Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

I’m happy to say that Ventana Research celebrated its tenth anniversary at our recent Business Technology Innovation Summit in San Jose at the Tech Museum. This location was fitting, since at the event we introduced and presented our first-ever Technology Innovation Awards and seventh annual Leadership Awards. If you did not get a chance to attend, we have the live webstream available for replay at no cost; thanks to Splunk for sponsoring this to let everyone enjoy the sessions. At our summit we discussed best practices organizations can employ to save time and resources when using technology across business processes. We also unveiled a series of new research studies on business technology innovation, next-generation business intelligence, integrated business planning, next-generation workforce management and customer service agent desktop. Our firm has strived for ten years to present research based on business and IT facts, rather than projecting analyst opinions based on handfuls of inquiries from IT-specific clients. We rely on primary research across business and IT as the foundation for our analysis and guidance, while most industry analyst firms provide opinions that do not represent the business priorities of organizations, because they research only IT. We continue to see the varying priorities of business and IT through our research, even where the alignment is not obvious. In our recent research on technology innovation, for instance, we found the number one factor driving change across business and IT is a business improvement initiative (60%) – and if you are not researching business, you cannot understand the dynamics of what organizations are doing to prioritize and select technology for business. The importance of independent research that covers business and IT is essential. I recently wrote about the skewed research in our industry and provided analysis about the misinformation on the projections that CMOs will outspend CIOs in technology. These situations point out the sad state of the technology analyst industry, which needs to do some serious self-policing of its actions and behavior. At our summit I was glad to bring forward some truth about technology innovation and the priorities of business and IT. Our new business technology innovation benchmark research uncovered some stark realities about what factors are most important for organizations to consider in technology in order to improve productivity and performance. Our research found analytics to be the top-ranked priority (39%), followed by collaboration (16%), mobile technology (15%), cloud computing (13%), big data (11%) and social media (11%). Organizations are using these critical technologies to improve results, and business improvement is the top factor driving change when businesses assess new technology. Many organizations are still working to address the largest barrier in taking on new technology, which is lack of resources (51%). I want to thanks the sponsors of the summit: IBM and SAP at the vanguard level, Ceridian and Datawatch at the pioneer level, and Peoplefluent, Planview and Saba at the ground-breaker level. I also thank the clients who over the last decade supported our mission to provide quality research and education to the industry. We also could not do this without the help of the partners who have helped us promote and syndicate our research. I thank everyone who has supported our mission to conduct research across business and IT in an independent and objective manner and provide facts and education to help advance businesses’ use of technology and gain the most value in the shortest period of time. I look forward to the next decade, and to continuing to deliver the most direct research and educational value to the market to help everyone use technology to its fullest value. Regards, Mark Smith CEO & Chief Research Officer

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