Dana Hernandez, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Management Platform (CMPs) Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 21:25:39 +0000

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are suites of integrated tools that help organizations manage and monitor hybrid and multicloud environments. These solutions are typically not used to manage single cloud implementations, but they are key to centralizing the control and governance of complex cloud environments.

In response to digital transformation and evolving business needs, multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures are now the norm. However, data centers and legacy applications haven’t disappeared, and organizations must contend with disparate systems and users around the world, all of which leads to complex and hard-to-manage infrastructure. CMPs help organizations to manage these complex environments and control costs more effectively.

As a discipline, cloud management encompasses three functional areas, often implemented with separate tools that are integrated to some degree:

CMP: Automation and deployment
Cloud resource optimization: Performance and capacity management (report link)
Cloud FinOps: Forecasting and value management (report link)

Figure 1 shows how these functions relate to each other. This report covers CMPs; GigaOm offers separate reports on the other two topics.

Figure 1: Three Focus Areas of Cloud Management

This is the third year GigaOm has reported on CMPs, and the need to use them to manage complex environments and control costs more effectively has only continued to grow. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

Business Imperative
A CMP enables organizations to efficiently manage and optimize their cloud resources, leading to significant cost savings and operational efficiencies. It provides centralized visibility and control over multicloud environments, allowing businesses to monitor usage, manage costs, and ensure compliance with security and regulatory standards. This centralized approach reduces the complexity of managing disparate cloud services and enhances decision-making by providing actionable insights. Additionally, a CMP supports automation of routine tasks, freeing up IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives. By streamlining cloud operations and improving resource utilization, a CMP helps organizations achieve greater agility, scalability, and resilience, ultimately driving business growth and innovation.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a CMP solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a CMP solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 2) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a CMP solution is a compelling candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for CMP solutions are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating CMPs Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 2. Sector Adoption Score for Cloud Management Platforms (CMP)

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the CMP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis (“2023 GigaOm Key Criteria and Radar Report for CMP) and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective CMP solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CMP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

The GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a detailed decision framework for IT and executive leadership assessing enterprise technologies. Each report defines relevant functional and nonfunctional aspects of solutions in a sector. The Key Criteria report informs the GigaOm Radar report, which provides a forward-looking assessment of vendor solutions in the sector.

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GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Process Automation (EPA) Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 16:00:56 +0000

Intelligent automation and hyperautomation have become technology buzzwords over the last few years—they represent the next evolutionary step following previous digital transformation efforts that were often piecemeal, proprietary, and brittle.

Enterprise process automation (EPA) solutions turn these buzzwords into reality, combining multiple automation technologies that have historically been purchased as separate tools—intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), and business process management (BPM)—into one solution infused with the additional powers of artificial intelligence (AI).

EPA can revolutionize business processes and operations by taking on repetitive tasks like document processing and data entry as well as more complex scenarios with natural language processing (NLP) or AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms to handle customer interactions with no human intervention. EPA solutions enable the full end-to-end automation of routine and nonroutine tasks that previously required human intervention. In doing so, these tools improve efficiency, increase accuracy, and reduce costs.

This is our second year evaluating the EPA space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines fourteen of the top EPA solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading EPA offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs)

Dana Hernandez — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 16:00:42 +0000

Responding to digital transformation and evolving business needs, organizations are moving their applications to the cloud. Multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures are now the norm; however, data centers and legacy applications haven’t disappeared. This means organizations must contend with disparate systems and users around the world, all of which lead to complex and hard-to-manage infrastructure.

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) help organizations to manage these complex environments and control costs more effectively. A CMP that can manage both on-premises automation and orchestration needs, as well as the cloud hosting, will provide greater value than separate tools that do only on-premises or in public cloud deployments.

Previously, essential functions such as asset tracking and dependency mapping ran in data centers with redundancy to protect against outages and ensure high levels of uptime. They used the asset tag of a physical server to track places where an application was running. The number of CPUs, network connections, and the amount of RAM and storage physical servers used was static and sized for peak expected workloads years in advance. This resulted in oversizing and wasted capacity.

Today, infrastructure is ephemeral, and organizations can’t rely on a physical server’s asset tag to track where an application is running. Additionally, in the cloud, none of these values—memory, CPU (count, type, speed, generation), storage, and network properties—are fixed. This is part of the promise of the cloud—to pay for only what is being used.

To ensure cloud implementations live up to this expectation, management systems must be able to track utilization, performance, and cost and relate them to the solution the business is paying for. CMPs provide real-time or near real-time situational awareness of the health and performance of a business solution. This helps businesses avoid both overspending and unplanned outages due to lack of capacity management.

More comprehensive CMP solutions also manage storage, security, disaster recovery, system health and performance, and application lifecycles. These are just a few examples of the functions that must now be managed across multiple planes while accounting for multiple, often differing requirements—cloud versus on-premises, hardware versus software, and ephemeral versus persistent storage, for example.

This is our third year evaluating the cloud management platform (CMP) solution space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 20 of the top CMP solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading CMP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 15:00:30 +0000

Intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions enable the transformation of documents (both paper and electronic) containing unstructured, semistructured, and structured data into digital assets quickly and accurately. IDP solutions use AI/ML, plus natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning, to improve data extraction accuracy and enable faster processing.

IDP solutions involve pre-processing and post-processing stages: the first primes the document in terms of shape and size, and the second ensures that a substantial degree of accuracy in processing unstructured data can be achieved.

The availability of AI/ML/NLP capabilities in IDP ensures that the strike rate in processing data is significantly higher than what a mere optical character recognition (OCR) tool can deliver. AI/ML/NLP features have self-training, self-learning capabilities that lead to continuous improvement in the accuracy of processing all types of documents.

Prebuilt AI/ML capabilities and business rules enable automated verification and validation of data as well as continuous learning and improvements based on AI/ML algorithms and user input. IDP combines OCR, data capture, and AI/ML to automate the retrieval, understanding, and integration of documents required for executing a business process. Know your customer (KYC), invoice processing, insurance claims, patient onboarding, patient records, proof of delivery, bills of lading, and commercial order forms are some of the key use case processes and document types suited for IDP solutions. IDP can also be useful for industry-specific processes, such as customer onboarding, mortgage processing, financial trading, and legal proceedings. Some of the key buyers of IDP solutions are leaders in a variety of business areas: shared services, process automation CoE, global business services (GBS), digital transformation, and finance.

Decision-makers will want to determine the specific requirements of their organization to use as a baseline for assessing the features they need in an IDP solution. Some solutions offer prebuilt processes supporting specific industries, which can speed the implementation of the solution. In contrast, some IDP solutions offer a template-free approach and can be trained on new document types and layouts by using sample documents; such solutions will usually deliver greater value at a lower cost. IDP solutions should be adopted as part of a broader enterprise automation strategy in which suitable software products are used for meeting various task, process, and document automation requirements.

There are more than 60 vendors that provide IDP-type capabilities. In this GigaOm Radar report, we focus only on vendors with a noteworthy footprint in terms of scaled IDP implementations for which the IDP product involves more than an add-on to a broader robotic process automation (RPA) or intelligent automation platform. We excluded vendors whose solutions were more service based as well as those that offer basic OCR-based document capture without significant advancement in AI/ML capabilities.

This is our third year evaluating the IDP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 18 of the top IDP solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading IDP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 14:37:52 +0000

Intelligent document processing (IDP) is supported by advanced technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) for data digitization, natural language processing (NLP) for understanding and categorizing text, and AI/ML for continuous improvement in data processing accuracy. With significant investments in AI, ML, NLP, and deep learning over the last few years, IDP solutions go beyond intelligent OCR and provide several tangible advantages:

Even with relatively poor quality documents and scanners, IDP solutions can deliver greater accuracy in data extraction than legacy OCR tools can.
The availability of AI/ML/NLP capabilities in IDP ensures that the strike rate in processing data is significantly higher than with legacy OCR tools.
IDP tools, in principle, are supposed to function with minimal training in terms of minor template changes, whereas with OCR, this type of flexibility doesn’t exist.

IDP solutions offering a template-free approach can be trained on new document types and layouts using a relatively limited number of sample documents, and such solutions will usually deliver a greater value at a lower cost of ownership.

IDP is flexible and scalable, making it beneficial to a variety of industries such as finance, healthcare, legal, and government. It streamlines operations, reduces the need for manual processing, enhances customer service, and facilitates quicker and more precise decision-making.

Successful IDP deployment involves identifying business requirements and use cases, evaluating the types of data to be processed, and understanding a product’s capabilities for processing, scalability, security, and compliance. This helps to ensure the solution can integrate seamlessly with existing systems to maximize efficiency, accuracy, data integrity, and productivity.

Decision-makers will want to determine whether an IDP solution meets the requirements of complex use cases. IDP solutions should be adopted as part of a broader enterprise automation strategy that uses suitable software products to meet various task, process, and document automation requirements.

Business Imperative
Organizations are inundated with reams of documents and mountains of data from a variety of sources. IDP solutions enable the transformation of documents (PDFs, emails, invoices, paper documents, and so on) containing unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data into digital assets quickly and accurately. IDP solutions use AI/ML, NLP, and deep learning capabilities to improve data extraction accuracy and enable faster processing.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an IDP solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of an IDP solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that an IDP solution is a very credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for IDP are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating IDP Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for IDP

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the IDP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective IDP solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading IDP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

Dana Hernandez — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 15:00:10 +0000

The need to support hybrid operating models, along with efficiency-focused strategies, is a strong driver for accelerated adoption of unified communications as a service (UCaaS). UCaaS is a cloud-based platform that delivers multiple communication and collaboration tools via a single interface. A post-pandemic world brought omnichannel communication requirements to many organizations, externally and internally, as employees can be working remotely anywhere, globally distributed, and in various physical business locations. Customer interactions are also globally distributed. As this market matures, solutions are shifting from simply supporting such working environments to leveraging native cloud-based functionality to enhance and automate the ways employees and customers interact.

Enterprises of all sizes have access to solution suites that often use AI-based advanced features to record the way they communicate and to provide actionable insights based on inputs from speech and sentiment analytics. Reporting offers administrators real-time assessments of important call metrics, while individual teams have a wealth of collaboration tooling to choose from when meeting virtually. Establishing international presence has never been easier either, with platforms dramatically expanding voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone service coverage to help unify global workforces and serve clients in almost any jurisdiction. As a result, the UCaaS market is less utility-oriented and increasingly viewed as a driver of digital transformation in its own right.

As always, to be considered a UCaaS provider, a platform must support all core features for video, call, and chat. These features also must be available throughout desktop and mobile environments, thus supporting critical hybrid work requirements. This often includes support for physical VoIP devices for a mix of on-premises and cloud-based deployment. Also generally expected from this market is a tightly integrated interface combining all related functionality into an easy-to-use, one-stop workspace. API-driven integration is another key requirement because deployment often will require supporting legacy systems that may be providing a portion of the overall UCaaS feature set.

If a solution is deployed successfully, enterprises will benefit from a highly flexible cost structure that offers per-seat and feature pricing. Strong video capabilities can help reduce real estate costs while providing even more supervision through native features such as employee presence. Extensive phone functionality such as interactive voice response (IVR) and calling groups can be deployed cheaply through VoIP and cloud-based PBX services. Purpose-built solutions such as webinars and events capabilities help enhance employee and customer engagement through scalable events and interactive tooling. Various vendors now also offer related products, such as contact center as a service (CCaaS) and customer experience (CX) solutions, that may be useful add-ons for future investment.

This is our third year evaluating the UCaaS solutions space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 16 of the top UCaaS solutions and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading UCaaS solution offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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FinOps Insights and Management from Spot by NetApp

Dana Hernandez — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 15:13:43 +0000

Modern IT environments increasingly employ complex multicloud infrastructures that prove challenging to provision, monitor, and manage. The discipline of FinOps (a blending of ”finance” and “DevOps”) enables organizations to collaborate to get maximum business value from the cloud by supporting data-driven decision-making on cloud spending. A growing cadre of FinOps solutions are designed to detect opportunities for cost savings, achieve waste reduction, and provide the right sizing recommendations and resource optimization. These tools can support organizations at all levels of maturity, making a FinOps practice possible for virtually every organization that uses the cloud.

Spot by NetApp provides a robust FinOps offering with a broad portfolio of functional modules and FinOps capabilities. The depth and breadth of capability are extensive, so in this report, we discuss specific elements of the Spot by NetApp FinOps functionality that focuses on providing stakeholders with costs and billing insights, efficiency, and management.

These capabilities provide an excellent starting point for organizations embarking on their FinOps journey. They allow an organization to ease into the basics of visibility and optimization recommendations with a simple implementation and intuitive dashboards. Organizations can then grow and expand their FinOps capabilities as they learn and improve their processes.

The FinOps Foundation is dedicated to advancing the discipline of cloud financial management through best practices, education, and standards. According to its 2024 State of FinOps report, the top priorities for organizations engaging FinOps solutions are reducing waste or unused resources and managing commitment-based discounts. The report further identifies accurate forecasting and full allocation of spend as important areas of focus. These areas align with the Spot by NetApp FinOps insight and management capabilities.

This document explores the challenges organizations face with their cloud spend and the escalating need for FinOps to manage it. We analyze the value provided to support various FinOps use cases. We also show how FinOps stakeholders can leverage data to discover anomalies, implement changes, and to focus on optimizing cloud spend, leading to double digit percentages in cloud spend savings.

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 16:37:13 +0000

Enterprises are facing a multitude of changes to the traditional office paradigm. The inflexible nature of fixed, on-premises telephony solutions has become a costly burden. And while online collaboration tools demonstrated value pre-pandemic, the requirements for operating in remote environments due to COVID-19 accelerated enterprise adoption of cloud-based, flexible, and scalable solutions. Enterprises are still working with fully distributed and hybrid business models, and successfully adapting to the new reality requires an organization to provide a way for its users and teams to communicate effectively no matter where they are.

Challenges around scaling user access and facilitating mobility in working environments have always existed for telecommunications, globally distributed enterprises generally, and working flexibly within an on-premises solution. The predominant use of on-premises telephony and an overreliance on email provided little insight into how people within an enterprise communicate both internally and externally and how they could do so more effectively. Simply embracing digital meetings and messaging clearly won’t solve all problems. Collaboration without physical presence can make it difficult to informally exchange ideas, gather information, gauge reactions, and create a sense of enterprise or team culture.

Today, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions are playing a critical role in business communications. These solutions provide a variety of functionalities, such as enterprise telephony, meetings (video, web, and audio conferencing), mobility, instant messaging and presence, and other collaboration tools. They can reduce technology costs by providing access to cloud-based ecosystems, allowing remote updates and upgrades to happen smoothly without on-site technician visits and with less equipment to manage, and can be customized for different needs across an organization.

UCaaS solutions enhance collaboration, reduce costs, and provide flexibility, making them an essential part of modern business communication. The need to facilitate collaboration and streamline communication for remote, global, hybrid, and colocated employees alike has only continued to grow.

Business Imperative
UCaaS solutions can reduce the time and effort required to deploy and manage communication services. They can improve productivity by enabling more fluid discussions of work items and facilitate sharing of assets associated with these discussions. High-quality face-to-face meetings with low latency provide more natural conversations, leading to better business outcomes. Usage analytics help team leaders understand the frequency and quality of internal and external interactions and can drive process improvements. And increasingly more advanced AI-driven capabilities now support communications and actually enhance and optimize the ways enterprises engage with customers and their own employees. As a result, UCaaS is becoming less of a utility and more a driver of digital transformation for SMBs and large enterprises alike.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a UCaaS solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.6 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a UCaaS solution is a very credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for UCaaS solutions are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating UCaaS Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for UCaaS

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the UCaaS space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective UCaaS solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the market, identify leading UCaaS solution offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Radar for Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM)

Dana Hernandez — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 15:00:49 +0000

In response to changing customer and employee needs, many companies escalated the adoption of agile processes. Agile planning and portfolio management (PPM) solutions help companies and teams organize and accelerate delivery of products and services. They help ensure that teams are collaborating and that project status is visible to all parties, including team members, leaders, and stakeholders. The ability to adapt to an ever-changing business environment more quickly and easily is a key driver for these solutions.

This market has matured significantly around the core table stakes functionality. Most tools today have robust collaboration capabilities, solid automation, and processes related to planning of iterations and releases, task and issue management, dashboard reporting, and KPI and OKR tracking. All the solutions we reviewed here have strong functionality across the core agile methodology.

Enterprise-focused vendors are also investing in functionality for financial management, including budgeting, forecasting, and actuals tracking. These functions are found at the feature level as well as at higher epic, portfolio, and enterprise levels and can tie the financials to the strategic business value, objectives, and key results that are linked to their delivery pipeline. These links at all levels help companies prioritize and focus on the highest-value work. They also assist the transition from traditional IT funding of projects to product-based agile funding.

There’s a strengthening focus on version management in these solutions, available through either functionality in the tool or integrations with third-party products. This represents the growing convergence of agile development with development operations (DevOps) solutions. The ability to take advantage of DevOps information within agile planning allows greater visibility into a product’s status and ongoing issues.

Also emerging in these solutions is a focus on using data for predictive analytics and predictive governance. Tools are beginning to enable increased automation for repetitive tasks as they are identified by historical data in the tool. Moreover, they are able to identify issues earlier in the process, which is key to solving them sooner. Value stream management (VSM), which identifies areas for workflow improvement with increased efficiency, elimination of redundant processes, and identification of backlogs, is becoming significant.

Based on their functionality, some of the solutions we reviewed demonstrate more of an engineering orientation, providing data to improve the life of the developer during the development process. Other solutions focus more on less technical aspects of agile delivery and leadership reporting. These solutions often add financial management to each level of the process to help ensure that what’s being delivered has actual business value.

The PPM market has evolved rapidly, with mergers and acquisitions enabling vendors to attain functionality that solutions were lacking previously. This trend is likely to continue.

The solutions we reviewed are available at varying price points: free versions; low-cost solutions priced per user, per month for core functionality; and costly platforms consisting of multiple integrated applications providing end-to-end functionality. The more complex solutions often require the assistance of professional services for implementation. Many have add-ons or marketplace options that further enhance the breadth and depth of the solution.

Most of these solutions are available as cloud-only software as a service (SaaS) models. Very few have on-premises or private cloud deployment options. The companies with on-premises and private cloud offerings tend to focus on highly regulated sectors such as government, medical devices, automotive, and aerospace.

Before selecting an agile PPM tool, organizations need to understand the complexity of their operations and product structure. Tools range from basic applications that support small teams to advanced platforms that bolster entire organizations and multiple enterprise-level initiatives, with varying areas of emphasis that may lean more toward planning and collaboration, engineering, or regulatory control. These are key factors that differentiate PPM solutions, and determining which approach suits your company’s strategic goals will help you make the best choice.

This is our third year evaluating the agile PPM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 17 of the top agile PPM solutions in the market and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading agile PPM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM) Solutions

Dana Hernandez — Wed, 22 May 2024 18:06:46 +0000

Agile environments take an iterative approach to software delivery, and agile planning and portfolio management (PPM) tools apply that approach to managing the large volumes of work or “epics” and smaller “stories” that feature in these environments. In an agile environment, much of the decision-making is decentralized at the team level, so it’s important to be aware of how teams progress. Agile PPM tools help ensure that teams collaborate and that project status is visible to all parties, including team members, leaders, and other stakeholders.

These tools track key metrics and allow reporting on progress at various levels. They support a flexible, collaborative way for teams to engage, and they provide a framework that’s both structured and adaptable, allowing teams to focus on the high-priority features the business needs, even as those priorities change.

Agile PPM tools continue to mature each year, providing features that support speed to market and business value prioritization. In addition, the ability of these tools to integrate with other agile and DevOps tools continues to expand. Many of these agile solutions are becoming more platform-like, rather than just a set of applications. As agile development continues to evolve, these solutions are maturing too.

Challenges do exist, however. Not least of these is the reality that agile PPM tools can become quite complex as they grow in functionality. It can take several months to get a tool in place before benefits are realized. Some offerings require multiple products to obtain end-to-end functionality, adding to cost and implementation complexity. Extensive customization of solutions can slow teams down and be costly to maintain over time as new updates are rolled out.

Tools range from basic applications that support small teams to advanced platforms that aid entire organizations and various enterprise-level initiatives. Organizations need to understand the complexity of their operations and product structure in order to select the appropriate agile PPM tool.

Business Imperative
Agile PPM not only eases the management of agile projects, it is a key enabler of visibility and collaboration within those projects. It involves aligning strategy, execution, and continuous improvement while enhancing transparency across a portfolio of projects. It embraces cross-team collaboration and makes project status visible to all parties, including team members, leaders, and other stakeholders.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of an agile Planning and Portfolio Management solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the agile PPM sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of agile PPM solutions, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) for agile PPM of 4.4 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that agile PPM is a credible candidate for deployment and worth thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for agile PPM are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.

Key Criteria for Evaluating Agile PPM Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

Deters
Adoption

Discourages
Adoption

Merits
Consideration

Encourages
Adoption

Compels
Adoption

Figure 1. Sector Adoption Score for Agile PPM

This is the third year that GigaOm has reported on the agile PPM space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and nonfunctional requirements (business criteria) for selecting an effective agile PPM solution. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those decision criteria. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading agile PPM offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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Dana Hernandez, Author at Gigaom

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Management Platform (CMPs) Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating CMPs Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Enterprise Process Automation (EPA) Solutions

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs)

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating IDP Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

FinOps Insights and Management from Spot by NetApp

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating UCaaS Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Radar for Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM)

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

GigaOm Key Criteria for Evaluating Agile Planning and Portfolio Management (PPM) Solutions

Key Criteria for Evaluating Agile PPM Solutions

Sector Adoption Score

DetersAdoption

DiscouragesAdoption

MeritsConsideration

EncouragesAdoption

CompelsAdoption

GIGAOM KEY CRITERIA AND RADAR REPORTS

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