Analyst Perspectives

A century ago, the big breakthrough in telephones was the ability to dial your party’s number directly. Dialing became necessary when enough people had telephones to require a shift from people-assisted to fully automated connections. But direct dialing was only a local option – you still needed an operator to make long-distance calls. In the 1920s, commenting on their forecast for the expected growth of long-distance calling, the analysts at Bell Laboratories concluded that by midcentury, the...

A lot of conversations around contact centers deal with automation, particularly how to balance the way humans and automated systems work together. Self-service, the front end of the customer interaction, is where practitioners get a first taste of the marvels of increasingly advanced automation. As customer expectations ramped up and labor became more costly during the pandemic, deflecting interactions away from agents took on new urgency. We continue to see impressive advances in automated...

Having worked at a start-up during the first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) that was predicted to revolutionize sales in the mid-2010s, I guess I am a natural skeptic when it comes to new claims about how AI will change sales forever. In the mid-2010s, vendors were using machine learning (ML) models trained on sets of historical opportunity data that represented closed won and closed lost deals. The ML models were looking for correlation and patterns to see whether they could predict...

Talent acquisition remains a focal point for most organizations in this dynamic and highly competitive corporate environment. Unfortunately, the pivotal process of offboarding often takes a back seat. An efficient employment separation process plays a key role in enhancing the employee experience, protecting the company's reputation and mitigating potential legal and financial risks associated with employee separation. One solution that effectively addresses these complexities is Onwards HR, a...

Enterprise organizations remain vulnerable to a host of security attacks. Cyberattacks are often associated with techniques that have never been seen before, which lead to data breaches if not quickly detected and remediated. However, one of the most common vulnerabilities for an organization is phishing. Phishing lures people to give up confidential information by clicking on a link or opening a file in an email from what appears to be a trusted source but is actually a bad actor....

Real-time business is a modern phenomenon, and business transformation has accelerated many business events in recent years. However, the execution of business events has always occurred in real time. Rather, it is the processing of the data related to business events that has accelerated instead of the event itself.

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, a research and assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Revenue Performance Management Ventana Research Buyers Guide: 2023 is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Revenue...

It is a mark of the rapid, current pace of development in artificial intelligence (AI) that machine learning (ML) models, until recently considered state of the art, are now routinely being referred to by developers and vendors as “traditional.” Generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) in particular, have taken the AI world by storm in the past year, automating and accelerating the development of content, including text, digital images, audio and video, as well as computer programs and...

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Revenue Performance Management, I want to share some of my observations about how the market has advanced since our assessment one year ago. 

As I have previously explained, we expect an increased demand for intelligent operational applications infused with the results of analytic processes, such as personalization and artificial intelligence-driven recommendations. These systems rely on the analysis of data in the operational data platform to accelerate worker decision-making or improve customer experience.