Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

Enterprises are increasingly recognizing the need to streamline operations for efficiency, agility and innovation. This has led to various “operations” or “Ops” initiatives, each focusing on a specific aspect of enterprise IT. From software development and data analytics to IT and cloud management, these Ops groups are transforming the way enterprises operate and compete.

I wrote recently about the role that data intelligence has in enabling enterprises to facilitate data democratization and the delivery of data as a product. Data intelligence provides a holistic view of how, when, and why data is produced and consumed across an enterprise, and by whom. This information can be used by data teams toensure business users and data analysts are provided with self-service access to data that is pertinent to their roles and requirements. Delivering data as a product...

Data and analytics have become increasingly important to all aspects of business. The modern data and analytics stack includes many components, which creates challenges for enterprises and software providers alike. As my colleague Matt Aslett points out, a better term might be modern data and analytics smorgasbord. There are arguments for and against using an assortment of tools versus a consolidated platform. For example, purchasing, integrating and deploying a variety of tools can be complex....

The development, testing and deployment of data pipelines is a fundamental accelerator of data-driven strategies, enabling enterprises to extract data from the operational applications and data platforms designed to run the business and load, integrate and transform it into the analytic data platforms and tools used to analyze the business. As I explained in our recent Data Pipelines Buyers Guide, data pipelines are essential to generating intelligence from data. Healthy data pipelines are...

As enterprises seek to increase data-driven decision-making, many are investing in strategic data democratization initiatives to provide business users and data analysts with self-service access to data across the enterprise. Such access has long been a goal of many enterprises, but few have achieved it. Only 15% of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research say their organization is very comfortable allowing business users to work with data that has not been...

Cloud computing has had an enormous impact on the analytics and data industry in recent decades, with the on-demand provisioning of computational resources providing new opportunities for enterprises to lower costs and increase efficiency. Two-thirds of participants in Ventana Research’s Data Lakes Dynamic Insightsresearch are using a cloud-based environment as the primary data platform for analytics. 

I have previously written about the impact of intelligent operational applications on the requirements for data platforms. Intelligent applications are used to run the business but also deliver personalization, recommendations and other features generated by machine learning and artificial intelligence. As such, they require a combination of operational and analytic processing functionality. The emergence of these intelligent applications does not eradicate the need for separate analysis of...

Ventana Research recently announced its Market Agenda in the expertise area of Customer Experience. CX has emerged as a way for enterprises to demonstrate value and stand out in the marketplace. The technology underlying modern CX is transitioning from tools that are based on communication to those centered on data analysis and process automation. No technology has had as dramatic impact as quickly as Generative AI, which has upended the industry. It allows enterprises to build great...

The phrase ‘big data’ may have largely gone out of fashion, but the concept of storing and processing all relevant data continues to be important for enterprises seeking to be more data-driven. Doing so requires analytic data platforms capable of storing and processing data in multiple formats and data models. This will be an important focus for the forthcoming Data Platforms Buyer’s Guide 2024. 

I recently discussed how fashion has a surprisingly significant role to play in the data market as various architectural approaches to data storage and processing take turns enjoying a phase in the limelight. Pendulum swing is a theory of fashion that describes the periodic movement of trends between two extremes, such as short and long hemlines or skinny and baggy/flared trousers. Pendulum swing theory is similarly a factor in data technology trends, with an example being the oscillation...