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Featured Dresner Research
Research Insight and Wisdom of Crowds® reports offer the most comprehensive and objective insights available for data, analytics, and performance management. Our process is global, encompassing thousands of organizations across all industries, functions, and organization sizes.
Wisdom of Crowds® Market Reports
Wisdom of Crowds® Market Reports offer in-depth research and reporting on key industry and technology topics, including user trends, perceptions, intentions and other drivers. Each report includes a section with objective and inclusive vendor ratings.
Agentic AI Report 2025
Agentic AI solutions deliver measurable business outcomes by wrapping a clearly defined business process, large language models (LLMs), and access to relevant data. Together, these components enable intelligence task execution – automating actions, making decisions, and adapting in real time with minimal human intervention.
The inaugural Dresner Agentic AI Report examines organizations attitudes and uses covering its relative importance among other key technologies and initiatives, priorities, training and development, obstacles, and data sources.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Market Study 2025
In response to shifting and escalating demand within the ERP market, Dresner Advisory Services has introduced this report as our first ERP Reporting Market Study. Many firms lack an effective ERP strategy or are reevaluating their ERP approach for a refresh or overhaul based on needed upgrades and the replacement of legacy on-premises systems.
Most current ERP implementations are not extensible enough to let organizations incorporate rapid changes in business intelligence (BI), analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and industry-specific data and analytics technologies into their business model. Additionally, while it’s possible to make incremental improvements through an ERP strategy, organizations must adopt a cloud version of ERP to take full advantage of the new capabilities. In many cases, this will require a new, holistic ERP strategy.
Environmental, Social, and Governance Reporting Market Study 2025
Global ESG progress demonstrates strong momentum and growth, fueled by rising investor demand, regulatory pressure, and an increasing understanding of the connection between robust ESG performance and business success. There is a growing emphasis on transparency in ESG reporting, with heightened stakeholder pressure for precise and truthful disclosures.
However, ESG faces many challenges and roadblocks. Successfully navigating these challenges requires a strategic approach, focusing on transparency, accurate data, and a commitment to measurable impact.
Research Insights
Published throughout each month, Research Insights are thought leadership articles, covering important topics and issues, with pointed advice and recommendations for readers.
Data Leader and Vendor Priority Mismatches Challenge Active Data Architecture® Adoption
Active Data Architecture® (ADA) continues to garner attention from data leaders and their teams seeking to make a step change in their approach to enabling more strategic business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI) use cases that involve extreme data volumes, highly complex data, and constant change. Technology vendors likewise see great value in ADA principles, and many are investing heavily in capabilities to enable the vision. But mismatches between vendor and user priorities for overall investment and specific functionality will make it challenging for data leaders to derive value.
Accelerate and Amplify BI Value by Establishing Semantic Layer Goals and Strategy
Massive data volumes, increasing numbers of available data sources, the growing diversity of data types (ranging from traditional to highly unstructured and variable), and the overall complexity of the data and analytics technology landscape all conspire to create barriers to data leaders and their teams achieving success in their business intelligence (BI) efforts. Consistent, accurate, broadly understood and well-governed views of critical data are increasingly harder to deliver in this ever-more intricate environment, which threatens to overrun existing capabilities and unnecessarily limit potential returns from BI investments.
In the face of these challenges, the role of a semantic layer is more important than ever. Semantic layer is an architectural approach to resolving and harnessing the diversity of formats, conflicting definitions, and growing volumes and numbers of relevant data sources. This is not a new concept or goal—data leaders and their teams have tried for decades to deliver consistent and broadly used views of critical data. This was the point of the large-scale data integration efforts that many organizations have already attempted. Regrettably, most organizations struggle to deliver meaningful results and business value from these initiatives.
Enable More Data-Driven Decision Making to Unlock Strategic Value and Improve Business Outcomes
Organizations often see their decision making as much more data driven than it actually is. Many data and business leaders assume business intelligence (BI) tools and applications automatically make decisions data driven—but this is not always the case. Other factors, such as metrics, data culture, data literacy, analytical skills, and politics, can override or degrade the potential value that solid data analysis and best-fit BI solutions can deliver.
Decision-making processes that involve humans often tend to overrule, ignore, or adjust what the data and tools recommend (due to any of these aforementioned factors). Data leaders need to anticipate when this may happen, and to develop and implement targeted plans to increase the prevalence of data-driven decision making.
Special Reports
Specialized reports rely on data collected directly from customers on a subset of vendors to provide an unbiased comparison within the broader market context.
Vena vs. Workday EPM
This special report examines the offerings and positioning of two major players in the EPM market: Vena Solutions (Vena) and Workday Adaptive Planning (Workday) and compares them on key aspects such as usability, integration capabilities, performance, scalability, and support. The goal is to provide a clear understanding of how each platform meets the needs of modern enterprises and supports their overall performance management initiatives.
Anaplan vs. Pigment EPM
This special report examines the offerings and positioning of two major players in the EPM market: Anaplan and Pigment and compares them on key aspects such as usability, integration capabilities, performance, scalability, and support. The goal is to provide a clear understanding of how each platform meets the needs of modern enterprises and supports their overall performance management initiatives.
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Who is Dresner Advisory Services?
We're comprised of a team of deeply experienced and seasoned analysts focused on delivering exceptional value to our members.
Howard Dresner
Founder and Chief Research Officer
Jamie Popkin
VP and Research Fellow
Bill Hostmann
VP and Research Fellow
Jim Ericson
VP and Distinguished Analyst
Michael Moran
VP and Research Director
Chris von Simson
VP and Research Director
John Hagerty
Distinguished Analyst
John Van Decker
Distinguished Analyst
Doc Kevin Elder
Research Director
Brian Lett
Research Director
Myles Suer
Research Director
Sarah Chung
Director of Technology
Elizabeth Espinoza
Director of Analytics
Danielle Guinebertiere
Vice President, Client Services
Michelle Whitson-Lorenzi
Director, Research Operations
Jeff Lynn
Vice President Client Development
Sherry Fairchok
Senior Editor