Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection
We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.
Services for Technology Vendors
We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.
While we will wait until January to publish our recommendations for the new year, we can digest the lessons learned in 2011 within the technology markets and with Ventana Research right now. That’s appropriate, since we at Ventana Research are committed to helping you with solid information and education. We help thousands of organizations make a better, faster, safer, smarter and more cost-effective environment for leveraging technology to its fullest extent. Our benchmark research worldwide across thousands of organizations of all sizes and vertical industries has found there is a lot more room for improvement than most realize or are addressing.
The year 2011 began with my assessment on the diminishing science of research in technology analyst firms. Sadly, that assessment continues to be true. Gartner, Forrester and many others aspiring to be like them see primary research as unnecessary to assess what is really happening in the use of technology. We take the opposite approach, and increased the volume of primary research we conduct as benchmark research to provide not just the facts but also education and best practices. To give you a sense of the volume, in 2011 we released 21 benchmarks (see below) spanning every line of business and vertical industry. From concept to delivery, benchmark reports take a minimum of six months and included one of our best and largest in business analytics with research from over 2,400 organizations. If that is not enough, we have 15 more benchmark reports (see below) already in design, execution or ready to release in first half of 2012, putting us on pace to potentially double the number of benchmarks that we released in 2011. If you do not think we are busy in the research factory just ask Alan Kay our SVP Research Management who along with his team continues to generate more quality research than any other firm in the market. We also have invested in research into the vertical industries that we have been assessing as part of every one of our benchmarks over the last decade. From this research we have found that organizations still have a lot to accomplish to get the most value from aligning business and IT to manage and optimize business processes. We have found significant misuse of technology for some tasks and roles, but we also deemed across our 2011 research topics five to 15 percent of organizations innovative across the people, process, information and technology components of a specific business technology area of focus.
I would be remiss to not also mention the importance of our Value Index research into vendors and products. We have now perfected the science of helping you with your assessment of existing vendors and products and for new projects with a request for proposal (RFP) approach, leveraging real-world concerns and evaluation criteria such as manageability, reliability and usability. You will see more Ventana Research Value Indexes in 2012 to ensure you get the analysis and real assessment of vendors and products compared to the less useful matrix and box assessment approaches by other analyst firms.
Our firm’s efforts to make research and insights more readily available through social media continue to expand. Our focus on the quality of what we provide in social media continues to be recognized, and while we are not the most popular analyst firm online yet, we are being recognized as the most relevant. The use of social media is also critical for technology vendors, and especially those who market and sell products to service this need. Nevertheless, many technology vendors are still not strongly engaging in this area; that fact will be part of my upcoming analysis on the lack of social media competence on the part of technology vendors.
2011 was a turbulent year for business and IT and also in the technology industry. The turbulence ranged from changes on the vendor landscape from merger and acquisitions (M&A), to executive leadership changes and scandals, to technology strategy changes, to elimination of products from the market. All of these changes impact your computing portfolio; the software and technology you use is becoming obsolescent faster than you planned, or already eliminated from the market. Businesses continue to depend on enterprise software applications and tools, which means any changes impact your business computing plans. You can read for yourself many examples of these changes and impact to the industry from the roster of our research teams’ week-by-week analysis; they may help and inspire you as you plan for 2012.
In the coming year, those who do not understand the dynamics and potential of the technology industry will find themselves operating significantly behind their competitors and cross-industry peers. Here are my ten best practices in the form of pragmatic advice and words of wisdom for you to consider as you think about 2012 and how you engage technology for your organization.
Ventana Research will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2012. As we close out our first decade of service to a community reaching 250,000 professionals, we have learned a lot in applying our own research and best practices to our firm. With our fairly priced on-demand monthly subscription to our advice and research, along with our education and benchmark and vendor assessment services, we have been able to continue growing our research and team. We also introduced the industry’s largest leadership awards for the use of technology across business and IT in our Ventana Research Leadership Awards to ensure that both organizations and technology vendors are recognized. You did not find this level of consideration or investment from other analyst firms who are quick to get a new customer but lack any follow through on in-depth research or analysis and recognition of those that use it.
We also in 2011 migrated all of our business and information systems to the cloud, eliminating the need for any dedicated on-premises and company-managed servers and software. Our cloud computing applications include but not limited to community software, content management, electronic mail, file sharing, financial management, marketing automation, project management, website and workflow. While this migration has had its challenges and bumps along the way, the simplicity and utility of cloud computing has given our small business better insight into the advice we provide our clients.
We have many new initiatives to expand our business and research in 2012 that will make it easier for you to get education and information in the timeframe and context you deserve. You will see more and not less from Ventana Research in 2012, and with your support we can continue to raise the bar on objective and independent research. I hope that you demand more from your industry analysts and firms you do business with to ensure you are not receiving mediocre advice based only on opinion or just the IT lens since you will need a lot more to be successful.
Thank you for being part of our readership and community of professionals. I thank all of our clients and partners, who made this all possible. Also thanks to the industry analyst relations professionals who voted that I was the #1 industry analyst in enterprise software as validated by Institute of Industry Analyst Relations; my humble regards for this honor. My best to the entire workforce at Ventana Research, who continue to believe in our mission and without whom we would not be able to continue to demonstrate the value of technology analyst firms that pride themselves on research and timely analysis to educate business and IT.
I wish everyone a Happy New Year and look forward to a great 2012!
Regards,
Mark Smith – CEO & Chief Research Officer
Benchmarks Released in 2011
Business Analytics; Business Analytics in Banking; Business Analytics in Consumer Goods; Business Analytics in Education; Business Analytics in Healthcare; Business Analytics in Insurance; Business Analytics in Manufacturing; Business Analytics in Retail; Business Analytics in SMB; Business Analytics in Telecommunications; Business Analytics in Services; Business Data in Cloud; Contact Center in the Cloud; Hadoop and Information Management; Marketing Analytics; Product and Service Analytics; Sales Analytics; Social Media and Recruiting; Supply Chain Analytics; State of Contact Center Technology; Total Compensation Management.
New Benchmarks Started in 2011
Big Data; Business Analytics in Government; Business Analytics in Technology; Business Planning; Customer Relationship Maturity; Customer Service Agent Desktop; Customer Feedback Management; Fast Clean Close; Governance, Risk and Compliance; Information Management; Next Generation Workforce Management; Operational Intelligence; Predictive Analytics; Product Information Management; Sales Performance Management
Mark Smith is the Partner, Head of Software Research at ISG, leading the global market agenda as a subject matter expert in digital business and enterprise software. Mark is a digital technology enthusiast using market research and insights to educate and inspire enterprises, software and service providers.
Ventana Research’s Analyst Perspectives are fact-based analysis and guidance on business,
Each is prepared and reviewed in accordance with Ventana Research’s strict standards for accuracy and objectivity and reviewed to ensure it delivers reliable and actionable insights. It is reviewed and edited by research management and is approved by the Chief Research Officer; no individual or organization outside of Ventana Research reviews any Analyst Perspective before it is published. If you have any issue with an Analyst Perspective, please email them to ChiefResearchOfficer@isg-research.net