ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

When NICE acquired inContact in 2016, it began a transformation that saw it broaden its product offering and positioned itself to play a larger role in the contact center and customer experience industries. It was a prescient move, creating a firm that could supply end-to-end contact center functionality in the cloud. And it anticipated today’s market dynamic, in which NICE and its competitors are racing to define (and capitalize on) the post-contact center future.

Our research shows that nearly all financial service organizations (97%) consider it important to accelerate the flow of information and improve responsiveness. Even just a few years ago, capturing and evaluating this information quickly was much more challenging, but with the advent of streaming data technologies that capture and process large volumes of data in real time, financial service organizations can quickly turn events into valuable business outcomes in the form of new products and...

In my recently published Analyst Perspective “Selecting an HCM System? Include the Tougher Use Cases in Evaluations,” I highlighted a few HCM systems use cases that have historically been under-supported across the vendor/product landscape. My view on “critical HCM use cases” is the same today as when I led global HR and HR technology initiatives: use cases flow from the business imperatives faced by nearly every organization and their associated workforce-related implications. These HCM...

The age of digital communication platforms is upon us. The need has never been greater for an open and secure platform that satisfies the demand for enterprise-grade business and technology requirements. Overcoming today’s technology challenges is possible with a next-generation cloud-based delivery model that is both extensible and reliable. Organizations considering a digital communication platform can take decisive steps to ensure digital communications for everyone — inside, outside,...

I am very happy to announce that I have joined Ventana Research to help lead the expertise area of Digital Technology, including Analytics and Data, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the Internet of Things, Robotic Automation, and Collaborative and Conversational Computing. While the breadth of applications and technology covered by our Digital Technology practice is broad, I will naturally make use of my decades of experience covering data platforms and analytics...

In part one of this Analyst Perspective on the use of artificial intelligence within contact center applications, we focused on the evolution — and resulting benefits — of tools embedded with AI, including ease-of-use for non-data-scientists.

To maximize the value of the workforce and the work conducted, organizations need to increase the effectiveness of workers assigned to critical, interrelated tasks. Doing so requires a commitment to planning the best use of workers and resources. Failing to do so can limit an organization’s ability to reach essential milestones and complete work related to business processes with customers, partners and across the supply chain.

Managing corporate income taxes is a challenge for chief financial officers. Tax codes are often complex, so tax accounting as well as the data required for tax provisions and tax compliance are different enough from statutory accounting to create significant workloads for the tax department. Today, the worldwide trend to higher taxes and growing tax code complexity is increasing the payoff for digitizing an organization’s tax function.

Databricks is a data engineering and analytics cloud platform built on top of Apache Spark that processes and transforms huge volumes of data and offers data exploration capabilities through machine learning models. It can enable data engineers, data scientists, analysts and other workers to process big data and unify analytics through a single interface. The platform supports streaming data, SQL queries, graph processing and machine learning. It also offers a collaborative user interface —...

As the pace of digital innovation has accelerated, many organizations have found it harder to manage the portfolio of work conducted by the workforce to ensure timeliness and mitigate the risk of increased costs and resources. The challenges in managing the work related to project plans are not only to ensure the timeliness in performing and tracking the individual tasks and activities every single moment of the day, but also having the intelligence to adjust and guide all future work. The...