ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Ventana Research has awarded IBM its 2019 Digital Innovation Award. This award recognizes the vendor’s support for identity management using blockchain technology through IBM Verify Credentials. The application is a first, small step in establishing a blockchain-enabled system for decentralized identity management, a technology that ultimately will enable point-to-point exchange of information about people, organizations or things. This form of identity management has considerable potential in...

“Platform,” as used in the world of technology, originally referred to an operating system on which one could construct software applications. More recently, its usage has been expanded to apply to two types of business models. One enables third parties to create products and services that are complementary to a company’s core technology. For instance, both Apple and Salesforce have attracted a wide array of third-party software developers whose offerings greatly increase the value of each...

Alteryx Inspire 2019, this year's user conference for Alteryx, drew around 4500 customers, partners, and prospects to Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Tennessee last month. The strong attendance was a reflection of the strong growth Alteryx has experienced over the last year; roughly 50% growth year-over-year. This year's conference focused on Alteryx's evolution from data preparation to AI and machine learning, and both were front and center.

It’s no secret that employees are overwhelmed. They’re having to use an array of systems and enterprise tools in the flow of work and deal with an explosion of email messages and other communications requiring some response or action and mountains of content to consume and retain. On top of these time demands, employees must try to keep up with a staggering amount of organizational change.

Summit 2019, Information Builders' annual user conference, drew about 1000 attendees this year, including customers, partners and prospects all working with Information Builders' technologies. Under new leadership, Summit 2019 showcased the direction Information Builders is moving in the next couple of years.

This year, I attended Informatica World 2019, Informatica's annual user conference. The main focus this year was on the cloud with a heavy does of AI. Under that focus, Informatica's conference emphasized capabilities across six areas (all strong areas for Informatica): data integration, data management, data quality & governance, Master Data Management (MDM), data cataloging, and data security. 

Qonnections 2019 is Qlik's annual user conference. Key news from this year's conference centered on acquisitions of Podium Data and Attunity, along with an expansion of certifications on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, and Azure, with the ability to support Red Hat OpenShift. Many of these announcements were centered on a key theme of a cloud and SaaS-first approach.

Identity management is an old problem that has taken on new dimensions in the digital world. In 1993, at the dawn of the World Wide Web (WWW), The New Yorker ran a cartoon featuring two dogs talking, one perched in front of a computer. The caption reads: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The phrase quickly evolved into a meme highlighting the issue of identity uncertainty in the new digital environment.

The emerging internet of things (IoT) is an extension of digital connectivity to devices and sensors in homes, businesses, vehicles and potentially almost anywhere. This innovation means that virtually any appropriately designed device can generate and transmit data about its operations, which can facilitate monitoring and a range of automatic functions. To do this IoT requires a set of event-centered information and analytic processes that enable people to use that event information to make...

Business planning in most companies is a relic, a process hemmed in by obsolete conceptions of what it can be. “Business planning” encompasses all of the forward-looking activities in which companies routinely engage, including marketing, sales, customer, supply chain and workforce planning as well as budgeting. In our view companies today can fundamentally change how they plan thanks to the maturation of information technology. Current systems can support better business planning as well as...