Analyst Perspectives

Vocalcom is one of the up-and-coming names in the contact center market. Founded in 1995, it is headquartered in France but has a worldwide presence, with 4,500 customers and more than half a million users of its services. It may not be as well-known as other companies in the same space because many of the customers are in southern Europe, and a high percentage are outsourcers who use its services to provide contact center services based on its platform. It offers what I call multichannel...

Ventana Research has just released the 2012 Value Index for Business Intelligence, in which we evaluate the competency and maturity of vendors and products. Our firm has been researching this software category for almost a decade. Our latest benchmark research in business intelligence found that new technology advancements in business intelligence are critical to its future; more than two-thirds of organizations will use BI on mobile technology in the next year, and more than a fifth will do so...

Salesforce.com launched more than 12 years ago as the founding CRM vendor in the cloud. Today it has grown to be the kitchen-sink vendor in the cloud. It seems every month it announces some new cloud service, and its services now cover almost the entire enterprise: sales, marketing, service, HR, finance and a list of supporting services that make it hard to determine just what the company now has to offer. Two things remain clear, however: Salesforce.com has established cloud computing as a...

Unlike other recent conferences that seem to focus almost exclusively on cloud computing, this week’s Teradata Partners Conference emphasized big data and analytics. The vision that Teradata lays out is one in which new technologies such as Apache Hadoop live side by side with more traditional enterprise data warehouses (EDW) and companies have the flexibility to define their own approaches to BI tools. This approach, at least in the near and medium terms, makes a lot of sense, and is backed by

SAP has inaugurated a new series of business applications it calls Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) OnDemand as a cloud-based subscription service. The applications are part of SAP’s EPM version 10 suite, which it introduced last year. It’s a first step in what is likely to be a portfolio of general-purpose, lightweight and relatively low-cost apps designed to be used on mobile devices. Using HANA on the back end, the applications can deliver high performance in accessing masses of...

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 moved into the retail space with user-friendly tools that should appeal to mid-tier retailers and...

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 from today’s record low interest rates. One major reason they can’t refinance is the collapse of...

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 broader analytics portfolio by providing support for Oracle BI Foundational Suite including OBIEE,...

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 Jeopardize Your Business. Unfortunately, the ethics and morals in the technology analyst industry have...

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 included a mix of core contact center vendors (interaction management, CRM, WFO, customer experience...