Our expertise comes from our research that is not found anywhere else in the industry. It can help you make Purchasing, Sourcing, and Payments impactful to your organization. Consider these insights as you look to assess and improve your Purchasing, Sourcing, and Payment efforts.
Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection
We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.
Services for Technology Vendors
We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.
Procure-to-Pay
How we can help
Consulting
Consulting where we deliver expert guidance with our experience, expertise and market research through workshops and assessments for better business outcomes.
Advisory
Advisory through our proactive and informed expert advice and insights for optimization of decisions through our Ventana On-Demand service designed for value every month of the year.
Research
Research enables insights from our industry analyst team and market research with our Benchmark Research, Dynamic Insights and Value Index research products that provide facts for decisions.
Education
Education in a range of business, technology and vertical industry topics through our publishing of digital content in mediums and styles for impactful insights across an entire organization.
Some of our Latest Research
Successful AI Adoption: Change Management is Essential
Analyst Perspective
Organizational change management is the discipline and process of guiding individuals, teams and organizations to a desired future structure. This is frequently an issue when implementing new technology designed to enable new strategies or business models. It is often a challenge because of human resistance to change, which is driven by a desire for stability, fear of personal consequences and the possible loss of control or power, among other factors. Executives can compound the issue through poor communication about the purpose of the change, leading to confusion and doubt, especially if trust in their ability or the ability of the enterprise to be successful in transformation is limited. Without competent leadership, it is always difficult for organizations with deep-rooted cultural norms to overcome resistance. Especially with technology, the buying process often underestimates the people side of the equation, focusing too much on systems and “speeds and feeds” requirements. ISG has a consulting practice that focuses on helping executives deal with change management. Here, I’m focusing on what software providers can do to accelerate adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and agents in support of change management efforts.
Payments Technology and Evolution of P2P and O2C
Analyst Perspective
At its heart, money is an intellectual construct, as demonstrated through its continual shape-shifting over the ages. Since most money today exists in digital form, technology has an outsized impact on advancing innovations, especially in the most mundane corners of finance. Payments—the transmission and receipt of money in commercial transactions—have been an especially fertile area for innovations that speed up processes and drive down the costs of doing business. ISG Research asserts that by 2029, one-half of all buying will involve payments made on high-efficiency platforms, reducing frictions and overhead to speed purchases and cut costs. The payments landscape is undergoing rapid transformation, driven by technological innovation, evolving consumer expectations and shifting regulatory dynamics. Differences in payment practices and norms between countries continue to exist because of cultural, legal and regulatory legacies, but these are narrowing. The rapidly evolving payments landscape is having an impact on how enterprises manage core processes such as procure-to-pay (P2P) and order-to-cash (O2C), as well as how software providers incorporate technology in their applications that manage these functions.
Sage Defines its Future in AI for ERP
Analyst Perspective
Sage recently held its Future user conference in Atlanta. Our ISG Buyers Guide for Midsize ERP Financial Management (2024) rated Sage Intacct as one of the top three providers, reflecting its strong performance in both product capabilities and customer experience. The event showcased its advances and roadmap aimed at embedding artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI in its applications, especially ERP. In 2024, nearly every software provider highlighted its (mostly potential) use of AI and GenAI capabilities in their products, especially in the form of assistants and copilots. Today, Sage has already deployed its copilot to assist finance organizations with invoice processing, automating data entry, and repetitive tasks and workflows. It can monitor business data to prevent errors and anomalies from being entered into its system as well as create alerts for key metrics and financial activity that requires immediate attention. ISG Research asserts that by 2028, almost all providers of ERP software will have incorporated AI to reduce workloads, speed processes and reduce errors. This year, Sage (like many other software providers) is emphasizing agents and agentic capabilities along with AI and GenAI. Agents are especially useful because they enable business applications to extend and amplify their offerings’ existing capabilities while making it easier for their customers to adopt and employ AI technology.
Oracle’s AI Agents Amplify Value for Finance
Analyst Perspective
Oracle’s recent industry analyst summit demonstrated significant progress in embedding artificial intelligence in its business applications—including those for finance, HR and supply chain management. This amplifies the already broad and deep functionality developed over decades. Oracle also continues to expand and extend its collaborative efforts with financial institutions, a form of network-enabled extended process facilitation that I expect will grow in importance for business software providers because it can be a source of value to customers and a form of stickiness for the application.
Gaining Financial Management Effectiveness in Midsize Enterprises
Analyst Perspective
Doing more with less is the defining characteristic of finance and accounting departments in midsize enterprises, which ISG research defines as organizations with between 100 and 999 workers. One frustrating truth confronting executives in these organizations is that, once their company stops being a small business, it has many of the same challenges that large enterprises face but with fewer resources to deal with them. Over the past two decades, advances in information technology have had the greatest incremental impact on midsize enterprises, approaching the ability of large organizations to harness practical, affordable and reliable technology to gain productivity and improve performance, especially in the office of finance. The introduction of artificial intelligence and generative AI will close the gap further.
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