Whether you are looking to deploy Corporate Performance Management (CPM) for the first time in your organization, or you’ve had CPM in your firm for years, the industry is changing quickly with tools and functionality that fit your ever-changing business needs.
Last month Gartner released its annual Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites. It is an overview of Strengths and Cautions for a variety of major vendors competing in the CPM space and it is a useful tool that should be leveraged by any company exploring new solutions.
There are two primary themes emerging in the space that organizations should consider when pursuing specific CPM needs: Cloud and Analytics.
For several years now, cloud-enabled SaaS solutions have offered small and medium enterprises (SMEs) a more cost effective and scalable infrastructure allowing internal IT resources to focus on the business. In the CPM space, this led to the birth of pure cloud-solution vendors whose disruptive effect has put those without on the defense to match the offering and meet growing customer demand for mobility, convenience and flexibility. The appeal for the cloud is understandable, but buyer beware as not all vendors’ cloud solutions are equal. There are many different flavors of “cloud” across the Magic Quadrant. Multitenancy is considered a key attribute of cloud computing and should be viewed as a differentiator. It is critical that companies ensure the benefits they seek are achievable through the vendor’s specific cloud offering.
For the longest time, comprehensive business intelligence (BI) and data analytics were missing or extremely lacking in most CPM suites. There is now serious momentum in the industry to embed BI and even predictive analytics into their products. As you would expect, the megavendors have long had these solutions and they continue to better integrate and package these components into their suite. There is now a push by traditional CPM providers to incorporate BI capabilities into their own product. You’ll notice that newer vendors in the space include an integrated BI offering. Others are acquiring, as evident by Longview Solutions’ recent acquisition of Arcplan. I expect that this trend will continue over the next couple of years.
CPM suites are improving significantly in terms of functionality and utility, are able to address multiple pinch points, and are financially attainable now more than ever. Make sure you are fully leveraging your CPM suite to drive business growth in your organization.