Executive Summary IT Service Management Chief information officers (CIOs) and IT leaders face the dual challenge of optimizing IT operations while driving innovation in an increasingly complex marketplace. The intricacies involved in managing a diverse array of technology environments require enterprises to harness a multitude of tools and platforms to address unique operational demands spanning various departments and functionalities. Technological advancements often outpace traditional strategies, so it is essential for IT leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the software solutions at their disposal. ITSM is a collection of processes and practices that guide enterprises in managing and delivering high-quality IT services to enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. IT Management software plays a pivotal role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives. As enterprises strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maintain a competitive edge, these approaches become critical enablers of streamlined operations and effective resource allocation. Furthermore, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures, the integration of comprehensive IT Management software platforms facilitates enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. This is particularly important as CIOs look to future-proof enterprise architecture and ensure that technology strategies are not only reactive but also proactive in addressing emerging challenges and opportunities. ISG defines IT Service Management (ITSM) as a strategic approach to deploy IT services that effectively support overall business objectives. ITSM is a collection of processes and practices that guide enterprises in managing and delivering high-quality IT services to enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Key subsets and extensions of ITSM that are critical for optimizing the performance of IT environments include: IT Operations Management (ITOM): ITOM focuses on the operational aspects of managing IT services and infrastructure. It encompasses vital functions such as incident management, problem management, change management, performance monitoring and capacity management. The goal of ITOM is to ensure that IT services operate smoothly and effectively by optimizing resource use, minimizing service disruptions and enhancing service quality. By implementing efficient ITOM practices, IT leaders can proactively address incidents and operational challenges before they escalate, fostering an environment of continuous improvement. IT Asset Management (ITAM): ITAM involves the management of an enterprise's IT assets throughout the entire lifecycle—from procurement to disposal. This includes such functions as asset tracking, compliance management and software license management. Adequate oversight of IT assets not only helps enterprises optimize costs but ensures compliance with licensing agreements and regulatory requirements. By maintaining accurate inventories of IT assets, CIOs can make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and investment in new technologies, ultimately supporting strategic initiatives and enhancing operational efficiency. Service Integration and Management (SIAM): In the current landscape, where multiple service providers are often involved in delivering IT services, SIAM has emerged as an essential framework for ensuring seamless coordination and integration. This subset focuses on managing relationships between suppliers and ensuring collaboration to maintain service quality and delivery. For organizations that rely heavily on third-party vendors, effective SIAM practices are vital for enhancing service continuity, accountability and operational synergy. By adopting a SIAM approach, CIOs can streamline interactions with multiple vendors, enhancing accountability and driving better alignment with business goals. Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL): Serving as a foundational framework for ITSM, ITIL provides a comprehensive set of best practices and processes designed to enhance service delivery. ITIL's service lifecycle stages emphasize the importance of continual improvement, highlighting the need for enterprises to evolve ITSM practices in a dynamic business environment. Furthermore, ITIL establishes a common language and set of standards that unify ITSM efforts across varied teams and stakeholders. By implementing ITIL guidelines, CIOs can create a cohesive ITSM strategy that drives collaboration, efficiency and innovation. An enterprise ITSM strategy should serve not only as a tool for managing IT resources but also as a catalyst for driving transformational growth and sustained competitive advantage. The integration of these key subsets—ITOM, ITAM, SIAM and ITIL—enables IT leaders to strategically align IT services with business objectives while fostering operational excellence and enhanced customer satisfaction. An enterprise ITSM strategy should serve not only as a tool for managing IT resources but also as a catalyst for driving transformational growth and sustained competitive advantage. Investing in these ITSM frameworks and practices allows enterprises to create resilient, adaptable IT environments. The criticality of effective ITSM software cannot be overstated. As enterprises strive to enhance operational efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and manage increasingly complex IT environments, the opportunity exists for enterprises to re-evaluate ITSM strategies and partnerships. In an enterprise evaluation, there are four key ITSM trends to consider, including: Accelerated digital transformation: The push for digital transformation initiatives across industries has been accelerated by the ongoing demand for enhanced customer experiences and streamlined operations. ITSM must support these transformations by ensuring that service delivery aligns with new business models. Enterprises should re-assess ITSM solutions to identify gaps in service capabilities and integration that may impede agility and responsiveness to market changes. Evolving workforce dynamics: With the rise of hybrid and remote work environments, ITSM strategies must adapt to support a distributed workforce. Workers require seamless access to IT services and support regardless of location. By examining current ITSM offerings, enterprises can uncover solutions that facilitate better collaboration, self-service options and proactive support mechanisms to enhance user satisfaction and productivity. Cost management and resource optimization: Economic uncertainty and tighter budgets have heightened the need for cost control in IT operations. Evaluating ITSM partnerships and software can reveal opportunities for consolidation, streamlining vendor relationships and renegotiating contracts. Through 2026, 85% of enterprises will rely on IT service management application marketplaces to connect software platforms across line-of-business groups. This focus on cost management not only improves financial performance but also ensures that ITSM investments align with overall business goals and deliver maximum value. Enhanced focus on customer experience: As enterprises compete for customer loyalty, the ability to deliver exceptional service is paramount. ITSM plays a crucial role in building processes that prioritize customer satisfaction. A review of ITSM solutions can identify ways to incorporate features that enable better tracking of customer interactions, manage service requests effectively and provide insights into service performance. Empowering IT teams to respond swiftly to customer needs fosters lasting relationships and trust. By focusing on the drivers behind a re-evaluation of ITSM service trends—digital transformation, workforce dynamics, cost management and customer experience—IT leaders can effectively advocate for the necessary changes to enhance service delivery and operational efficiency. A well-defined ITSM strategy will not only help enterprises meet current challenges but also position them for long-term success. GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. Generative AI (GenAI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing IT Management software by automating complex processes, improving decision-making and driving efficiencies across various IT functions. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline service delivery, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify and resolve issues, ultimately leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. As enterprises embrace digital transformation, IT Management software integrated with GenAI capabilities becomes essential for staying competitive. In the realm of ITSM, GenAI functionality is transforming how enterprise IT teams handle service requests, incident resolution and knowledge management. IT technicians can leverage features such as automated session summaries, which capture key details of interactions and help provide context in support tickets. This significantly reduces the time spent on notetaking and allows teams to focus on delivering solutions. GenAI can also assist in command-line generation, enabling technicians to automate routine tasks by generating scripts or commands based on specific requests or scenarios. This capability minimizes the need for extensive coding knowledge, allowing less experienced staff to execute complex tasks effectively. Additionally, GenAI enhances troubleshooting processes by narrowing problem scenarios to the most likely causes based on historical data and context cues from previous incidents. This predictive capability allows IT teams to resolve issues more quickly, reducing downtime and improving service levels. And GenAI supports knowledge management by automatically generating knowledge articles. When a new issue is identified, GenAI can curate and create documentation that details the symptoms, remediation steps and relevant configurations. By streamlining knowledge article creation directly within application workflows, enterprises can ensure that essential information is readily available for future reference, promoting a culture of continuous improvement. Agentic AI, while not yet available, has the potential to transform ITSM by reshaping how enterprise IT teams manage service requests, incident management and customer interactions. One possible application is intelligent virtual agents that autonomously handle routine inquiries via natural language processing, enhancing the user experience and allowing IT staff to focus on complex issues. Additionally, Agentic AI may streamline incident resolution by analyzing historical data to recommend solutions, reducing response times. Proactively, it could monitor system performance to detect anomalies and initiate actions, ultimately paving the way for a more efficient ITSM framework that improves service reliability and customer satisfaction. CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software that incorporates GenAI, LLMs and future Agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects and business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance and a long-term perspective on the sustainability and scalability of AI approaches. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components. The ISG Buyers Guide for ITSM software research is designed to provide a 360-degree view of a software provider’s ability to optimize the delivery, performance and governance of IT services within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for FinOps, AIOps, Observability and IT Management software. This ISG Buyers Guide for ITSM evaluates products based on capabilities including asset and configuration management, GenAI, machine learning and automation, human-centric IT service management, incident and request management, knowledge management and service level management. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available products for enterprise ITSM. The insights gained from understanding current IT Management software providers are invaluable for IT leaders who aim to align technology investments with organizational goals, optimize workflows and foster a culture of innovation. By investing in the right tools, CIOs can unlock new avenues for growth and transformation, paving the way for enterprises to thrive. This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements for ITSM: Atera, Atlassian, BMC Software, Broadcom, EasyVista, Freshworks, IBM, IFS, Ivanti, Matrix42 AG, OpenText, ServiceNow, SolarWinds, SymphonyAI, Zendesk and Zoho. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Service Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for ITSM software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for AIOps to an enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of AIOps technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of AIOps software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating AIOps systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds ServiceNow atop the list, followed by BMC with Broadcom and Atlassian tied for third. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. ServiceNow has done so in seven categories; BMC in five; Atlassian in four; Zendesk in two; and Broadcom, Matrix42 and SolarWinds in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Atlassian, BMC, Broadcom, Ivanti, ServiceNow and Zendesk. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Freshworks and SolarWinds. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: IBM and OpenText. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Atera, EasyVista, IFS, Matrix42, SymphonyAI and Zoho. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle ITSM, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Adaptability (15%), Capability (30%), Manageability (15%), Reliability (10%) and Usability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. ServiceNow, BMC and SolarWinds were designated Product Experience Leaders. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are ServiceNow, BMC and Atlassian and Zendesk tied for third. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Service Management in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $40 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 100 full-time employees. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant ITSM products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year Atera Atera Platform n/a January 2025 Atlassian Jira Service Management 10.4 January 2025 BMC Helix IT Service Management 23.3.04 January 2025 Broadcom CA Service Desk Manager 17.4 December 2024 EasyVista EV Service Manager 2024.3 December 2024 Freshworks Freshservice Freshdesk n/a n/a January 2025 January 2025 IBM IBM Control Desk 7.6.0.3 February 2025 IFS IFS assyst 24R2 November 2024 Ivanti Ivanti Neurons for ITSM 2025.2 February 2025 Matrix42 IT Service Management 12.1 January 2025 OpenText Service Management Automation X (SMAX) 25.1.1 February 2025 ServiceNow ServiceNow ITSM Yokohama January 2025 SolarWinds SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) n/a February 2025 SymphonyAI SymphonyAI Apex Platform 6.1.0.1 December 2024 Zendesk Zendesk for Enterprise n/a February 2025 Zoho ServiceDesk Plus 14940 January 2025 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. Providers offering functionality focused on only a subset of ITSM capabilities, such as asset management, helpdesk or remote monitoring, have been excluded. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product $40M+ Revenue 100+ Full-time Employees Functionality Datadog Datadog Service Management Yes Yes No Epicor Software Corporation Service Management Yes Yes No Everbridge xmatters Yes Yes No InvGate Inc. Service Desk No Yes Yes N-able N-central RMM Yes Yes No NinjaOne RMM Yes Yes No Proactivanet Proactivanet No No Yes Quest KACE Service Desk Yes Yes No Startly Service Management No No Yes SysAid Technologies Ltd. SysAid ITSM No Yes Yes TeamDynamix TeamDynamix ITSM No Yes Yes TOPdesk Nederland B.V. TOPdeskITSM No No Yes Xurrent 4me ITSM No Yes Yes
Executive Summary IT Operations Management Chief information officers and IT leaders face the dual challenge of optimizing IT operations while simultaneously driving innovation in an increasingly complex marketplace. The intricacies involved in managing a diverse array of technology environments require enterprises to harness a multitude of tools and platforms to address unique operational demands spanning various departments and functionalities. Technological advancements often outpace traditional strategies, so it is essential for IT leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the software at their disposal. IT Management software platforms facilitate enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. IT Management and Operations software plays a pivotal role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives. As enterprises strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maintain a competitive edge, these approaches become critical enablers of streamlined operations and effective resource allocation. Furthermore, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures, IT Management and Operations software platforms facilitate enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. This is particularly important as CIOs look to future-proof enterprise architecture and ensure that technology strategies are not only reactive but also proactive in addressing emerging challenges and opportunities. ISG defines IT Operations Management as an overarching discipline that encompasses the strategic integration of artificial intelligence for IT operations and observability data. Together, these methodologies provide a comprehensive software framework for optimizing the delivery, performance and governance of IT services within an enterprise. Integrating these systems specifically benefits enterprises by: Enhancing operational efficiency by maximizing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. AIOps software automates complex IT processes, gathers and analyzes vast amounts of data from diverse sources and identifies anomalies in real time. This intelligent automation enables IT teams to streamline operations, enhance incident response times and predict potential issues before they escalate. The transformative impact of AIOps allows enterprises to deliver high-quality services while minimizing manual intervention and downtime. Providing a holistic view of IT system performance. Observability involves collecting, analyzing and visualizing data to understand the internal state of IT systems through their outputs. By implementing observability practices, enterprises can optimize IT operations, enhance incident response times and ensure service reliability. With a unified approach to observability data, IT leaders can proactively identify and mitigate issues, facilitate collaboration between IT and business teams and ultimately drive operational excellence. By strategically integrating these approaches, enterprises can optimize the delivery of IT services, enhance operational efficiency and align technology initiatives with business objectives. This unified approach empowers enterprises to navigate the complexities of digital operations effectively. Aligning these technology initiatives with business objectives ensures that enterprises can achieve operational excellence, enhance service quality and respond proactively to challenges. For CIOs and IT leaders, investing in IT Operations Management practices is essential for long-term success and resilience. Enterprises rely on digital technologies to drive growth and operational efficiency. The rapid convergence of technological advancements, evolving workforce dynamics and shifting market demands makes this an opportune time for enterprises to assess and realign IT Operations Management software strategies and partnerships. Trends driving the adoption of IT Operations Management software include: Accelerated digital transformation. The urgency of digital transformation initiatives has intensified as enterprises maximize technology to optimize processes, enhance customer experiences and gain competitive advantages. CIOs and IT leaders must ensure that IT Operations Management software is agile and scalable enough to support these transformation efforts. By re-evaluating existing solutions and partnerships, enterprises can identify gaps in functionality, performance and integration that could hinder the ability to adapt to new business requirements. The demand for robust IT Operations Management software approaches that cater to distributed teams has surged. The rise of hybrid and remote work environments. The shift to hybrid and remote work models has fundamentally altered how enterprises operate. With more employees working off-site, the demand for robust IT Operations Management software approaches that cater to distributed teams has surged. Enterprises need to rethink strategies to ensure workers can access the tools and resources they require, regardless of location. Evaluating current IT Operations Management software providers will help identify approaches that promote collaboration, streamline communication and secure remote access—all critical in this new working paradigm. Cost management and resource optimization. Economic pressures resulting from global uncertainties necessitate a close examination of IT budgets and spending. IT leaders are tasked with optimizing resource allocation while delivering value and performance. Now is the time to scrutinize software contracts and partnerships for cost efficiencies, such as consolidating vendors or renegotiating licensing agreements. The goal should be to align IT expenditures with business outcomes, ensuring that every dollar spent on IT Operations Management software contributes to achieving organizational objectives. Evolution of cybersecurity threats. As reliance on digital platforms increases, so does the risk of cybersecurity threats. Enterprises must ensure that IT Operations Management software includes robust security features that protect sensitive information and safeguard against potential breaches. Assessing current software and partners confirms preparedness to mitigate risks. Strengthening the security posture of IT Operations Management software is essential not only for compliance but also for maintaining customer trust and brand reputation. Growing demand for innovation and agility: In a technology-driven economy, the ability to innovate quickly is crucial for maintaining competitive advantage. IT Operations Management software should facilitate agility by enabling enterprises to respond swiftly to changing market conditions. By re-examining software strategies and partnerships, enterprises can identify applications that support rapid deployment, seamless integration and enhanced functionality. Embracing cutting-edge technologies such as AI, ML and automation can propel enterprises forward and enhance operational efficiency. By understanding the critical factors driving an IT Operations Management software review process—accelerated digital transformation, evolving work environments, cost management, cybersecurity threats and the demand for innovation—CIOs and IT leaders can effectively communicate the importance of this initiative to executive leaders, including the CEO and CFO, as well as the board of directors. A refined IT Operations Management software strategy not only aligns technology with business goals but also positions enterprises for sustained growth and resilience. GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. Generative AI plays a pivotal role in enhancing IT Operations Management software by automating complex processes, improving decision-making and driving efficiencies across various IT functions. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline service delivery, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify and resolve issues, ultimately leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. As enterprises embrace digital transformation, IT Operations Management software integrated with GenAI capabilities becomes essential for staying competitive. Generative AI offers substantial benefits across the core categories of IT Operations Management software—AIOps and observability—empowering IT teams to enhance service quality and operational efficiency. AIOps integrates GenAI to analyze operational data and automate incident responses, enabling faster identification of issues and minimizing operational risks. In observability, GenAI aids in automating performance reporting, enhancing anomaly detection and generating troubleshooting documentation, which supports proactive system monitoring and quick resolution of issues. Applying Generative AI across these categories fosters a more efficient, responsive and data-driven IT Operations Management strategy. We assert that by 2027, software providers seeking to streamline enterprise IT operations will release GenAI-driven tools to optimize processes such as incident management, resource allocation and performance forecasting. By streamlining workflows, enhancing decision-making and improving resource allocation, enterprises can strengthen IT capabilities and establish a position for long-term success. Agentic AI holds the potential to enhance IT Operations Management in the future by introducing autonomous decision-making and proactive management capabilities beyond those of GenAI. Its envisioned ability to automate routine tasks, manage incidents and initiate complex workflows in real time could allow IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Additionally, Agentic AI could enable self-healing mechanisms to resolve issues automatically, minimizing downtime and improving service reliability. In AIOps, it is expected to automate incident management and performance optimization. For observability, it may enhance system monitoring and incident response, supporting a proactive, data-driven IT strategy and helping enterprises optimize operations to achieve strategic objectives. CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Operations Management software that incorporates GenAI, LLMs and future Agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects and business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance and a long-term perspective on the sustainability and scalability of AI approaches. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components. Our IT Operations Management Buyers Guide research provides a 360-degree view of a software provider’s ability to optimize the delivery, performance and governance of IT services within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for ITSM, FinOps, AIOps and Observability software. This IT Operations Management Buyers Guide evaluates products based on two software segments—AIOps and observability. Capabilities evaluated for IT Operations Management include collaboration and communications, data visualization, event correlation, GenAI and machine learning, intelligent automation, performance monitoring, predictive analytics, root-cause analysis, security and compliance, self-healing features, anomaly detection and proactive alerts, insight sharing, data collection and integration, open-source framework support, real-time monitoring and visualization, troubleshooting tools, scalability and integration with existing tools. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available products in both AIOps and Observability categories. The insights gained from understanding current IT Operations Management software providers are invaluable for IT leaders who aim to align their technology investments with organizational goals, optimize workflows and foster a culture of innovation. By investing in the right tools, CIOs can unlock new avenues for growth and transformation, paving the way for enterprises to thrive. This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements for IT Operations Management: BMC, Datadog, Dynatrace, Elastic, IBM, LogicMonitor, New Relic, OpsRamp, SolarWinds, Splunk and Zenoss. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Operations Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for IT management software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for AIOps to an enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of AIOps technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of AIOps software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating AIOps systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds Splunk atop the list, followed by Dynatrace and BMC. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Splunk has done so in six categories, BMC and Datadog in four categories, Dynatrace in three, Elastic and New Relic in two and IBM in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: BMC, Datadog, Dynatrace and Splunk. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: LogicMonitor and New Relic. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Elastic and IBM. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: OpsRamp, SolarWinds and Zenoss. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle IT operations management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Adaptability (10%), Capability (30%), Manageability (10%), Reliability (20%) and Usability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Dynatrace, Splunk and Datadog were designated Product Experience Leaders. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are TCO/ROI (10%) and Validation (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are BMC, Splunk and Elastic. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Operations Management in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $40 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 100 full-time employees. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant IT operations management products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year BMC Helix AIOps Netreo Ultimate SaaS Edition 25.1 25.1.00 February 2025 January 2025 Datadog Datadog platform Datadog Log Management and Analytics February 2025 February 2025 Dynatrace Dynatrace Platform 1.308 February 2025 Elastic Elastic Observability 8.17 December 2024 IBM Instana Observability IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps 290 4.8.1 December 2024 February 2025 LogicMonitor LogicMonitor Envision LogicMonitor 216 216 January 2025 January 2025 New Relic New Relic AIOps New Relic One February 2025 February 2025 OpsRamp OpsRamp 2025.02-U1 February 2025 SolarWinds SolarWinds Observability January 2025 Splunk Splunk AppDynamics Splunk Enterprise Splunk IT Service Intelligence Splunk Observability Cloud 24.10.3 9.4.0 4.19.3 February 2025 December 2024 February 2025 February 2025 Zenoss Zenoss Cloud 5.7.0 December 2024 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, because of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. The ISG Buyers Guide for IT Operations Management requires products from a single software provider supporting AIOps and IT Observability. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product $40M+ Revenue Two Continent Sales 100+ Employees CloudFabrix Software CloudFabrix AIOps CloudFabrix Unified Network Observability No Yes No
Executive Summary IT Observability Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT leaders face the dual challenge of optimizing IT operations while simultaneously driving innovation in an increasingly complex marketplace. The intricacies involved in managing a diverse array of technology environments require enterprises to harness a multitude of tools and platforms to address unique operational demands spanning various departments and functionalities. Technological advancements often outpace traditional strategies, so it is essential for IT leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the software solutions at their disposal. IT Management software plays a pivotal role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives. As enterprises strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maintain a competitive edge, these approaches become critical enablers of streamlined operations and effective resource allocation. Furthermore, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures, the integration of comprehensive IT Management software platforms facilitates enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. This is particularly important as CIOs look to future-proof enterprise architecture and ensure that technology strategies are not only reactive but also proactive in addressing emerging challenges and opportunities. Observability empowers enterprises to gain deeper insights into system performance, enabling them to proactively address challenges. ISG defines IT observability as a discipline for understanding the internal state of IT systems based on their outputs. This practice transcends traditional monitoring methods, encompassing data collection, analysis and visualization across various IT components. Observability empowers enterprises to gain deeper insights into system performance, enabling them to proactively address challenges such as performance degradation, system anomalies and incidents that might disrupt business operations. At its core, observability data consists of the specific data points gathered by observability tools—often logs, traces and metrics—which provide an enhanced view of IT services. With the ability to monitor application performance and infrastructure health in real time, enterprises can improve incident response times and operational efficiency. This increased visibility allows IT teams to identify latent issues and mitigate them before they escalate into more significant problems, thereby minimizing downtime and ensuring the reliability of critical services. One of the most significant benefits of adopting observability practices is the ability to create a unified and collaborative approach to IT Management. By consolidating data from multiple sources and systems, enterprises can develop an integrated view of IT health and performance. This holistic understanding fosters collaboration among IT and business teams, enabling them to work together effectively in identifying root causes and implementing timely solutions. Consequently, habits of data-driven decision-making are formed, enhancing trust in the information that informs operational strategies. Additionally, as observability data evolves in response to the enterprise’s changing needs, it enables continuous improvement in IT service delivery. The insights gained from this data can inform key operational decisions and strategic investments. For CIOs and IT leaders, this means they are better equipped to align technology initiatives with business objectives. The necessity for robust observability software approaches cannot be overstated. Infrastructure and applications must perform as expected. ISG asserts that through 2026, only 1 in 10 enterprises will have achieved end-to-end observability due to data silos, application complexity and volume of data, limiting the potential for resilience and growth. A mature observability strategy not only supports operational excellence but also drives strategic growth and resilience within the enterprise. By transforming awareness of system performance into actionable insights, businesses can enhance their ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities while mitigating risks. The commitment to observability can yield substantial dividends, as it empowers IT leaders to optimize operations, enhance service delivery and create a resilient IT ecosystem that supports both current needs and future ambitions. For CIOs looking to foster innovation while managing complexity, investing in observability is not just a choice—it is a necessity for achieving long-term success. Enterprises depend on real-time data for decision-making, and the need for effective observability solutions is more critical than ever. The near-term opportunity is for enterprises to reevaluate their observability strategies and partnerships to improve system performance and reliability. Here are four observability considerations when reassessing the IT strategy: Complexity of modern IT environments: The adoption of microservices, cloud technologies and hybrid infrastructures has led to heightened complexity in monitoring and managing IT systems. A thorough review of current observability tools can help enterprises identify gaps in visibility that may hinder their ability to understand system performance. Now is the time to ensure that observability software approaches are equipped to handle the dynamic nature of modern infrastructures. Proactive performance monitoring: In an environment where downtime can significantly impact revenue and customer satisfaction, proactive performance monitoring is crucial. Effective observability tools can automate the detection of anomalies and provide actionable insights before problems escalate. Enterprises should evaluate their observability partnerships to ensure they offer advanced capabilities, such as real-time analytics and automated troubleshooting, to enhance incident response efforts. Focus on user experience: As enterprises strive to deliver exceptional user experiences, observability tools must span beyond technical metrics to include user behavior and performance monitoring. This holistic view empowers IT teams to make data-driven decisions that prioritize user satisfaction. By reassessing observability strategies, enterprises can align their monitoring efforts with the broader goal of enhancing customer experiences. Enable data-driven decision making: In the age of data, enterprises must harness insights gleaned from observability tools to inform strategic decisions. Effective observability not only aids in troubleshooting but also provides valuable insights into usage patterns, trends and potential areas for investment. As such, it is essential for enterprises to ensure their observability software approaches support data analysis and reporting capabilities. Effective observability not only aids in troubleshooting but also provides valuable insights into usage patterns, trends and potential areas for investment. By focusing on complexity management, proactive monitoring, user experience and data-driven decision making, IT leaders can build a compelling case for necessary enhancements. A robust observability strategy will empower enterprises to maintain system reliability, enhance operational efficiency and deliver superior experiences in an increasingly digital landscape. Generative AI (GenAI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing IT Management software by automating complex processes, improving decision-making and driving efficiencies across various IT functions. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline service delivery, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify and resolve issues, ultimately leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. As enterprises embrace digital transformation, IT Management software integrated with GenAI capabilities becomes essential for staying competitive. Within observability, GenAI has become a significant tool for enterprises aiming to gain deeper insights into their IT system performance. One practical use case is the automation of performance reports based on data collected from various monitoring tools. This enables IT teams to quickly understand trends, identify anomalies and assess the overall health of their systems without manually sifting through extensive datasets. GenAI is also instrumental in enhancing incident detection and response. By analyzing real-time system outputs, it can pinpoint anomalies and correlate events from diverse sources, creating a comprehensive view of system behavior. This predictive capability allows teams to address issues proactively, thereby reducing incident response times significantly. Furthermore, GenAI can be leveraged to generate troubleshooting guides and knowledge articles based on previously documented issues and their resolutions. This facilitates faster issue resolution by providing technicians with contextually relevant documentation directly within their workflows, improving efficiency and supporting a culture of knowledge sharing. Additionally, GenAI can assist in synthesizing insights across various observability tools, delivering comprehensive health checks of IT environments at a glance. By merging data from multiple systems, stakeholders can obtain a holistic view of their infrastructure's performance, making it easier to identify systemic weaknesses and take corrective actions. Agentic AI, although not yet available, has the potential to enhance how enterprises monitor and manage system performance. One envisioned application is autonomous monitoring systems that continuously analyze data to detect anomalies and provide insights without human intervention. Its predictive capabilities may enable early identification of issues, recommending proactive measures based on historical performance data. Additionally, agentic AI could automate troubleshooting processes, improving incident response times and allowing IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Future capabilities may also include detailed performance reports and dashboards, facilitating informed decision-making regarding IT environments and enhancing overall service levels. CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software incorporating GenAI, LLMs and future agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software incorporating GenAI, large language models (LLMs) and future agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects as well as business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance along with a long-term perspective on sustainability and scalability of AI approaches. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components. The ISG Buyers Guide for Observability is designed to provide a 360-degree view of a software provider’s ability to optimize the delivery, performance and governance of IT services within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for ITSM, FinOps, AIOps and IT Operations Management software. The ISG Buyers Guide for Observability evaluates products on capabilities including anomaly detection and proactive alerts, collaboration and insight sharing, data collection and integration, GenAI and machine learning (ML), open-source framework support, real-time monitoring and visualization, root cause analysis and troubleshooting tools, and scalability and integration with existing tools. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available observability software products. The insights gained from understanding current IT Management software providers are invaluable for IT leaders who aim to align their technology investments with organizational goals, optimize workflows and foster a culture of innovation. By investing in the right tools, CIOs can unlock new avenues for growth and transformation, paving the way for enterprises to thrive. This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements for observability: BMC, Broadcom, Chronosphere, Coralogix, Datadog, Dynatrace, EasyVista, Elastic, Google Cloud, Grafana Labs, IBM, LogicMonitor, Logz.io, Microsoft, New Relic, OpsRamp, ServiceNow, SolarWinds, Splunk, Sumo Logic, Zenoss and Zoho. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Observability is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for IT observability software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for AIOps to an enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of AIOps technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of AIOps software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating AIOps systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds ServiceNow atop the list, followed by Splunk and Microsoft. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. ServiceNow has done so in seven categories; Splunk in six; Datadog in three; BMC in two; and Dynatrace, Microsoft and New Relic in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: BMC, Datadog, Dynatrace, Grafana Labs, IBM, Microsoft, ServiceNow and Splunk. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Coralogix, LogicMonitor and New Relic. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Broadcom, Elastic and Google Cloud. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Chronosphere, EasyVista, Logz.io, OpsRamp, SolarWinds, Sumo Logic, Zenoss and Zoho. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle IT observability, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Adaptability (10%), Capability (35%), Manageability (10%), Reliability (10%) and Usability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Splunk, ServiceNow and New Relic were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not Leaders, Microsoft and Dynatrace were also found to meet a broad range of enterprise product experience requirements. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are TCO/ROI (10%) and Validation (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are ServiceNow, BMC and Splunk. These category Leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Observability in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $40 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 100 full-time employees. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant IT observability products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year BMC Netreo Ultimate SaaS Edition v. 25.1.00 January 2025 Broadcom Tanzu Observability February 2025 Chronosphere Chronosphere Observability Platform v. 2.27.0 February 2025 Coralogix Coralogix January 2025 Datadog Datadog Log Management and Analytics February 2025 Dynatrace Dynatrace Platform v. 1.308 February 2025 EasyVista EV Observe v. 2024.3 December 2024 Elastic Elastic Observability v. 8.17 December 2024 Google Cloud Google Cloud Operations Suite February 2025 Grafana Labs Grafana Cloud Application Observability v. 11.5 January 2025 IBM Instana Observability v. 290 December 2024 LogicMonitor LogicMonitor v. 216 January 2025 Logz.io Logz.io February 2025 Microsoft Azure Monitor January 2025 New Relic New Relic One February 2025 OpsRamp OpsRamp v. 2025.02-U1 February 2025 ServiceNow ServiceNow Now Platform v. Yokohama January 2025 SolarWinds SolarWinds Observability SaaS January 2025 Splunk Splunk Observability Cloud Splunk AppDynamics 24.10 February 2025 February 2025 Sumo Logic Sumo Logic Platform February 2025 Zenoss Zenoss Cloud v. 5.7.0 December 2024 Zoho Site24x7 v. 20.9.0 January 2025 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. Providers that do not offer IT observability software in a single, commercial tool are excluded. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product $40M+ Revenue 100+ Full-time Employees Functionality AWS AWS OpenSearch Yes Yes No CloudFabrix Software CloudFabrix Unified Network Observability No No Yes Dash0 Dash0 No No Yes Honeycomb Honeycomb Observability Platform No Yes Yes Intergral FusionReactor Observability & APM No No Yes Observe, Inc. Observability Cloud No Yes Yes Oracle Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform Yes Yes No Zabbix Zabbix Cloud No Yes Yes
Executive Summary FinOps Chief information officers and IT leaders face the dual challenge of optimizing IT operations while simultaneously driving innovation in an increasingly complex marketplace. The intricacies involved in managing a diverse array of technology environments require enterprises to harness a multitude of tools and platforms to address unique operational demands spanning various departments and functionalities. Technological advancements often outpace traditional strategies, so it is essential for IT leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the software solutions at their disposal. The discipline of FinOps, or Financial Operations, has emerged as a critical strategy for enterprises aiming to optimize cloud spending and ensure financial accountability within cloud environments. IT Management software plays a pivotal role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives. As enterprises strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maintain a competitive edge, these approaches become critical enablers of streamlined operations and effective resource allocation. Furthermore, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures, the integration of comprehensive IT Management software platforms facilitates enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. This is particularly important as CIOs look to future-proof enterprise architecture and ensure that technology strategies are not only reactive but also proactive in addressing emerging challenges and opportunities. ISG defines FinOps, or Financial Operations, as a critical strategy for enterprises aiming to optimize cloud spending and ensure financial accountability within cloud environments. As enterprises increasingly migrate to the cloud, the challenge of managing associated costs becomes paramount. FinOps addresses this challenge by fostering collaboration between finance, IT and business teams, creating a unified approach to manage cloud expenditures effectively. At the heart of FinOps is the principle of collaboration, where stakeholders across various departments come together to align cloud spending with overall business objectives. This partnership reaffirms that financial accountability is not solely the responsibility of the finance department but is shared across all teams involved in the cloud ecosystem. By promoting an inclusive approach, FinOps contributes to a culture of shared responsibility and accountability for resource consumption and cost management. A primary focus of FinOps is achieving cost efficiency. Enterprises adopting this discipline are equipped to eliminate waste and optimize cloud expenditure. This involves a thorough review of cloud resource usage, understanding pricing models and validating that resources are utilized efficiently. By continuously monitoring usage patterns and identifying areas of overspending, enterprises can make informed decisions to reduce costs without sacrificing performance or operational capabilities. Real-time visibility into cloud spending is another essential aspect of FinOps. By implementing tools and processes that enable checks and balances, enterprises gain insights into cloud costs, enabling tracking and reporting of expenditures as they occur. This enhanced visibility facilitates a proactive approach to financial management, allowing organizations to identify trends, forecast future spending and adjust budgets as necessary. For IT and Finance leaders, having access to accurate and timely financial data is imperative for making strategic decisions that align cloud investments with business goals. Governance and accountability are also cornerstones of the FinOps discipline. Establishing clear policies, budgets and guidelines enables oversight of cloud expenses. These governance structures empower enterprises to enforce accountability, making it easier to manage budgets and mitigate financial risks. By instituting strong governance practices, enterprises can cultivate a disciplined approach to cloud financial management, which in turn fosters greater operational efficiency. Moreover, FinOps is not a one-time initiative, but an ongoing process focused on continuous improvement. We assert that through 2026, 1 in 5 enterprises will invest in a coordinated FinOps effort between IT and Finance to create visibility and accountability of public, private and hybrid cloud spending. Enterprise s that rely on cloud data analytics are better positioned to drive decisions that enhance financial operations over time. This iterative approach allows teams to refine their strategies, adapt to changing cloud environments and optimize resource allocation dynamically. FinOps is an essential discipline for enterprises navigating the complexities of cloud financial management. By integrating financial strategies with operational execution, enterprises can align cloud expenditures with business objectives, enhance efficiency and ensure accountability across departments. For CIOs and IT leaders, investing in FinOps is crucial not only for managing costs but also for driving strategic initiatives that facilitate growth and innovation. Embracing FinOps as a fundamental aspect of cloud operations positions enterprises for long-term success and resilience in the digital age. With the growing trend of cloud adoption and the increasing costs associated with cloud services, a strategic approach to FinOps has become essential for enterprises. Routine reviews of FinOps strategies and partnerships help optimize cloud spending and ensure cost accountability. FinOps software trends include: The rise of cloud spending: Understanding and managing costs associated with cloud computing has become more complex. A careful evaluation of current FinOps practices can uncover inefficiencies in spending and opportunities for better cost allocation. By scrutinizing existing partnerships, enterprises can ensure the most effective tools for cloud financial management are in use. Demand for financial accountability: As economic pressures mount, enterprises are increasingly held accountable for financial decisions. A strong FinOps strategy promotes transparency and collaboration between IT and finance teams, reinforcing the alignment of cloud spending with business objectives. Now is the time to assess FinOps solutions and partnerships to guarantee they support a culture of financial accountability. Proactive budgeting and forecasting: Proactive budgeting and accurate forecasting are critical to success. FinOps strategies that incorporate advanced analytics and forecasting tools enable enterprises to anticipate spending patterns and plan accordingly. Enterprises should re-evaluate FinOps partnerships to ensure access to the necessary analytics capabilities to drive informed budget decisions. Focus on cost optimization: With tighter budgets and a focus on maximizing returns, enterprises must prioritize cost optimization strategies. By reviewing FinOps practices, enterprises can identify areas for potential savings, streamline financial processes and enhance resource allocation. Validating that FinOps tools provide actionable insights into spending patterns will empower enterprises to make informed financial decisions that support overall business goals. A solid FinOps strategy will not only promote responsible spending but also drive value across the enterprise. By emphasizing cloud spending management, financial accountability, proactive forecasting and cost optimization, IT leaders can present a compelling case for refining their financial operations approach. A solid FinOps strategy will not only promote responsible spending but also drive value across the enterprise. Generative AI (GenAI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing IT Management software by automating complex processes, improving decision-making and driving efficiencies across various IT functions. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline service delivery, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify and resolve issues, ultimately leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. As enterprises embrace digital transformation, IT Management software integrated with GenAI capabilities becomes essential for staying competitive. In the FinOps space, GenAI is enhancing financial operations within enterprises by providing analytics, insights and automated decision-making functions. A practical use case is the generation of real-time financial forecasts based on spending patterns and usage data. This capability helps finance teams gain a better understanding of current spending and predict future costs, allowing for more accurate budgeting and resource allocation. Another critical application of GenAI is the automation of cost categorization and tagging. By recognizing patterns in spending and identifying relevant categories, GenAI can streamline the process of organizing cloud expenditures, leading to improved financial visibility and accountability. This results in more strategic financial decisions and reduced overspending on unnecessary resources. Additionally, GenAI can generate reports and dashboards that provide stakeholders with a clear view of cloud financial performance. These reporting tools help teams quickly grasp complex financial data, facilitating better discussions on cloud costs and strategy. Furthermore, GenAI enables customized alerts for financial anomalies or overages, allowing finance and IT teams to respond promptly. GenAI empowers organizations to maximize returns on cloud investments while minimizing wasted resources. Lastly, one of the most impactful uses of GenAI in FinOps involves the generation of tailored recommendations based on analysis of cloud resource utilization. By providing insights on the best ways to optimize spending, such as rightsizing instances or recommending specific pricing models, GenAI empowers organizations to maximize returns on cloud investments while minimizing wasted resources. Agentic AI, while not yet available, has the potential to transform FinOps by improving cloud cost management and financial accountability. One anticipated application is automating financial analyses and reporting, enabling real-time insights into trends and cost-saving opportunities. Additionally, it could enhance budgeting and forecasting by analyzing past financial data to inform decision-making. Agentic AI may streamline cost allocation by categorizing expenses and mapping them to specific projects, increasing financial transparency. Furthermore, it could alert finance teams to budgetary risks or overspending in real time. Overall, its future integration could enhance financial management and strategic decision-making in enterprises and should be part of an evaluation of FinOps software providers. CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software that incorporates GenAI, LLMs and future Agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects and business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance and a long-term perspective on the sustainability and scalability of AI approaches. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components. The ISG Buyers Guide for FinOps is designed to provide a 360-degree view of a software provider’s ability to optimize the delivery, performance and governance of cloud-powered IT services within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for IT Operations Management, ITSM, AIOps and Observability software. This FinOps Buyers Guide evaluates products based on capabilities including identifying and decommissioning underutilized cloud resources, identifying cost-saving opportunities and making recommendations, visualizing cloud costs and usage, integrating with cloud cost management and financial tools, enabling collaboration between IT and finance teams, managing chargeback or showback models, budgeting and forecasting cloud expenditures based on historical usage, real-time monitoring and alerts for spending anomalies, supporting tagging and cost allocation, offering key performance indicator measurements, ensuring regulatory compliance and governance, handling multi-cloud environments, including training resources for FinOps best practices, achieving certifications for standards and industry trade associations, and investments in FinOps capabilities. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available FinOps products. The insights gained from understanding current FinOps software providers are invaluable for IT leaders who aim to align technology investments with organizational goals, optimize workflows and foster a culture of innovation. By investing in the right tools, CIOs can unlock new avenues for growth and transformation, paving the way for enterprises to thrive. This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements for FinOps: Apptio, Broadcom, Datadog, Flexera, Google Cloud, Harness, HCLSoftware, Microsoft, Nutanix, OpenText, Oracle and Zoho. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for FinOps is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for FinOps software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for AIOps to an enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of AIOps technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of AIOps software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating AIOps systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds Datadog atop the list, followed by Flexera and Broadcom. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Datadog and Broadcom have done so in five categories, Oracle in four, Flexera in three, Apptio and Google Cloud in two and Nutanix in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Broadcom, Microsoft and Nutanix. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Datadog, Flexera and Zoho. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Apptio, Google Cloud and Oracle. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Harness, HCLSoftware and OpenText. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle FinOps, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Adaptability (10%), Capability (35%), and Manageability (15%), Reliability (10%) and Usability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Datadog, Flexera and Broadcom were designated Product Experience Leaders. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are TCO/ROI (10%) and Validation (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Google Cloud, Apptio and Broadcom. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for FinOps in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $40 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 100 full-time employees. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant FinOps products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year Apptio IBM Cloudability January 2025 January 2025 Broadcom VMware Tanzu CloudHealth February 2025 February 2025 Datadog Datadog Cloud Cost Management February 2025 February 2025 Flexera Flexera One FinOps 2024 R2 November 2024 Google Cloud Google Cloud Cost Management February 2025 February 2025 Harness Cloud Cost Management 1.38.3 January 2025 HCLSoftware DRYiCE MyXalytics FinOps 6.4 July 2024 Microsoft Microsoft Cost Management & Billing 0.8 February 2025 Nutanix NCM Cost Governance December 2024 December 2024 OpenText OpenText AI Operations Management (Operations Bridge) 25.1.1 February 2025 Oracle OCI Billing & Cost Management June 2024 June 2024 Zoho ManageEngine CloudSpend December 2024 December 2024 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. Providers that offer a suite of FinOps-related tools instead of a single application have been excluded. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product $40M+ Revenue 100+ Full-time Employees Functionality Anodot Anodot No Yes Yes AWS AWS Cost Management Console Yes Yes No Centilytics Cloud Management Platform No Yes Yes Certero Vitado No No Yes CloudBolt Software CloudBolt No Yes Yes Cloudeasier Cloudeasier No No Yes CloudFabrix Software CloudFabrix FinOps No No Yes Cloudfit Cloudfit No Yes Yes Cloudfix Cloudfix No No Yes CloudZero CloudZero No No Yes Densify Cloud Resource Optimizer No No Yes Finout Finout No No Yes IBM Corporation Kubecost Yes Yes No nOps nOps No No Yes ProsperOps ProsperOps No No Yes Spot by Netapp CloudCheckr No No Yes Zylo Zylo No Yes Yes
Executive Summary AIOps Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT leaders face the dual challenge of optimizing IT operations while simultaneously driving innovation in an increasingly complex marketplace. The intricacies involved in managing a diverse array of technology environments require enterprises to harness a multitude of tools and platforms to address unique operational demands spanning various departments and functionalities. Technological advancements often outpace traditional strategies, so it is essential for IT leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the software solutions at their disposal. The integration of comprehensive IT Management software platforms facilitates enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. IT Management software plays a pivotal role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives. As enterprises strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maintain a competitive edge, these approaches become critical enablers of streamlined operations and effective resource allocation. Furthermore, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures, the integration of comprehensive IT Management software platforms facilitates enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. This is particularly important as CIOs look to future-proof enterprise architecture and ensure that technology strategies are not only reactive but also proactive in addressing emerging challenges and opportunities. ISG defines AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, as the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies into IT processes. It represents a significant shift from traditional operational management methods towards a strategy for optimizing and managing IT operations. AIOps not only streamlines complex workflows but also enhances overall operational efficiency, addressing the intricate challenges faced by modern IT environments. At its core, AIOps encompasses a suite of tools and applications designed to automate critical IT processes, thereby improving incident response times and minimizing downtime. By leveraging advanced algorithms and analytics, AIOps approaches can gather and analyze vast amounts of data sourced from various operational domains, including application performance monitoring, infrastructure metrics, event logs and user experiences. This breadth of data allows organizations to detect anomalies, correlate events and identify root causes in real time, vastly reducing the manual effort typically associated with problem-solving. One of the most impressive capabilities of AIOps is its proactive nature. Rather than merely responding to incidents after they occur, AIOps empowers IT teams to predict potential issues before they escalate. This foresight is made possible through the continuous analysis of data patterns and trends, allowing enterprises to adopt a more anticipatory approach to IT Management. By identifying irregularities early, IT operations can avert crises, ensuring a smoother user experience and more reliable service delivery. Another critical advantage of AIOps is its facilitation of intelligent automation. Routine tasks that traditionally consumed valuable IT resources can now be automated, enabling teams to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives. Tasks such as software updates, system monitoring and even some incident resolutions can be accomplished through automated processes, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. Additionally, AIOps can implement self-healing mechanisms, allowing systems to automatically correct minor issues without human intervention. This not only minimizes downtime but also reduces the strain on IT personnel who often find themselves inundated with routine tasks. The transformation brought about by AIOps extends beyond automation: it also paves the way for intelligent decision-making. Through 2026, demand for real-time insights into the health and performance of IT systems will result in 40% of enterprises funding AIOps strategies to streamline operations and optimize resources. With real-time insights and data aggregation across all IT functions, enterprises can make informed decisions that impact overall business operations. AIOps helps bridge the gap between IT and business objectives by ensuring that IT services align with the strategic aims of the enterprise. Enterprise AIOps software represents a revolutionary approach to optimizing IT operations. By embracing AI and ML technologies, organizations can enhance operational efficiency, reduce manual intervention and deliver consistent, high-quality services. For CIOs and IT leaders, the strategic adoption of AIOps is crucial for fostering innovation and agility, ultimately driving sustainable growth. Enterprises depend on data-driven insights to enhance operational efficiency and require an effective AIOps strategy. Enterprises should take this opportunity to reassess their AIOps software approach and partners to better address business needs. Here are four IT requirements to consider while building the business case for AIOps software: Increasing complexity of IT environments: Modern IT environments are becoming increasingly complex, encompassing cloud services, on-premises infrastructure and hybrid systems. AIOps software approaches must provide comprehensive visibility and correlation across these environments. By evaluating current AIOps capabilities, enterprises can identify gaps that may be hindering their ability to monitor and optimize performance effectively. Proactive incident management: Amid a growing reliance on technology is the need for proactive incident management. AIOps software can automate incident detection and response, reducing downtime and improving service reliability. When enterprises evaluate their AIOps partners, it is important to verify they offer advanced features such as predictive analytics and intelligent automation that facilitate swift remediation of potential issues. Resource optimization and cost efficiency: As economic pressures mount, enterprises are compelled to optimize resource utilization across IT operations. A review of AIOps strategies reveals opportunities for consolidating data sources, reducing duplication of effort and enhancing overall efficiency. Enterprises should seek AIOps software approaches that not only streamline operations but also provide insights into cost-saving measures and resource allocation. Enhance business agility: Enterprises need to adapt quickly to market changes and customer demands. AIOps software that enables rapid insight generation and facilitates automation can enhance business agility. By re-evaluating AIOps partnerships, enterprises can uncover tools that empower teams to respond rapidly to evolving situations, driving innovation and competitive advantage. A refined AIOps strategy will position enterprises to achieve higher operational efficiency and respond effectively to digital business challenges. By focusing on key strategic elements such as complexity management, proactive incident resolution, resource optimization and business agility, IT leaders can make a strong case for the necessary investments and changes. A refined AIOps strategy will position enterprises to achieve higher operational efficiency and respond effectively to digital business challenges. Generative AI (GenAI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing IT Management software by automating complex processes, improving decision-making and driving efficiencies across various IT functions. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline service delivery, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify and resolve issues, ultimately leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. As enterprises embrace digital transformation, IT Management software integrated with GenAI capabilities becomes essential for staying competitive. In the field of AIOps, GenAI offers enterprise IT teams innovative capabilities to enhance operational efficiency and improve decision-making. One primary application of GenAI within AIOps is its ability to analyze significant amounts of operational data and generate insights in real time. This functionality enables teams to quickly identify patterns, anomalies and weaknesses in system performance, which can significantly reduce the time spent on monitoring and diagnostics. GenAI can also streamline incident response workflows by automating the creation of alerts and notifications based on learned behavior from historical incidents. By understanding the contexts in which issues arise, GenAI can prioritize alerts and differentiate between critical incidents and minor alerts, allowing technicians to focus on high-impact issues first. Furthermore, GenAI facilitates intelligent automation within AIOps by generating scripts that automate routine operational tasks, such as resource scaling and routine system checks. By implementing automated approaches, IT teams can achieve greater consistency and accuracy and free up valuable time to focus on strategic initiatives. Additionally, predictive analytics supported by GenAI allows enterprises to anticipate potential issues before they become critical. By leveraging historical data and identifying trends, enterprises can take proactive measures, minimizing disruptions and maintaining optimal system performance. Agentic AI, though not yet available, could play a crucial role in future AIOps by automating and enhancing IT operations. One potential application is to manage and resolve incidents autonomously by analyzing historical data to initiate corrective actions like scaling resources, enabling quicker incident responses. Additionally, it could facilitate intelligent anomaly detection by continuously analyzing data to identify irregularities, automatically escalating issues to relevant teams. Furthermore, agentic AI could recommend performance optimizations based on resource utilization patterns. Ultimately, its integration within AIOps could empower enterprises to manage incidents and maintain performance more efficiently and proactively. CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software incorporating GenAI, large language models (LLMs) and future agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software incorporating GenAI, large language models (LLMs) and future agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects as well as business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance, and a long-term perspective on sustainability and scalability of AI approaches. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components. The ISG Buyers Guide for AIOps software is designed to provide a 360-degree view of a software provider’s ability to optimize the delivery, performance and governance of IT services within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for ITSM, IT Operations Management, FinOps and Observability software. The ISG Buyers Guide for AIOps evaluates products based on capabilities including collaboration and communications, data visualization, event correlation, GenAI and ML, integration with other systems and tools, intelligent automation, performance monitoring, predictive analytics, root cause analysis, security and compliance, and self-healing features. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available AIOps software products. The insights gained from understanding current IT Management software are invaluable for IT leaders who aim to align their technology investments with organizational goals, optimize workflows and foster a culture of innovation. By investing in the right tools, CIOs can unlock new avenues for growth and transformation, paving the way for enterprises to thrive. This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements for AIOps: Aisera, BMC Software, Datadog, Dell Technologies, Digitate, Dynatrace, Elastic, IBM, LogicMonitor, New Relic, OpenText, OpsRamp, PagerDuty, ScienceLogic, SolarWinds, SoundHound AI, Splunk, Vitria and Zenoss. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for AIOps is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for AIOps software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for AIOps to an enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of AIOps technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of AIOps software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating AIOps systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds Dynatrace atop the list, followed by SoundHound AI and Splunk. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Splunk has done so in five categories; Datadog and BMC in four; Dynatrace in three; New Relic and PagerDuty in two; and SoundHound AI and IBM in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: BMC, Datadog, Dynatrace, IBM, PagerDuty, SoundHound AI and Splunk. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: LogicMonitor, New Relic and SolarWinds. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Elastic, Dell Technologies and OpenText. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Aisera, Digitate, OpsRamp, ScienceLogic, Vitria and Zenoss. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle AIOps, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (15%), Capability (30%), Reliability (10%), Adaptability (15%) and Manageability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Dynatrace, Datadog and Splunk were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not a Leader, SoundHound AI was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise product experience requirements. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are BMC, Splunk and PagerDuty. These category Leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for AIOps in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $40 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 100 full-time employees. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 18 months. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant AIOps products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year Aisera Aisera AIOps Platform - January 2025 BMC Helix AIOps v. 25.1 February 2025 Datadog Datadog - February 2025 Dell Technologies Dell APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability v. H15691.10 September 2024 Digitate ignio - February 2025 Dynatrace Dynatrace Platform v. 1.308 February 2025 Elastic Elastic Observability v. 8.17 December 2024 IBM IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps v. 4.8.1 February 2025 LogicMonitor LogicMonitor Envision v. 216 January 2025 New Relic New Relic AIOps - February 2025 OpenText OpenText AI Operations Management (Operations Bridge) v. 25.1.1 February 2025 OpsRamp OpsRamp v. 2025.02-U1 February 2025 PagerDuty PagerDuty AIOps - January 2025 ScienceLogic SL1 Platform v. 12.3 January 2025 SolarWinds SolarWinds Observability SaaS - January 2025 SoundHound AI Autonomics v.V3 February 2025 Splunk Splunk AppDynamics, Splunk Enterprise, Splunk IT Service Intelligence v. 4.19.3 February 2025 Vitria VIA AIOps - February 2025 Zenoss Zenoss Cloud v. 5.7.0 December 2024 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. Providers that offer multiple, separate tools or AI functionality without specific application to ITOps were excluded These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product $40M+ Revenue 100+ Full-time Employees Functionality BigPanda BigPanda No Yes Yes BMC Software Inc. Helix Operations Management with AIOps Yes Yes No Broadcom Broadcom Operational Intelligence Yes Yes No CloudEagle.ai CloudEagle No No Yes CloudFabrix Software CloudFabrix AIOps No No Yes meshIQ meshIQ Platform No Yes Yes Netreo Netreo No No Yes ProphetStor Data Services Federator.ai No No Yes ProsperOps ProsperOps No No Yes
Executive Summary Product Experience Management for Retail Products are the foundation of every retailer, regardless of its industry or size. Across all channels and departments, nearly every interaction relates to answering questions or gaining access to product information. Every retail organization must ensure that products get the attention they deserve as they are marketed, sold, serviced and enhanced to meet customer expectations. A “customer-first” mentality is critical and not unreasonable. Still, in a rush to be the most cost-effective, retail leaders too often forget that product experiences are key to satisfying and retaining customers. The ability to invest adequate time and resources into products determines an retail's agility, sustainability, operational effectiveness and overall business health. Successful product experiences require technology investments like product information management (PIM) to ensure the proper support of interactions and the underlying lifecycle that enables impactful and interactive communication with customers. To accomplish this requires an agreed-upon standard of product information that should be readily available for any purpose, including AI uses cases. By 2027, the product information management category will evolve as product experience management (PXM) where the value from the technology is focused on digital experiences and engagement through GenAI. ISG Research defines product experience management as the methods and processes for managing customer experiences using systems that support product-related processes to meet the satisfaction and needs of any buyer, consumer or customer. PXM is integral across the front office; the customer and revenue areas of marketing, sales, commerce, customer and supplier; and retail needs. As retailers increase the number and diversity of products offered to customers, it is critical to address limitations in the ways product information is managed and distributed, including the administration of related attributes and content that describes the products. The goal of PXM is to establish a reliable, single source of product information to share across retail channels. Getting it right is not easy, as the majority of retailers have more than five sources of product information to integrate and manage efficiently. Most retailers acknowledge that standardizing product information requires substantial effort and often use laborious, time-consuming, customized methods or rely on manual effort to produce a reliable product record. Worse yet, many retailers still depend heavily on spreadsheets, and most will admit to finding major or minor errors in records. Processes and tools are available to automate much of this work. If properly deployed, PXM systems can synchronize all attributes and definitions used in the identification, description, sales and accessibility of products across all retail channels that customers access. PXM benefits from decades of evolutionary advancements in product information management systems that have focused on the administration and standardization of product content and data for internal processes and applications. However, not all PIM systems have evolved to support product experiences consumed across channels—though the needs of retailers necessitate those capabilities. Effectively evaluating PIM systems requires the ability to examine an expanded set of requirements that support PXM. At the same time, competitive pressures require that retailers quickly incorporate large amounts of new content—video and images, for example—while ensuring the information presented to customers is accurate, operational processes run uninterrupted and timely data is available for business analysis. For environments where consumers can use multiple channels to access product information—websites, kiosks, smartphones, tablets—retailers must present complete, up-to-date product information to inspire interest and facilitate purchases. Today’s retailers must manage a continually expanding array of data, content and digital assets while satisfying consumer demands for comprehensive product information. Addressing these challenges requires unified processes, automated systems and, importantly, the ability to augment and enrich product information. We find that most retailers have incompatible tools and lack a centralized information repository. These situations lead to wasted time and inefficiency in checking for errors and reconciling data across systems. To provide an effective product experience for buyers, consumers, customers and partners across the entire supply chain, enterprises must deliver accurate, consistent and actionable product information. To provide an effective product experience for buyers, consumers and customers across channels, retailers must deliver accurate, consistent and actionable product information. Crucially, it is impossible to deliver the best customer experience without a great product experience, and successful retailers recognize this is a key benefit realized from PXM investments. PXM enhances visibility into—and engagement with—product information and can help retailers increase revenue and satisfy customers. Managing product information can be challenging when a retailer and its workers use different names, attributes, images and related product information for the same purpose. Disparities often exist across retailers and manufacturers. Additionally, retailers regularly add suppliers to their channels and increase the number and variety of products offered without utilizing already defined and agreed-upon product information. Many retailers indicate that today’s customers also expect a delightful product experience that provides information on mobile devices, but conducting commerce across sites, marketplaces and social media introduces challenges for a unified experience. These advances bring additional content and data into a retailer’s information systems, introducing new inconsistencies in how products and attributes are combined. Still, competitive pressures require up-to-date and accurate information that is also engaging in its presentation—in other words, an effective product experience. Retailers need systems that enable intelligent processes to run continuously and uninterrupted, using AI and machine language with analytics to identify issues and opportunities to exploit the power of product information. Analytics provide insight into the use of product information and where collaborative actions are necessary for improvement. By 2028, one-third of enterprises will have invested in a common technological approach for product information management that is committed to product experiences and not just digital assets. In most retailers, product information is spread across websites, digital asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets and a variety of applications. Each retailer can uniquely present information from similar manufacturers, resulting in disparate product experiences. A related issue is the difficulty of exchanging, integrating and synchronizing product information across diverse systems and services used by buyers, customers and business partners. Typically, this occurs outside retailers’ systems and in cloud computing environments such as digital commerce, marketplaces and CRM systems. Slow and incomplete integration processes prevent retailers from gaining a single view of products to control and update the information and enable a consistent product experience for buyers, consumers and customers. Retailers must effectively manage and improve product information beyond internal channels and systems to ensure accuracy and consistency across the retailer spectrum. This approach enables better alignment of products to specific activities and processes but requires applications that allow a retailer to manage product information for satisfactory digital experiences. The benefits of using dedicated PXM technology can be significant. In our research, most retail organizations said PXM can help eliminate data errors, gain a competitive advantage and improve the customer experience through consistent product information. And if addressed effectively, the improvement can ensure a retailer achieves satisfaction in product experiences. PXM software should meet customer needs for interacting with any application or platform or directly via product catalogs shared from websites to marketplaces. PXM—and the applications and technology that enable it—help retailers provide the best possible product information for processes, departments and partners. To accomplish this, software must support multiple business roles, including product managers and marketers, operations and connections with manufacturers. Manufacturers, for example, must be able to share product information with distributors and direct retailers. PXM software should meet customer needs for interacting with any application or platform or directly via product catalogs shared from websites to marketplaces. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. Improving retail performance through adapting processes, information and technology components requires selecting the right software provider and product. However, caution is appropriate here: Technology updates alone are not enough to improve the use of PXM in a retail organization. Doing so requires a balanced set of upgrades and efforts to enhance processes and information. We find that few retailers are satisfied with PXM processes that derive from underlying PIM efforts. It is best to start by assessing all short- and long-term efforts related to the product experience and any existing approach. No matter where a retailer manages product information—whether from a dedicated ERP or CRM system or, vexingly, a tangle of spreadsheets—it must continuously improve the product experience. Product success is more than just merchandising and maintaining product information on a digital shelf. The goal is to increase productivity and sustain those efforts in the best and worst of times, ensuring success under pressure and over the long term. Product success is about increasing effectiveness in digital engagement and bringing new value to the process. Applications should do more than enhance productivity in managing product information and provide insights into usage such as product activation, new product introduction and end of life. The product experience unifies a retailer’s efforts to sustain continuity while bringing new value to digital merchandising and marketing efforts, helping exceed customer expectations. Optimizing the product experience is more than just a nicety—it is essential for every retailer that looks to make the most of customer engagement and relationships. This effort is vital when relying on digital commerce to sell products and services. Without an optimized product experience, a retailer will not successfully elevate the customer experience. Continuous improvement is a shared responsibility across business and IT leadership, and impossible to do without PIM designed to optimize the product experience. This approach is separate from master data management technology or goals for achieving better data integration. Antiquated methods such as spreadsheets, databases and other ERP, CRM or digital commerce systems are not always designed for a contemporary digital product experience. Retailers should also prioritize investments that enable more effective digital merchandising and price management. These systems need a comprehensive view of the digital shelf and should be able to virtualize products from packaging to specifications for buyers and customers. Simply posting an image and description was possible a decade ago, but that does not provide an actual product experience. In cases where the product is equipment, extended reality technology can virtualize and augment the product experience, significantly enhancing buyer and customer engagement and often answering their questions without losing valuable time on a phone call or chat with a customer service agent. Embracing methods that use mobile devices to virtualize products in context—whether in a retail store or a living room—can further enhance the product experience, thus increasing the likelihood of a purchase. If an organization doesn’t capture and monitor interactions and online feedback from all relevant parties, it is likely missing the insights required to effectively improve the product experience. Retailers can better determine sentiment about the product experience by collecting feedback from customers and related parties at the time of purchase or product usage. If a retailer does not capture and monitor interactions and online feedback from all relevant parties, it is likely missing the insights required to effectively improve the product experience. Continuous feedback can help increase productivity and, more importantly, the effectiveness of the retailer. Additionally, sharing feedback digitally through product reviews establishes confidence with buyers and customers. Retailers should seek to create or expand a voice-of-the-product program with processes and technology that collect customer feedback and sentiment, aided by analytics and ML to gain insights. Using digital technologies to reinvent the product experience from the outside in and the inside out requires the right lens to support business continuity—rather than distract from it. Retailers should optimize underlying product processes and technology for internal use and buyers, customers, suppliers and partners. This can have an immediate impact on top- and bottom-line results and reflects the priority a retailer places on product experience. Retailers should ensure that existing and future PXM technology investments are designed for effective engagement and a fantastic product experience, not just for automation and efficiency. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PXM for Retail evaluates products based on support for analyst and administrative-specific requirements, catalog management, commerce, consumers, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, digital merchandising, integration-specific requirements, industry standard requirements, management and manager-specific requirements, product managers, product-specific management, investment and demonstrating alignment to benefits. To be evaluated in this retail industry Buyers Guide, products must include support for consumer requirements or digital merchandising. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of PXM for retail as we define it: Acquia, Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, censhare, Comosoft, Contentserv, fabric, Feedonomics, inriver, insightsoftware, Netcore Unbxd, novomind, Pimcore, Plytix, Productsup, Sales Layer, Salsify, SAP, Stibo Systems and Syndigo. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PXM for Retail is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address retailers’ requirements for PXM software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for PIM to a manufacturing enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of manufacturing-related PIM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of manufacturing-related PIM software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge manufacturing enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating PIM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds Akeneo atop the list, followed by Salsify and inriver. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Akeneo and inriver have done so in four categories; Bluestone PIM in three; Pimcore, Salsify, SAP and Syndigo in two; and Contentserv and Stibo Systems in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Contentserv, inriver, Pimcore, Salsify, SAP and Syndigo. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Acquia and Netcore Unbxd. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The provider/providers rated Assurance are: insightsoftware and Stibo Systems. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: censhare, Comosoft, fabric, Feedonomics, novomind, Plytix, Productsup, and Sales Layer. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every retailer or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how retailers handle PXM, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular retailer’s needs. We advise retailers to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address a retailer’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with a retailer’s lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent a retailer’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (12.5%), Capability (35%), Reliability (7.5%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Akeneo, Salsify and Syndigo were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not a Leader, SAP was also found to meet a range of retailer and commerce product experience requirements. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle a retailer has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are inriver, Contentserv and Bluestone PIM. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and a customer’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the retailer, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for PXM for Retail in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $10 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The product must provide PXM for retail processes, including support for: analyst and administrative-specific requirements, catalog management, commerce, consumers, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, digital merchandising, integration-specific requirements, industry standard requirements, management and manager-specific requirements, product managers, product-specific management, investment and demonstrating alignment to benefits. To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include support for consumer requirements or digital merchandising. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant PXM for retail products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year Acquia Acquia PIM 2025 January 2025 Akeneo Akeneo PIM Serenity December 2024 Bluestone PIM Bluestone PIM Release 64 January 2025 censhare Product Information Management 2024.2.2 January 2025 Comosoft LAGO LAGO Tana 6.5 December 2024 Contentserv Product Information Management PXC24.9 January 2025 fabric Product Catalog 2024 November 2024 Feedonomics Feedonomics January 2025 January 2025 inriver inriver January 2025 January 2025 insightsoftware Agility PIM 24.3 January 2025 Netcore Unbxd Netcore Unbxd PIM January 2025 January 2025 novomind novomind iPIM 5.5.3 January 2025 Pimcore Pimcore Platform 2024.4 December 2024 Plytix Product Information Management January 2025 January 2025 Productsup Productsup Platform January 2025 January 2025 Sales Layer Sales Layer PIM December 2024 December 2024 Salsify Salsify PIM Q3 2024 October 2024 SAP SAP Commerce Cloud SAP Datasphere SAP Product and Process Governance by BDF 2211 2025.5 2.1 November 2024 January 2025 October 2024 Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud Product MDM 2025.1 January 2025 Syndigo Syndigo PIM January 2025 January 2025 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product Revenue Geography Customers Functionality Catsy Catsy PIM No Yes Yes Yes Gepard Gepard No Yes Yes Yes Goaland Goaland PIM No Yes Yes Yes Jasper Commerce Jasper PIM No Yes Yes Yes Pattern Pattern Yes No Yes Yes Proplanet Proplanet PIM No Yes Yes Yes
Executive Summary Product Lifecycle Management In an increasingly complex and competitive global marketplace, enterprises are under constant pressure to innovate, streamline operations and bring products to market faster while maintaining high levels of quality in production cycles and compliance with any range of regulatory standards. Organizations must balance the demands of rapid product development with cost efficiency, regulatory adherence and the complications of supply chains to meet manufacturing cycles. PLM enables enterprises to manage a product from its initial conception through design, production, operations and governance. ISG Research defines product lifecycle management (PLM) as the business processes and applications that manage and operate existing product lifecycles and support the innovation in new ones. PLM enables enterprises to manage a product from its initial conception through design, production, operations and governance. PLM systems help facilitate the efficient management of products, allowing enterprises to maximize innovation, improve quality and reduce time to market. In this modern age of PLM, the need to support a range of innovation in 3D visualization and augmented reality must support carbon footprint and sustainability requirements. The market demand for PLM software and its continuous improvement has never been more acute. As product complexity increases, with more intricate designs and shorter lifecycles, the challenge of managing product development efficiently becomes more formidable. Global competition and increasing customer expectations demand faster innovation cycles and higher quality standards. The need to conform to stringent regulatory requirements adds another layer of complexity that businesses must navigate. PLM software addresses these challenges by providing a centralized repository for manufacturing and supply chain-related product information and documents. It breaks down information silos, enabling cross-functional teams to collaborate effectively. With PLM, the enterprise can streamline workflows, enhance decision-making and maintain a unified, up-to-date view of products and the underlying processes to the bill of materials (BOM) and sourcing. The scope of PLM encompasses strategic areas, including management, design, production, operations and governance of products and supporting processes. Critically, at the core of PLM are the design processes that support product development, requirements management, specifications and configurator-to-image management. By managing information and integrating it across disparate systems and processes, PLM ensures a holistic approach to product development, from idea to end-of-life. Beyond production, operations around bill of materials, orders, product catalogue, supplier and vendor management as well as document management are critical parts of ensuring the effective management of the lifecycle of products. In an era where customer-driven innovation is critical, PLM enables enterprises to align product development with market requirements. By harnessing collaborative tools and real-time data, companies can respond swiftly to changing customer needs and market dynamics. This agility not only helps in maintaining a competitive edge but also in fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. The inherent flexibility of PLM systems allows businesses to scale operations and adapt to evolving technological and market demands. As a result, PLM software has become an essential tool for enterprises across various industries, including automotive, aerospace, electronics, consumer goods and fashion. For example, in the automotive industry, PLM is used to manage intricate design, engineering and manufacturing processes, ensuring compliance with safety standards and continuous product innovation. In aerospace, PLM helps manage the complexity of aircraft design, regulatory compliance and reliability, all while controlling costs. This is why the focus of PLM for governance across quality management, audit and review, and support of regulatory compliance is integral to this software. It is imperative for businesses to understand not only the technology itself but also how it aligns with their specific needs and processes. Given the breadth of PLM's capabilities, it is not surprising that the market for PLM software is both complex and dynamic. The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and supporting analytics are spurring further advancements in PLM systems. Today's PLM solutions are more powerful, integrated and user-friendly than ever before, benefiting a growing set of users who need to interoperate with the software. They offer advanced analytics, cloud-based deployment options and mobile access, allowing for real-time data sharing and collaboration. However, leveraging PLM to its full potential requires a strategic approach. It is imperative for businesses to understand not only the technology itself but also how it aligns with their specific needs and processes. This understanding is crucial for selecting the right PLM software and for implementing it effectively. The concept of product lifecycle management has its roots in the engineering and manufacturing practices of the late 20th century. Initially, PLM was focused on product design and engineering data management. As industries grew more complex and global, the limitations of traditional product data management systems became apparent. Enterprises needed a more comprehensive approach to manage product information across the entire lifecycle, from design and development to manufacturing and maintenance. Over the years, PLM has evolved significantly. The advent of the internet and digital technologies brought new opportunities for collaboration, information sharing and innovation. Integrated PLM systems emerged, connecting various aspects of product development and supply chain management. Modern PLM solutions now incorporate sophisticated features such as digital twins, predictive analytics and advanced simulation tools, reflecting the growing complexity and technological advancements in product development. The need to integrate carbon footprint and sustainability information is increasing to ensure internal operations comply with external reporting requirements. By 2028, one-quarter of product information management (PIM) and product experience management (PXM) software providers will acquire or combine with product lifecycle management (PLM) to meet the needs of enterprises. In today's dynamic business environment, enterprises face a multitude of challenges that necessitate robust PLM solutions. Organizations must navigate rapid technological changes, increasing product complexity and market pressures to innovate and reduce costs. Consequently, modern enterprises need a PLM system that offers comprehensive capabilities to meet these demands. First and foremost, organizations require PLM software that facilitates seamless collaboration among cross-functional teams. Product development often involves diverse groups, including design, engineering, manufacturing, marketing and support. Efficient collaboration and information sharing are essential for aligning efforts, reducing errors and expediting decision-making. PLM systems should provide a centralized platform for real-time data access and collaboration, enabling teams to work cohesively across geographic and departmental boundaries. Another critical need for enterprises is flexibility and scalability in PLM solutions. As businesses grow and evolve, their PLM requirements may change. A PLM system must be adaptable to accommodate new processes, technologies and market conditions. Scalability is equally important, as enterprises should be able to scale their PLM solutions to match their operational needs, whether they are expanding product lines, entering new markets or integrating new technologies. The ability to manage and safeguard vast amounts of data is another crucial aspect of PLM. Products today generate significant data throughout their lifecycle, including design files, manufacturing records, quality reports and customer feedback. PLM systems must efficiently organize and store this data, ensuring its accuracy, security and accessibility. Robust data management capabilities enable enterprises to leverage data-driven insights for informed decision-making and continuous improvement. Compliance with industry standards and regulations is a non-negotiable requirement for many enterprises, especially those operating in highly regulated sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and medical devices. PLM software must offer features that simplify regulatory compliance, including audit trails, documentation control and change management. Ensuring compliance not only mitigates legal risks but also reinforces customer confidence in the enterprise's commitment to quality and safety. By providing tools for ideation, simulation and prototyping, PLM software empowers enterprises to innovate continuously and bring new products to market faster. Additionally, modern enterprises seek PLM solutions that enable innovation and speed to market. The competitive landscape demands rapid product development cycles and the ability to respond swiftly to market changes. PLM systems should support agile methodologies, streamline workflows and reduced time to market. By providing tools for ideation, simulation and prototyping, PLM software empowers enterprises to innovate continuously and bring new products to market faster. For PLM software to be effective and truly meet the needs of enterprises, it must possess a set of critical attributes. These attributes ensure that PLM solutions facilitate collaboration, innovation, data management, compliance and adaptability. Effective collaboration is paramount in product development. Successful PLM software should offer robust tools for real-time communication, data sharing and project management. Features such as collaborative workspaces, version control and integrated workflows enable cross-functional teams to work seamlessly, reducing bottlenecks and enhancing productivity. The ability to collaborate effectively accelerates decision-making and ensures alignment across all stages of product development. Flexibility and scalability are key attributes that any successful PLM software must possess. Enterprises operate in ever-changing environments, and their PLM systems should be able to adapt to evolving needs. Whether introducing new products, adopting new manufacturing processes or integrating emerging technologies, PLM software should have the flexibility to accommodate these changes. It is critical that PLM software supports variability management as well as a range of product versions in the manufacturing or assembly processes. Scalability ensures that the PLM system can grow with the enterprise, accommodating increasing data volumes and expanding operations. Robust data management capabilities are essential for any PLM solution to succeed. PLM software should efficiently handle the vast amounts of data generated throughout the product lifecycle. This includes organizing, storing and securing data, as well as ensuring its accessibility and accuracy. Advanced search functionalities, metadata management and data visualization tools enable users to find and interpret data quickly. Data integrity is crucial, as accurate and timely data is the foundation for informed decision-making. Compliance features are critical for enterprises in regulated industries. Successful PLM software should include capabilities to manage compliance with industry standards and regulations. This includes features such as change management, audit trails and documentation control. Compliance and regulatory support should help ensure that all product development processes adhere to regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of legal issues and enhancing product quality and safety. Lastly, user-friendliness and integration capabilities are vital for the success of PLM software. A user-friendly interface ensures that teams can adopt and use the PLM system effectively, minimizing the learning curve and maximizing productivity. Integration capabilities allow the PLM software to connect seamlessly with other enterprise systems, such as ERP, CRM and MES. Seamless integration ensures that data flows smoothly across all systems, enabling a unified view of product information and processes. As enterprises navigate the complexities of product development, selecting the right PLM software is a strategic decision that can have far-reaching implications. As enterprises navigate the complexities of product development, selecting the right PLM software is a strategic decision that can have far-reaching implications. A well-suited PLM solution empowers organizations to innovate, collaborate and manage data effectively, ensuring compliance and adaptability in a dynamic business environment. When evaluating PLM software providers, enterprises should consider attributes such as collaboration tools, flexibility, data management capabilities, compliance features, innovation support, user-friendliness and integration. PLM software should integrate closely with PIM and support the broader set of requirements from customer and commerce to supply chain and supplier systems. By carefully assessing these factors and aligning their PLM strategy with business goals, enterprises can make informed decisions that drive success and maintain a competitive advantage. With the right PLM software, organizations can manage the entire product lifecycle efficiently and cost-effectively, positioning themselves for sustained growth and innovation. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Lifecycle Management evaluates software providers and products in key areas based on analyst and administrative specific support, catalogue management support, content management infrastructure support, alignment to benefits, data management infrastructure support, digital asset management support, digital innovation, enterprise support, integration specific support, industry standard support, management and manager specific support, PLM application support, product lifecycle support, product manager support, product specific management support, supplier support and investment. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of PLM as we define it: Aras, Arena, Bamboo Rose, CentricSoftware, CONTACT Software, Dassault Systems, Epicor, IBM, Infor, Logility, Oracle, Propel Software, PTC, Revalize, SAP and Siemens. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Lifecycle Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for product lifecycle management software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for PIM to a manufacturing enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of manufacturing-related PIM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of manufacturing-related PIM software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge manufacturing enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating PIM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds SAP atop the list, followed by Oracle and Siemens. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. SAP has done so in seven of the seven categories; Oracle in six; Siemens in five; Dassault Systems in two; and Aras in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Arena, Dassault Systems, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Siemens. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: CentricSoftware and PTC. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: CONTACT Software and Infor. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Aras, Bamboo Rose, Epicor, Logility, Propel Software and Revalize. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle product lifecycle management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (10%), Capability (30%), Reliability (10%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (20%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. SAP, Oracle and Siemens were designated Product Experience Leaders. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Oracle, SAP and Siemens. These category Leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Lifecycle Management in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $25 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Lifecycle Management evaluates software providers and products in key areas based on analyst and administrative specific support, catalogue management support, content management infrastructure support, alignment to benefits, data management infrastructure support, digital asset management support, digital innovation, enterprise support, integration specific support, industry standard support, management and manager specific support, PLM application support, product lifecycle support, product manager support, product specific management support, supplier support and investment. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant product lifecycle management products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year Aras Aras Platform 34 February 2025 Arena Arena Platform January 2025 January 2025 Bamboo Rose Bamboo Rose TotalPLM N/A January 2025 CentricSoftware Centric PLM 7.9 July 2024 CONTACT Software CONTACT CIM Database September 2024 September 2024 Dassault Systems 3DEXPERIENCE Platform 3DEXPERIENCE R2023x FP.2505 January 2025 Epicor Epicor PLM Platform 2024.2 November 2024 IBM IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management 7.03 January 2025 Infor Optiva January 2025 January 2025 Logility Logility PLM January 2025 January 2025 Oracle Oracle PLM Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence v. 25A 25.R1 January 2025 Propel Software Propel PVM & PLM January 2025 January 2025 PTC Windchill January 2025 January 2025 Revalize Revalize PLM January 2025 January 2025 SAP SAP PLM SAP Product and Process Governance by BDF 2502 v. 2.1 January 2025 October 2024 Siemens PLM Software January 2025 January 2025 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product Revenue Geography Customers Functionality Autodesk Product Design & Manufacturing Yes Yes Yes No Bentley Systems Bentley PLM Yes Yes Yes No Bluestar PLM Bluestar PLM No Yes Yes No duro duro No No Yes No Newman Cloud OpenBOM No Yes Yes Yes
Executive Summary Product Intelligence In today’s digital landscape, gaining insights into digital product representations through technology can be complex. The vast amounts of consumer interaction data generated can reveal performance metrics and growth opportunities. Digital reviews and advanced analytics quickly identify trends and address challenges, with product definitions serving as references for optimizing consumer guidance. A data-driven approach supports informed decisions and drives sustained digital growth. ISG Research defines product intelligence as the digital practices and processes that optimize interactions between consumers and enterprise systems used for information and commerce. ISG Research defines product intelligence as the digital practices and processes that optimize interactions between consumers and enterprise systems used for information and commerce. It provides tools for managing digital interactions through analytics and automation, utilizing AI and other techniques. The evolution of product intelligence stems from over two decades of advancements in content and web analytics. These analytics have progressively supported the experimentation and testing of web content, transforming the digital representation of features and services to achieve optimal results. Initially, in the mid-1990s, websites relied on basic tracking methods using server logs to monitor user interactions, providing fundamental metrics like page views and unique visitors. These early tools offered minimal insights into user behavior. However, as the internet expanded, the demand for more sophisticated analytics grew, paving the way for solutions that incorporated product-focused metrics. The launch of Google Analytics in the early 2000s marked a transformative shift, democratizing access to analytics tools. Although these tools provided significant improvements, they did not fully meet the needs for more advanced analysis. With the infusion of product intelligence, marketers gained the ability to analyze not just traffic sources and user demographics, but also digital product performance and user engagement on a deeper level within the context of user journeys. This integration of digital intelligence into web analytics frameworks has significantly evolved the field, allowing for more comprehensive and actionable insights. The continued evolution of web analytics has been further enhanced by the emergence of AI and machine learning technologies, imbuing analytics processes with digital intelligence. These advancements enable predictive analytics, allowing businesses to foresee user behavior and optimize product offerings based on real-time data. Today, web analytics encompasses various techniques, including conversion rate optimization, A/B testing and multi-channel attribution. This comprehensive approach enables enterprises to make informed decisions regarding digital product and marketing strategies, enhancing user experiences and navigating the complexities of the online marketplace. Ultimately, this evolution has solidified web analytics as an essential tool for effective digital marketing and product management. To enhance digital operations and drive growth in today’s data-driven environment, enterprises must strategically implement product intelligence. This involves adopting advanced platforms for real-time insights into consumer behavior and product performance. Product intelligence enables organizations to move beyond traditional analytics, providing a comprehensive understanding of user interactions and preferences for informed decision-making. By 2028, one-third of enterprises will have invested in a common technological approach for product information management that is committed to product experiences and not just digital assets. Incorporating AI and machine learning into digital intelligence frameworks is crucial. These technologies enable predictive analytics, helping businesses anticipate customer needs and behaviors, which leads to personalized experiences and optimized product offerings. Techniques such as journey mapping, sentiment analysis and performance metrics enhance market understanding and improve strategies. Integrating digital intelligence increases enterprise agility, improves customer engagement and helps navigate the complexities of the digital landscape, securing a sustainable competitive advantage. To thrive in this data-driven landscape, enterprises should invest in platforms that provide real-time insights and use methods like experimentation and testing for optimal performance. Moving beyond traditional metrics allows for a holistic view of user interactions, informing strategic decisions. By prioritizing AI and machine learning technologies, predictive analytics can better anticipate customer needs, enabling personalized experiences and optimized offerings. This comprehensive approach refines overall strategies, ultimately improving agility and enhancing consumer engagement. Technology is essential for enterprises to effectively implement product intelligence in today’s digital, data-driven environment. With vast amounts of data generated across various channels, advanced platforms are necessary for real-time processing and analysis to ensure critical insights are not missed. AI and machine learning technologies enhance predictive analytics, enabling businesses to anticipate customer needs, create personalized experiences and optimize product offerings. Adopting technology is fundamental for extracting value from digital intelligence, improving customer engagement and maintaining a competitive edge in a complex digital landscape. Optimizing product descriptions with SEO techniques and competitive pricing strategies will strengthen market positions. Utilizing AI and machine learning for predictive analytics will uncover new opportunities and mitigate risks. Structured product scorecards and digital dashboards will effectively measure performance, while insights from digital shelf analytics and sentiment analysis will enhance understanding of customer feedback. Integrating automated notification systems for real-time monitoring of compliance and product activity provides valuable insights for agile decision-making. Providing technology that meets the diverse needs of product and technology professionals is crucial for guiding operations and informed decision-making. To harness product intelligence effectively, enterprises should take several strategic steps. First, they need to invest in advanced platforms that offer real-time insights into consumer behavior and digital interactions. Employing AI and machine learning technologies will enhance predictive analytics capabilities, allowing businesses to better anticipate consumer needs. Implementing journey mapping techniques will help gain a comprehensive understanding of user interactions and preferences. Focusing on personalization will enable organizations to create tailored experiences based on insights gathered from data analysis. It is also essential to enhance product data governance to ensure clean, accurate and compliant data practices, maximizing the value of product intelligence. Finally, providing technology that meets the diverse needs of product and technology professionals is crucial for guiding operations and informed decision-making. By following these steps, enterprises can improve digital engagement, adapt to market changes and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Intelligence evaluates software providers and products in key areas that require support for digital representation of what we call product intelligence, and underlying support in content and data management, support for integration into digital systems, and the support for analyst, product managers, operations and administrative roles. Examination of digital innovation and investment were examined. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of product intelligence as we define it: Adobe, Amplitude, Contentsquare, Fullstory, Gainsight, Glassbox, MixPanel, Pendo, QuantumMetric and Sensor Tower. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Intelligence is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for product intelligence software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for PIM to a manufacturing enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of manufacturing-related PIM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of manufacturing-related PIM software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge manufacturing enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating PIM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds Pendo atop the list, followed by Amplitude and Quantum Metric. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Amplitude has done so in six categories; Pendo in five; Adobe and Quantum Metric in three; and Gainsight, Glassbox, Contentsquare and Mixpanel in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Adobe, Amplitude, Pendo and Quantum Metric. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The provider rated Innovative is: Glassbox. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The provider rated Assurance is: Contentsquare. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The provider's rated Merit are: Fullstory, Gainsight, Mixpanel and Sensor Tower. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle product intelligence, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (20%), Capability (20%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Pendo, Amplitude and Quantum Metric were designated Product Experience Leaders. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Amplitude, Adobe, Contentsquare and Pendo. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not a Leader, Quantum Metric and Gainsight were also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Intelligence in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $15 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Intelligence evaluates software providers and products in key areas that require support for digital representation of what we call product intelligence, and should have underlying support in content and data management, support for integration into digital systems, and the support for analyst, product managers, operations and administrative roles. Extent of digital innovation and investment were examined. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant product intelligence products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year Adobe Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe Analytics February 2025 February 2025 Amplitude Amplitude Platform February 2025 February 2025 Contentsquare Heap, Hotjar, Product Analytics February 2025 February 2025 Fullstory Product Analytics February 2025 February 2025 Gainsight Product Experience v. 4.20.0 February 2025 Glassbox Glassbox Platform January 2025 January 2025 Mixpanel Mixpanel Product Analytics, Session Replay, Warehouse Connectors February 2025 February 2025 Pendo Pendo Analytics January 2025 January 2025 Quantum Metric Digital Analytics Platform v. summer September 2024 Sensor Tower App Performance Insights, Audience Insights, Pathmatics, Web Insights January 2025 January 2025 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product Revenue Geography Customers Functionality Kissmetrics Kissmetrics No Yes Yes Yes LogRocket LogRocket No Yes Yes Yes Mouseflow Mouseflow No Yes Yes Yes PostHog Product Analytics, Web Analytics No Yes Yes Yes Userpilot Userpilot No Yes Yes Yes UserVoice Uservoice No Yes Yes Yes Woopra Woopra No Yes Yes Yes
Executive Summary Product Experience Management Products and services are the foundation of every organization, regardless of its industry or size. Across all channels and departments, nearly every interaction relates to answering questions or gaining access to product information. Every organization must ensure that products get the attention they deserve as they are marketed, sold, serviced and enhanced to meet customer expectations. A “customer-first” mentality is critical and not unreasonable. Still, in a rush to be the most cost-effective, business leaders too often forget that product experiences are key to satisfying and retaining customers. The ability to invest adequate time and resources into products determines an organization’s agility, sustainability, operational effectiveness and overall business health. Successful product experiences require technology investments like product information management (PIM) to ensure the proper support of interactions and the underlying lifecycle that enables impactful and interactive communication with customers. To accomplish this requires an agreed-upon standard of product information that should be readily available for any purpose, including AI uses cases. By 2027, the product information management category will evolve as product experience management (PXM) where the value from the technology is focused on digital experiences and engagement through GenAI. ISG Research defines product experience management as the methods and processes for managing customer experiences using systems that support product-related processes to meet the satisfaction and needs of any consumer, customer, partner or supplier. PXM is integral across the front office; the customer and revenue areas of marketing, sales, commerce, customer and field service; and the manufacturing and distribution supply chain. As enterprises increase the number and diversity of products and services offered to customers and partners, it’s critical to address limitations in the ways product information is managed and distributed, including the administration of related attributes and content that describes the products. The goal of PXM is to establish a reliable, single source of product information to share across channels. Getting it right is not easy, as the majority of enterprises have more than five sources of product information to integrate and manage efficiently. Most organizations acknowledge that standardizing product information requires substantial effort and often use laborious, time-consuming, customized methods or rely on manual effort to produce a reliable product record. Worse yet, many organizations still depend heavily on spreadsheets, and most will admit to finding major or minor errors in records. Processes and tools are available to automate much of this work. If properly deployed, PXM systems can synchronize all attributes and definitions used in the identification, description, sales and fulfillment of products across all channels that customers, suppliers, trading partners and workers use. PXM benefits from decades of evolutionary advancements in product information management systems that have focused on the administration and standardization of product content and data for internal processes and applications. However, not all PIM systems have evolved to support product experiences consumed across the demand and supply chain—though the needs of enterprises necessitate those capabilities. Effectively evaluating PIM systems requires the ability to examine an expanded set of requirements that support PXM. At the same time, competitive pressures require that enterprises quickly incorporate large amounts of new content—video and images, for example—while ensuring the information presented to customers is accurate, operational processes run uninterrupted and timely data is available for business analysis. For environments where consumers, suppliers and partners use multiple channels to access product information—websites, kiosks, smartphones, tablets—organizations must present complete, up-to-date product information to inspire interest and facilitate purchases. Today’s enterprises must manage a continually expanding array of data, content and digital assets while satisfying consumer demands for comprehensive product information. Addressing these challenges requires unified processes, automated systems and, importantly, the ability to augment and enrich product information. We find that most organizations have incompatible tools and lack a centralized information repository. These situations lead to wasted time and inefficiency in checking for errors and reconciling data across systems. To provide an effective product experience for buyers, consumers, customers and partners across the entire supply chain, enterprises must deliver accurate, consistent and actionable product information. To provide an effective product experience for buyers, consumers, customers and partners across the entire supply chain, enterprises must deliver accurate, consistent and actionable product information. Crucially, it is impossible to deliver the best customer experience without a great product experience, and successful organizations recognize this is a key benefit realized from PXM investments. PXM enhances visibility into—and engagement with—product information and can help organizations increase revenue and satisfy customers. Managing product information can be challenging when an enterprise and its workers use different names, attributes, images and related product information for the same purpose. Disparities often exist across departments. Additionally, organizations regularly add suppliers to business networks and increase the number and variety of products offered without utilizing already defined and agreed-upon product information. Many organizations indicate that today’s customers also expect a delightful product experience that provides information on mobile devices, but conducting commerce across sites, marketplaces and social media introduces challenges for a unified experience. These advances bring additional content and data into an enterprise’s information systems, introducing new inconsistencies in how products and attributes are combined. Still, competitive pressures require up-to-date and accurate information that is also engaging in its presentation—in other words, an effective product experience. Enterprises need systems that enable intelligent processes to run continuously and uninterrupted, using AI and machine language with analytics to identify issues and opportunities to exploit the power of product information. Analytics provide insight into the use of product information and where collaborative actions are necessary for improvement. By 2028, one-third of enterprises will have invested in a common technological approach for product information management that is committed to product experiences and not just digital assets. In most organizations, product information is spread across websites, digital asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets and a variety of applications. Each system can uniquely present the information, resulting in disparate product experiences. A related issue is the difficulty of exchanging, integrating and synchronizing product information across diverse systems and services used by buyers, customers and business partners. Typically, this occurs outside enterprise systems and in cloud computing environments such as digital commerce, marketplaces and CRM systems. Slow and incomplete integration processes prevent organizations from gaining a single view of products to control and update the information and enable a consistent product experience for workers, partners and customers. Enterprises must effectively manage and improve product information beyond internal channels and systems to ensure accuracy and consistency across the organizational spectrum. This approach enables better alignment of products to specific activities and processes but requires applications that allow an enterprise to manage product information for satisfactory digital experiences. The benefits of using dedicated PXM technology can be significant. In our research, most organizations said PXM can help eliminate data errors, gain a competitive advantage and improve the customer experience through consistent product information. And if addressed effectively, the improvement can ensure an organization achieves satisfaction in product experiences. PXM software should meet customer needs for interacting with any application or platform or directly via product catalogs shared from websites to marketplaces. PXM—and the applications and technology that enable it—help organizations provide the best possible product information for processes, departments and partners. To accomplish this, software must support multiple business roles, including product managers and marketers, operations and manufacturing teams and those in the supply chain. Manufacturers, for example, must be able to share product information with distributors and direct retailers or digital commerce providers. PXM software should meet customer needs for interacting with any application or platform or directly via product catalogs shared from websites to marketplaces. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. Improving the performance of your enterprise’s people, processes, information and technology components requires selecting the right software provider and product. However, caution is appropriate here: Technology updates alone are not enough to improve the use of PXM in an organization. Doing so requires a balanced set of upgrades and efforts to enhance processes and information. We find that few organizations are satisfied with PXM processes that derive from underlying PIM efforts. It is best to start by assessing all short- and long-term efforts related to the product experience and any existing approach. No matter where an enterprise manages product information—whether from a dedicated ERP or CRM system or, vexingly, a tangle of spreadsheets—it must continuously improve the product experience. Product success is more than just merchandising and maintaining product information on a digital shelf. The goal is to increase productivity and sustain those efforts in the best and worst of times, ensuring success under pressure and over the long term. Product success is about increasing effectiveness in digital engagement and bringing new value to the process. Applications should do more than enhance productivity in managing product information and provide insights into usage such as product activation, new product introduction and end of life. The product experience unifies an enterprise’s efforts to sustain continuity while bringing new value to digital merchandising and marketing efforts, helping exceed customer expectations. Optimizing the product experience is more than just a nicety—it is essential for every organization that looks to make the most of customer engagement and relationships. This effort is vital when relying on digital commerce to sell products and services. Without an optimized product experience, an organization will not successfully elevate the customer experience. Continuous improvement is a shared responsibility across business and IT leadership, and impossible to do without PIM designed to optimize the product experience. This approach is separate from master data management technology or goals for achieving better data integration. Antiquated methods such as spreadsheets, databases and other ERP, CRM or digital commerce systems are not always designed for a contemporary digital product experience. Enterprises should also prioritize investments that enable more effective digital merchandising and price management. These systems need a comprehensive view of the digital shelf and should be able to virtualize products from packaging to specifications for buyers and customers. Simply posting an image and description was possible a decade ago, but that does not provide an actual product experience. In cases where the product is equipment, extended reality technology can virtualize and augment the product experience, significantly enhancing buyer and customer engagement and often answering their questions without losing valuable time on a phone call or chat with a customer service agent. Embracing methods that use mobile devices to virtualize products in context—whether in a facility or a living room—can further enhance the product experience, thus increasing the likelihood of a purchase. If an organization doesn’t capture and monitor interactions and online feedback from all relevant parties, it is likely missing the insights required to effectively improve the product experience. Enterprises can better determine sentiment about the product experience by collecting feedback from customers and related parties at the time of purchase or product usage. If an organization doesn’t capture and monitor interactions and online feedback from all relevant parties, it is likely missing the insights required to effectively improve the product experience. Continuous feedback can help increase productivity and, more importantly, the effectiveness of the enterprise. Additionally, sharing feedback digitally through product reviews establishes confidence with buyers and customers. Organizations should seek to create or expand a voice-of-the-product program with processes and technology that collect customer feedback and sentiment, aided by analytics and ML to gain insights. Using digital technologies to reinvent the product experience from the outside in and the inside out requires the right lens to support business continuity—rather than distract from it. Enterprises should optimize underlying product processes and technology for internal use and buyers, customers, suppliers and partners. This can have an immediate impact on top- and bottom-line results and reflects the priority an organization places on product experience. Enterprises should ensure that existing and future PXM technology investments are designed for effective engagement and a fantastic product experience, not just for automation and efficiency. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Experience Management evaluates the software providers and products in support of functional areas, including catalog management, commerce, business and enterprise needs, content management infrastructure, alignment to benefits, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, digital merchandising, direct-to-consumer, integration-specific requirements and industry standards. The results also encompass provisions for consumers, analyst and administrative needs, management and manager-specific needs, the product life cycle, product manager tasks, product-specific management, suppliers and investment. This comprehensive capability framework supports the broad requirements for PXM across industries and the needs of business and IT. To be evaluated in this Buyers Guide, products must include a platform that supports business and IT requirements across channels where product experiences and information are managed throughout the enterprise and to external parties. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of PXM as we define it: Acquia, Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Boyum IT, censhare, Comosoft, Contentserv, Informatica, inriver, Netcore Unbxd, insightsoftware, novomind, Pimcore, Plytix, Sales Layer, Salsify, SAP, Stibo Systems, Syndigo and Viamedici. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Experience Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for product experience management software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for PIM to a manufacturing enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of manufacturing-related PIM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of manufacturing-related PIM software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge manufacturing enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating PIM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds Informatica atop the list, followed by Akeneo and Salsify. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Informatica has done so in seven categories, Akeneo in four, inriver in three, Salsify and SAP in two and Bluestone PM, Contentserv and Pimcore in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Contentserv, Informatica, inriver, Pimcore, Salsify and Syndigo. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: SAP and Viamedici. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: insightsoftware and Stibo Systems. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Acquia, Boyum IT, censhare, Comosoft, novomind, Plytix, Sales Layer and Netcore Unbxd. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle product experience management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (15%), Capability (25%), Reliability (12.5%), Adaptability (15%) and Manageability (12.5%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Informatica, Akeneo and Salsify were designated Product Experience Leaders. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Informatica, inriver and Contentserv. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Product Experience Management in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $10 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months. The product must provide PXM for enterprise and external processes for consumers to suppliers. We evaluated critical support areas like analyst and administrative-specific requirements, business, catalog management, commerce, consumers, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, digital merchandising, direct-to-consumer requirements, enterprise, integration-specific needs, industry standard requirements, management and manager-specific needs, the product life cycle, product managers, product-specific management, suppliers and investment and demonstrating alignment to benefits. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant product experience management products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year Acquia Acquia PIM 2025 January 2025 Akeneo Akeneo PIM Serenity December 2024 Bluestone PIM Bluestone PIM Release 64 January 2025 Boyum IT Perfion B1UP 2024.12 December 2024 censhare Product Information Management 2024.2.2 January 2025 Comosoft LAGO LAGO Tana 6.5 December 2024 Contentserv Product Information Management PXC24.9 January 2025 Informatica Product 360 10.5 HotFix 4 December 2024 inriver inriver January 2025 January 2025 insightsoftware Agility PIM 24.3 September 2024 Netcore Unbxd Netcore Unbxd PIM January 2025 January 2025 novomind novomind iPIM 5.5.3 January 2025 Pimcore Pimcore platform 2024.4 December 2024 Plytix Product Information Management January 2025 January 2025 Sales Layer Sales Layer PIM December 2024 December 2024 Salsify Salsify PIM Q3 2024 October 2024 SAP SAP Commerce Cloud SAP Datasphere SAP Product and Process Governance by BDF 2211 2025.5 2.1 November 2024 January 2025 October 2024 Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud Product MDM 2025.1 January 2025 Syndigo Syndigo PIM January 2025 January 2025 Viamedici Viamedici Product Information Management 360° EPIM 5 July 2024 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product Revenue Geography Customers Functionality Catsy Catsy PIM No Yes Yes Yes Gepard Gepard No Yes Yes Yes Goaland Goaland PIM No Yes Yes Yes Jasper Commerce Jasper PIM No Yes Yes Yes Pattern Pattern Yes No Yes Yes Proplanet Proplanet PIM No Yes Yes Yes
Executive Summary Product Information Management Platform Products and services are the foundation of every organization, regardless of its industry or size. Across all channels and departments, nearly every interaction relates to answering questions or gaining access to product information. Every organization must ensure that products get the attention they deserve as they are marketed, sold, serviced and enhanced to meet customer expectations. A “customer-first” mentality is critical and not unreasonable. Still, in a rush to be the most cost-effective, business leaders too often forget that product experiences are key to satisfying and retaining customers. The ability to invest adequate time and resources into products determines an organization’s agility, sustainability, operational effectiveness and overall business health. Successful product experiences require technology investments like product information management (PIM) to ensure the proper support of interactions and the underlying life cycle that enables impactful and interactive communication with customers. To accomplish this requires an agreed-upon standard of product information that should be readily available for any purpose, including AI use cases. By 2027, one-quarter of enterprises will re-activate a new product information management software investment to meet GenAI requirements to have an ingestible product catalog for interactions across the supply chain. ISG Research defines PIM as the methods and processes for managing and using product information with applications and processes across the front office; customer and revenue areas of marketing, sales and commerce; customer and field service; and the back office. This also applies to the supply chain—from manufacturing and distribution to financial accounting. As enterprises increase the number and diversity of products and services offered to customers and partners, it’s critical to address limitations in the ways product information is managed and distributed, including the administration of related attributes and content that describes the products. At the same time, competitive pressures require that enterprises quickly incorporate large amounts of new content—video and images, for example—while ensuring that the information presented to customers is accurate, operational processes run uninterrupted and timely data is available for business analysis. For environments where consumers, suppliers and partners use multiple channels to access product information—websites, kiosks, smartphones, tablets—it is essential that the organization must present complete, up-to-date product information to inspire interest and facilitate purchases. PIM—and the applications and technology that enable it—help organizations provide the best possible product information for processes, departments and partners. To accomplish this, PIM software must support multiple business roles, including product managers and marketers, operations and manufacturing teams and those in the supply chain. Manufacturers, for example, must be able to share product information with distributors and direct retailers or digital commerce providers. Effectively managed product information is also essential to support operational and decision-making processes. Effectively managed product information is also essential to support decision-making processes. Analytics applied to product information can yield a variety of metrics—indicating where product information is missing, where it needs to be improved, the patterns of product usage and the meaning of feedback received. Analytics can help profile and improve data quality and associated attributes to determine where action is needed. PIM is not the same as master data management (MDM), although the two are sometimes confused. This misunderstanding can distract enterprises from focusing on the needs of product processes. MDM technology can ensure a single definition of data across the enterprise and improve the quality and integration of data across information systems. PIM systems must have MDM built in and connect to the data integration and quality processes to ensure only one defined master record exists for any given product. However, product information encompasses more than just the defined name and attributes of a product in a database. It also includes related information, such as digital assets and documents needed for reference or compliance purposes. Enterprises should take care to understand the differences between PIM and MDM and how these systems complement one another to inform decisions. PIM is essential to enable business units to manage product-related processes, just as IT staff need broader MDM technology and integration tools to manage data throughout the enterprise. PIM as a software category has existed for decades. It operates independently and also interoperates with enterprise software. The platform category of PIM meets the specific needs of particular users, including digital merchandising to support online marketplaces and exchanges of information across suppliers, manufacturers and retailers. Beyond the traditional management of product information, the software category has evolved to support product life cycles and the activation and deactivation across channels that distribute or market products. Today’s enterprises must manage a continually expanding array of data, content and digital assets while satisfying consumer demands for comprehensive product information. Addressing these challenges requires unified processes, automated systems and, importantly, the ability to augment and enrich product information. We find that most organizations have incompatible tools and must cope with disparate forms of data that lead to inefficiency and time wasted checking for errors and reconciling data across systems. To provide an effective product experience for buyers, consumers, customers and partners across the entire supply chain, enterprises must deliver accurate, consistent and actionable product information. Crucially, it is impossible to deliver the best customer experience without a great product experience, and successful organizations recognize this is a key benefit realized from PIM investments. PIM enhances visibility into—and engagement with—product information and can help organizations increase revenue and satisfy customers. Managing product information can be challenging when an enterprise and its workers use different names, attributes, images and related product information for the same purpose. Disparities often exist across departments. Additionally, organizations regularly add suppliers to business networks and increase the number and variety of products offered without utilizing already defined and agreed-upon product information. Today’s customers also expect a delightful product experience that provides information on mobile devices, but conducting commerce across sites and social media introduces challenges for a unified experience. Perhaps most importantly, product information today must have a visual component, from images and video to social ratings and reviews. These advances bring additional content and data into an enterprise’s information systems, introducing new inconsistencies in how products and attributes are combined. Still, competitive pressures require up-to-date and accurate information that is also engaging in its presentation—in other words, an effective product experience. Enterprises need systems that enable intelligent processes to run continuously and uninterrupted and use AI machine learning with analytics to identify issues and opportunities to exploit the power of product information. Analytics provide insight into the use of product information and where collaborative actions are necessary for improvement. However, the advancing aspects of agentic AI to help machines interact with workers and consumers through workflows are becoming even more important. Through 2028, one-fifth of enterprises will have connected a product information network with agentic AI supporting the enterprise and customers’ requirements for responsiveness. In most organizations, product information is spread across websites, applications, digital asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets and a variety of applications. Each system can uniquely present the information, resulting in disparate product experiences. A related issue is the difficulty of exchanging, integrating and synchronizing product information across diverse systems and services used by buyers, customers and business partners. Typically, this occurs outside enterprise systems and in cloud computing environments such as digital commerce, marketplaces and CRM systems. In most organizations, product information is spread across websites, applications, digital asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets and a variety of applications. Each system can uniquely present the information, resulting in disparate product experiences. A related issue is the difficulty of exchanging, integrating and synchronizing product information across diverse systems and services used by buyers, customers and business partners. Typically, this occurs outside enterprise systems and in cloud computing environments such as digital commerce, marketplaces and CRM systems. ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. Improving the performance of your enterprise’s people, processes, information and technology components requires selecting the right software provider and product. Technology updates alone are not enough to improve the use of PIM in an organization. Doing so requires a balanced set of upgrades and efforts to enhance processes and information. It is best to start by assessing all short- and long-term efforts related to the product experience and any existing PIM approach. Enterprises should cultivate product information that encourages buyer and customer engagement. Key touchpoints include the physical world and digital systems like commerce and websites with products, services and subscriptions to bolster interactive experiences. This approach requires more intelligent, streamlined and automated product information processes, freeing responsible parties to focus on areas that need immediate improvement, be it velocity, volume of interest, sales or outdated product information. Product success is about increasing effectiveness in digital engagement and bringing new value to the process. Product success is more than just merchandising and maintaining product information on a digital shelf. The goal is to increase productivity and sustain those efforts in the best and worst of times, ensuring success under pressure and over the long term. Product success is about increasing effectiveness in digital engagement and bringing new value to the process. Applications should do more than enhance productivity in managing product information and provide insights into usage such as product activation, new product introduction and end of life. The product experience unifies an enterprise’s efforts to sustain continuity while bringing new value to digital merchandising and marketing efforts, helping exceed customer expectations. Optimizing the product experience is more than just a nicety—it is essential for every organization that looks to make the most of customer engagement and relationships. This effort is vital when relying on digital commerce to sell products and services. Without an optimized product experience, an organization will not successfully elevate the customer experience. Continuous improvement is a shared responsibility across business and IT leadership, and impossible to do without PIM designed to optimize the product experience. This approach is separate from MDM technology or goals for achieving better data integration. Antiquated methods such as spreadsheets, databases and other ERP, CRM or digital commerce systems are not always designed for a contemporary digital product experience. These options can decrease productivity, diminish accountability and increase risk. Enterprises must use business continuity as a driver of investments to improve the intelligent use of PIM, especially in times of duress. Enterprises should optimize underlying product processes and technology for internal use, and buyers and customers, suppliers and partners. This can have an immediate impact on top- and bottom-line results and reflects the priority an organization places on product experience. Enterprises should ensure that existing and future PIM technology investments are designed for effective engagement and a fantastic product experience, not just for automation and efficiency. Organizations need only look at how they manage prices and the related promotions for revenue management. Enterprises must effectively manage and improve product information outside of organizational channels and systems to ensure accuracy and consistency across the entire enterprise’s efforts. This approach enables organizations to more effectively align products to specific activities and processes. It requires applications that allow an organization to manage product information for an effective digital experience. The benefits of using dedicated PIM technology can be significant. Organizations find PIM helps eliminate data errors, improves cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and enhances the customer experience through consistent product information. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PIM Platforms evaluates the software providers and products in support of functional areas, including catalog management, business, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, enterprise, integration-specific needs, industry standard, the product life cycle and the ability to demonstrate alignment to benefits. The results also encompass provisions for management and manager-specific needs, product manager, product-specific management, analyst and administrative-specific needs and investment. This comprehensive capability framework supports the broad requirements for PIM across industries and the needs of business and IT. To be evaluated in this Buyers Guide, products must include a platform that supports business and IT needs across channels to view product information. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of PIM as we define it: 1WorldSync, Acquia, Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Boyum IT, censhare, Comosoft, Contentserv, fabric, Feedonomics, IBM, Informatica, inriver, insightsoftware, Netcore Unbxd, novomind, Oracle, Pimcore, Plytix, Precisely, Productsup, Propel Software, SAP, Sales Layer, Salsify, Stibo Systems, Syndigo and Viamedici. Buyers Guide Overview For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise. ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise. The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PIM Platform is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for PIM platform software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment. In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for PIM to a manufacturing enterprise’s requirements. The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of manufacturing-related PIM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise. ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of manufacturing-related PIM software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge manufacturing enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating PIM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. How To Use This Buyers Guide Evaluating Software Providers: The Process We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes. Define the business case and goals. Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. Specify the business needs. Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology. Assess the required roles and responsibilities. Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. Outline the project’s critical path. What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. Ascertain the technology approach. Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria. Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. Evaluate and select the technology properly. Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products. Establish the business initiative team to start the project. Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. The Findings All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software. Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs. Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories The research finds Informatica atop the list, followed by Akeneo, inriver and Salsify. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Informatica has done so in seven categories; inriver in three; Akeneo, Oracle and Salsify in two; and Bluestone PIM, Contentserv, Pimcore, SAP and Syndigo in one category. The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left. The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance. Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Contentserv, Informatica, inriver, Oracle, Pimcore, Salsify, SAP, Stibo Systems and Syndigo. Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Acquia, Netcore Unbxd and Viamedici. Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Boyum IT, IBM and insighsoftware. Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: 1WorldSync, censhare, Comosoft, fabric, Feedonomics, novomind, Plytix, Precisely, Productsup, Propel Software and Sales Layer. We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle PIM platform, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs. We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products. Product Experience The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust. The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (10%), Capability (30%), Reliability (12.5%), Adaptability (15%) and Manageability (12.5%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Informatica, Akeneo and Salsify were designated Product Experience Leaders. Customer Experience The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey. The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research. The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Informatica, inriver and Contentserv. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience. Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for PIM Platform in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $10 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months. The product must provide PIM for enterprise processes and support product experiences for commerce and suppliers. This Buyers Guide evaluates critical areas like: analyst and administrative-specific requirements, business, catalog management, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, enterprise, integration-specific requirements, industry standard needs, management and manager-specific requirements, product life cycle, product manager, product-specific management, investment and demonstrating alignment to benefits. The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion. All software providers that offer relevant PIM platform products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them. Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers. Products Evaluated Provider Product Names Version Release Month/Year 1WorldSync 1WorldSync PIM 2024 September 2024 Acquia Acquia PIM 2025 January 2025 Akeneo Akeneo PIM Serenity January 2025 Bluestone PIM Bluestone PIM Release 64 January 2025 Boyum IT Perfion B1UP 2024.12 December 2024 censhare Product Information Management 2024.2.2 January 2025 Comosoft LAGO LAGO Tana 6.5 December 2024 Contentserv Product Information Management PXC24.9 January 2025 fabric Product Catalog 2024 October 2024 Feedonomics Feedonomics January 2025 January 2025 IBM IBM Product Master 12.0 FP12 October 2024 Informatica Product 360 10.5 HotFix 4 December 2024 inriver inriver January 2025 January 2025 insightsoftware Agility PIM 24.3 September 2024 Netcore Unbxd Netcore Unbxd PIM January 2025 January 2025 novomind novomind iPIM 5.5.3 January 2025 Oracle Oracle PLM Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence 25A 25.R1 January 2025 Pimcore Pimcore Platform 2024.4 December 2024 Plytix Product Information Management January 2025 January 2025 Precisely EnterWorks 11.1 August 2024 Productsup Productsup Platform February 2025 February 2025 Propel Software Propel PIM Winter 8.94 November 2024 Sales Layer Sales Layer PIM December 2024 December 2024 Salsify Salsify PIM Q3 2024 October 2024 SAP SAP Commerce Cloud SAP Datasphere SAP Product and Process Governance by BDF 2211 2025.5 2.1 November 2024 January 2025 October 2024 Stibo Systems Product Experience Data Cloud Product MDM 2025.1 January 2025 Syndigo Syndigo PIM January 2025 January 2025 Viamedici Viamedici Product Information Management 360° EPIM 5 July 2024 Providers of Promise We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide but were above $5m US in revenue. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.” Provider Product Revenue Geography Customers Functionality AtroCore AtroPIM No Yes Yes Yes CatalogForce CatalogForce No Yes Yes Yes Catsy Catsy PIM No Yes Yes Yes Ergonode Ergonode PIM No Yes Yes Yes Gepard Gepard No Yes Yes Yes Goaland Goaland PIM No Yes Yes Yes Hark aHub, aView No Yes Yes Yes Innovit Innovit PIM No Yes Yes Yes Jasper Commerce Jasper PIM No Yes Yes Yes Kontainer Kontainer No Yes Yes Yes OneTimePIM OneTImePIM No Yes Yes Yes Pattern Pattern Yes No Yes Yes Pimberly Pimberly No Yes Yes Yes Proplanet Proplanet PIM No Yes Yes Yes Quable Quable No Yes Yes Yes