Analyst Perspectives

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Subscription Management, I want to share some of my observations about an important component of subscription management: Contract management.

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Subscription Management, I want to share some of my observations about how the market is evolving. The era of subscriptions has transformed the way businesses operate and consumers engage with services across every industry. Organizations are increasingly adopting a digital approach to selling goods and services, wherein customers have the option to purchase through periodic subscription pricing or based on consumption, rather than...

In 2015, I began using the term continuous accounting to call attention to technology advances that enable finance and accounting departments to improve performance. These advances have continued, making an even more compelling case for adoption of continuous accounting.

Generative AI is a class of artificial intelligence used to generate new, seemingly real content. Broadly speaking, AI has traditionally been used to identify patterns in data and apply those patterns to categorize and predict behaviors. For instance, it can organize customers into groups (or clusters) with similar characteristics, or predict which customers are most likely to respond to certain offers.

The world is witnessing a long overdue and significant shift in the realm of pay equity and transparency. On March 30, the European Parliament passed the Pay Transparency Directive, mandating pay transparency and equity within organizations in an effort to close the gender pay gap and ensure equal pay for equal work. This legislation comes with teeth, providing strict mechanisms for enforcement including shifting the burden of proof from the worker to the employer in the event of legal...

Conga is part of our Office of Revenue market coverage and I recently attended the 2023 Conga Connect conference held in Orlando during April of 2023. The conference was the public reveal of a new Conga, with significant announcements in three main areas. First was the overall positioning within a self-designated category of revenue life cycle management. Secondly was the first public revealing of a new Conga platform. And finally, announcements of new partnerships were headlined by a...

The recent publication of our Value Index research highlights the impact of intelligent applications on the operational data platforms sector. While we continue to believe that, for most use cases, there is a clear, functional requirement for either analytic or operational data platforms, recent growth in the development of intelligent applications infused with the results of analytic processes, such as personalization and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven recommendations, has increasing...

In recent years, organizations have struggled to find and retain the right talent to fill critical roles. This can be attributed to a combination of factors, including an aging workforce, a lack of critical skills needed for current and future organizational needs, and increased competition for talent from other organizations seeking similar skills. Our research shows that, within the next five years, one-half of all employees will require significant reskilling and upskilling in order to keep...

In my perspective on decision intelligence, I lamented the fact that business intelligence technologies have left the rest of the exercise to the reader for too long. Making a decision is a process that involves many steps and many people. Decision-making is so complicated and divorced from day-to-day business processes that organizations have had to create entirely separate teams to focus on the analytics and data to support it. One aspect of the decision-making process that can be enhanced by...

As engagement with customers, suppliers and partners is increasingly conducted through digital channels, ensuring that infrastructure and applications are performing as expected is not just important but mission critical. My colleague, David Menninger, recently explained the increasing importance of observability to enable organizations to ensure that their systems and applications are operating efficiently. Observability has previously been the domain of the IT department but is increasingly...