David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

SAP was formed in 1972 to create standardized business software that would integrate all business processes and enable data processing in real time. Following the success of the initial release and subsequent R/2, the company went public in 1988 and has grown into one of the world’s largest software companies, reporting more than $37 billion in revenues in its most recent annual report. Through internal development efforts and numerous acquisitions, including Business Objects, Sybase, Ariba,...

Databricks recently announced its Series J funding round, successfully raising $10 billion at a valuation of $62 billion. Led by Thrive Capital alongside high-profile investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners, the company intends to invest this capital towards new artificial intelligence (AI) products, acquisitions and significant expansion of its international operations. In the announcement, Databricks reported that it expects to achieve an annual revenue run rate of $3...

Data and analytics have become increasingly important to all aspects of business. The modern data and analytics stack includes many components, which creates challenges for enterprises and software providers alike. As my colleague Matt Aslett points out, a better term might be modern data and analytics smorgasbord. There are arguments for and against using an assortment of tools versus a consolidated platform. For example, purchasing, integrating and deploying a variety of tools can be complex....

Alteryx was founded in 1997 and initially focused on analyzing demographic and geographically organized data. In 2006, the company released its eponymous product that established its direction for what the product is today. In 2017, it went public in an IPO on the NYSE. At the time of the IPO, Alteryx was focusing much of its marketing efforts on the data preparation market, particularly to support Tableau. Throughout this time though, Alteryx offered much more than data preparation. As a...

In my past perspectives, I’ve written about the evolution from data at rest to data in motion and the fact that you can’t rely on dashboards for real-time analytics. Organizations are becoming more and more event-driven and operating based on streaming data. As well, analytics are becoming more and more intertwined with operations. More than one-fifth of organizations (22%) describe their analytics workloads as real time in our Data and Analytics Benchmark Research and nearly half (47%) of...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Mobile Analytics Buyers Guide 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 Analytics vendors supporting the spectrum...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Mobile Analytics research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Collaborative Analytics Buyers Guide 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 Analytics vendors supporting the...

The 2023 Ventana Research Buyers Guide for Collaborative Analytics research enables me to provide observations about how the market has advanced. 

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research 2023 Embedded Analytics Buyers Guide 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 Analytics vendors supporting the spectrum...