Analyst Perspectives

Hello! I’m excited to be the newest member of the Ventana Research leadership team to bring research insights and education to the business analytics and technology industry. I’d like to start by telling you a bit about who I am, why I’ve chosen to join this company and what I hope to contribute.

For more than 15 years I’ve been studying businesses and their buying behaviors in technology markets. I have a long-time passion for technology, which led me early in my career to systems design and integration at General Electric. I’ve led technology initiatives across marketing, sales and customer service and brought to market one of the first global deployments of a Web-based architecture for Voice of the Customer (VOC). Over the years, I’ve worked with some of the largest technology vendors, including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, on strategic initiatives in the areas of market segmentation, offer optimization and stakeholder management. Through my predictive analytics work I’ve come to understand how companies can use the new generation of tools to look into the future rather than just analyze the past. My book, Into the River: How Big Data, The Long Tail, and Situated Cognition are Changing the World of Market Insights Forever discusses the revolutionary changes in the way innovative companies use data to effect change and gain competitive advantage. I appreciate that Ventana Research has the most in-depth and new benchmark research in big data and predictive analytics that came out in 2012 building on top of its research on business analytics and Hadoop in 2011.

At Ventana Research I’ll focus on the expanding world of business analytics. Businesses increasingly are looking at past and present behaviors in order to be able to predict future ones. While we’ve done this for a long time in select areas such as financial forecasting, it’s only been in the past few years that the amount of data available, married with massive computing power, has made it possible for the newest generation of business intelligence systems to provide decision support that goes beyond the “what” to begin to provide the “so what” and the “now what.” Including social media for contextual inquiry and attitude analysis, it’s now possible to build a solid, powerful decision support system.

My interest in being part of a team that works hard at accumulating and analyzing reliable data to be able to help organizations move ever closer to “the truth” is a large part of why I came to this company. Its research and advisory services model has kept Ventana Research going strong through two recessions and has made it the go-to choice to advise both technologists and business professionals. Its prolific work, all grounded in research data, puts Ventana Research in a unique position to help companies navigate their way.

A second reason I joined the company is because I share its conviction that technology categories cannot be analyzed in a vacuum. Facing the dynamic interactions today of cloud computing, mobile technology, social media, analytics, business collaboration and big data, to look at markets as silos is to proceed with blinders on. Our ongoing benchmark research, maturity analysis and Value Index work allow us to look across the spectrum of technologies and understand both their interactions and their roles in the business.

As I’ve suggested, I’m a firm believer that knowledge evolves – that we approach the truth at an uneven pace, though hopefully moving ever closer. I learn from everyone around me – including, I hope, you. If you have a thought about something I write, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

I will be posting regularly to report on the exciting research we have going on now, trends in the industry and my views on market developments and directions. I look forward to hearing from you and working with you to help create effective, forward-looking business strategies.

Regards,

Tony Cosentino – VP & Research Director