using open source software...

Merced Systems’ European Event Showcases Best Practices and Customer Insights

Posted by ISG Software Research on 28 November 2010

Merced Systems provides software to support performance management in both sales and service. Its products extract data from various systems to produce business-related reports, dashboards, scorecards and analysis that help companies improve performance in these two key functions. To further its efforts, Merced recently invited around 100 partners, customers and prospects to its 360 Degree...

SuccessFactors Takes a Calculator into the Cloud?

Posted by Mark Smith on 28 November 2010

SuccessFactors is known for applications in performance and talent management but has been working to expand its portfolio more broadly into business. This year the company expanded its focus to workforce analytics with the acquisition of Inform, which I assessed. I have assessed that Inform needed to improve the usability of its tools to compete better which is now more easily possible with a...

Qlik Here for My View of QlikView 10

Posted by ISG Software Research on 28 November 2010

My colleague recently wrote about QlikView, noting its rapid ascent to providing a very robust support of mobile technology platforms among BI vendors and integration with SAP. On the occasion of its release of a major product revision, QlikView 10, I’d like to add my perspective on the company and its most recent release. I first learned of QlikView about five years ago while working on the TM1...

Teradata Advances Personalized Marketing Using Analytics

Posted by ISG Software Research on 28 November 2010

Most people would describe Teradata as a data warehouse and analytics vendor as my colleague has reviewed its core technology. In addition to that, through its own development and by partnering, the company has branched out into the applications market. One such application is Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM) main purpose is to personalize customer interactions, regardless of channel or type...