Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

PentahoWorld, the first user conference for this 10-year-old supplier of data integration and business intelligence that provides business analytics, attracted more than 400 customers in roles ranging from IT and database professionals to business analysts and end users. The diversity of the crowd reflects Pentaho’s broad portfolio of products. It covers the integration aspects of big data analytics with the Pentaho Data Integration tools and the front-end tools and visualization with the Pentaho Business Analytics. In essence its portfolio provides end-to-end data to analytics through what they introduced as Big Data Orchestration that brings governed data delivery and streamlined data refinery together on one platform.

Financial management software provider Intacct recently held its seventh annual user conference. In addition to a long list of enhancements in current and upcoming product releases, the company used the occasion to announce Intacct Collaborate, a capability built into its software that enables finance and accounting organizations to work together to answer questions or resolve issues while performing a process. Our benchmark research shows that collaboration ranks second in importance behind analytics as a technology innovation priority. Collaborative capabilities in software will multiply over the next several years as software transitions from the rigid constructs established in the client/server days, which force users to adapt to the limitations of the software, to fluid and dynamic designs that mold themselves around the needs of the user. A while back, I noted that finance and accounting organizations need collaborative capabilities although they might not realize it. At the same time, finance departments have their own requirements for these systems that reflect the character and constraints of the work they do. This means narrowcast, not broadcast, feeds (Finance doesn’t want a Facebook or Twitter experience because it considers much of what it does to be confidential) and in-context collaborative capabilities to simplify the working environment.

The market for big data continues to grow as organizations try to extract business value from their own masses of data and other sources. Earlier this year I outlined the dynamics of the business opportunity for big data and information optimization. We continue to see advances as big data and associated information technologies deliver more value, but the range of innovation also has created fragmentation among existing systems including databases that are managed onpremises or in cloud computing environments. In this changing environment organizations encounter new challenges not only in adapting to technology that is more efficient in automating data processing but also in integrating it into their enterprise architecture. I’ve already explained how big data can be ineffective without integration, and we conducted more in-depth research into the market, resulting in our benchmark research on big data integration, which reveals the state of how organizations are adopting this technology in their processes.

At this year's Dreamforce more than 140,000 people gathered in San Francisco to share the excitement about the use of technology for business. Salesforce.com’s annual conference has reached megashow status, which is a mixed blessing: Dreamforce remains social in its design, but it has become impersonal due to its size. In any case Salesforce had plenty to show off. The company has continued to enhance its cloud-based business applications for sales and customer service, and in the last year it has added marketing through acquisitions. It also has advanced the attraction of its cloud computing platform; even IT departments see its approach as a simple way to use and build applications, especially mobile ones which the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets have made critical to business. Cloud computing is becoming the defacto approach for new applications and software for business and now IT, and its importance continues to grow: Our benchmark research on business technology innovation shows that it is important or very important to more than half (57%) of organizations. At Dreamforce, Salesforce announced Salesforce1 Lightning (available in 2015), a way to assemble mobile applications that can operate across platforms. Salesforce makes the technical details of the mobile platform transparent and facilitates assembly of mobile applications.

At a conference of more than 3,500 users, Splunk executives showed off their company’s latest tools. Splunk makes software for discovering, monitoring and analyzing machine data, which is often considered data exhaust since it is a by-product of computing processes and applications. But machine data is essential to a smoothly running technology infrastructure that supports business process. One advantage is that because machine data not recorded by end users, it is less subject to input error. Splunk has grown rapidly by solving fundamental problems associated with the complexities of information technology and challenging assumptions in IT systems and network management that is rapidly being referred to as big data analytics. The two main and related assumptions it challenges are that different types of IT systems should be managed separately and that data should be modeled prior to recording it. Clint Sharp, Splunk’s director of product marketing, pointed out that network and system data can come from several sources and argued that utilizing point solution tools and a “model first” approach does not work when it has to deal with big data and a question-and-answer paradigm. Our research into Operational Intelligence finds that IT systems are most important information source in almost two thirds (62%) of organizations. Splunk used the conference to show how it has brought to these data management innovations the business trends of mobility, cloud deployment and security.

Most HR technology practitioners and vendors attend the annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition. One of the largest industry gatherings, it provides an indicator of their levels of investment and the hottest trends. This year’s event revealed new technologies and approaches to two key human resources processes – recruitment and retention. They included predictive analytics and big data as well mobile delivery to allow employees easier access to applications. Regarding the first two, these technologies can help managers make better informed and more intelligent decisions from their masses of HR data. It seems that investment in recruiting applications has increased with the growth of the economy. Earlier this year I described how many vendors are investing in recruiting applications. At HR Tech I saw this trend continuing, hearing from vendors that are focused on evolving their recruiting software. Among the new products in recruiting is HireVue Insights, which uses predictive logic and big data to analyze the desirability of candidates. HireVue recently won our 2014 Ventana Research Technology Innovation award for this offering. In addition, talent management vendor Cornerstone OnDemand announced an agreement to acquire Evolv, whose primary product also uses big data and predictive models to match candidates to positions. Our benchmark research on human capital analytics shows that many organizations are considering investments in big data for human capital analytics in almost half of organizations, so these and other products appear to be in step with market demand.