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It's no secret that in many companies the relationship between Finance and IT can be somewhat strained. Business performance management (BPM) initiatives tend to bring those underlying tensions to the surface. For BPM to succeed Finance and IT need to work closely together as a team. In some companies there is such strong disagreement around BPM approaches, priorities, and technologies that they fail to reach consensus and the project simply stalls out. Of course if there was a good senior executive sponsor in place they could break through the logjam, but many companies fail to fill that role with the right person. A company we have been working with recently has absolutely no Finance/IT issues to deal with. The reason is that they took a proactive approach to head off problems of that type. They simply have the CIO reporting to the CFO.
Continue reading "The Future of IT?" »
In the performance management space there are currently at least 6 vendors that could be classified as 'big'. While they all have a broad and deep range of offerings, for some end users these solutions can be overkill - too complex, too expensive, too much of a good thing. For some vendors, their sheer size has also had a negative impact on their behavior in the field and therefore their ability to win business. We have recently observed the actions of one of these vendors at several prospects where their 'big company behavior' cost them the business. In at least one case it was a multi-million dollar deal that ended up gong to a much smaller competitor.
Continue reading "Bigger is Not Always Better" »
Most of the newly merged vendors have now stepped up to the plate and made the tough decisions they needed to about people and products. This has resulted in removal of staff redundancies, restructurings that have caused additional staff to consider new opportunities, and sunsetting of several products. While it is impressive that the vendors have made the tough decisions (in spite of earlier protestations that nothing will change), it now comes down to execution.
Continue reading "Decision Time" »
Companies evaluating business performance management (BPM) solutions in 2008 are still trying to make sense of all of 2007's mergers and acquisitions. Which vendor owns which products? Will all of these sometimes overlapping products survive? Do I need to own the transactional and/or BI products from a vendor to get the full benefits of their BPM solution? What is the timeline for integration? While BPM prospects are pondering these issues they don't need anything else to muddy the waters. Well, along comes IDS Scheer with an attempt to ride the performance management wave that can only serve to further confuse prospects.
Continue reading "Aren't Things Confusing Enough Already?" »
Since there is a lead time of several weeks from when an article is written until it is published there is always the possibility that some elements will be out of date the moment they come out. In the fast moving world of BPM it is even more likely. In our article 'Best and Worst of Performance Management in 2007' we lamented the fact that Applix and its solid mid-market offering got lost in the IBM/Cognos shuffle. Well, we are happy to report that all has now been made right with the world. What we anticipated in our article has actually come to pass - a new financial performance management offering for the mid-market: Cognos TM1 MidMarket Edition.
As you would expect after all of last year's merger and acquisition activity, the business performance management (BPM) world looks very different in 2008. Conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that there are fewer, but larger vendors to choose from. While it's true that there certainly are some very large vendors now offering BPM, the actual number of viable BPM vendors has gone up, not down. Why? A handful of new entrants in the U.S. market coupled with ERP vendors that had marginal BPM solutions in the past now able to offer robust product sets from their recent acquisitions. To make sense of it all we have developed a BPM Vendor Landscape Matrix, viewable as part of our Beyond the Hype 2008 webcast. In addition, we list all of the viable BPM vendors in this PDF.
I have noticed a disturbing new trend in BPM vendor selection in the past few months. There have now been several instances of vendors being selected solely on the basis of prior experiences or business relationship with that vendor. For example, a media company I am familiar with determined that a specific BPM application vendor was the best fit for their particular needs. However, the CEO stepped in and said that 'since our ERP provider, who we have a long and positive history with, has recently acquired a well-known BPM vendor that is who we are going with'.
Continue reading "Vendors Benefit from Prior Relationships" »
Just when I was about to blog about something other than all the BPM mergers, this comes along. Well, thankfully I think we have run out of large BPM vendors to be bought, and by now most of the companies doing the buying should have had their fill as well. Its time for everyone to settle down and digest what they bought, and then come out fighting. The purchase of Cognos by IBM combined with the other recent M&A activity has created a powerhouse field of huge performance vendors: IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle. Make no mistake about it, this is all about performance management. Business intelligence on its own would not have been as interesting to these companies. Business performance management is driving the purchase of BPM applications, as well as BI tools, as well as related applications, and even the underlying transactional systems they feed off of. That's why some of these new mega vendors, regardless of their roots, are billing themselves as performance vendors. BPM sells. Doesn't every company want to/need to improve their performance, or at least better understand what is going on? Now to the specifics of this particular transaction ...
Continue reading "Last of the Big BPM Purchases: IBM/Cognos?" »
This performance management stuff must be addictive. These big vendors just can't stop acquiring more vendors in the BPM (business performance management) space. Coming on the heels of its acquisition of OutlookSoft in June, today SAP announced its planned acquisition of Business Objects. Both fine companies with good product sets. The issue is that, at least in the performance management space, they have much of the same product set. Let's see, over the years Business Objects acquired BPM vendors SRC, ALG, and most recently Cartesis. SAP had its own SEM, acquired Pilot and most recently OutlookSoft. In the combined company that means they will have about six different flavors of essentially the same thing (take that Oracle/Hyperion and your measly two flavors of BPM). Now I know that these products have different strengths and weaknesses. Still, someone has to figure out how each will be developed and marketed and how it all fits. That's a tough job, but not as tough as the job prospects will face trying to figure out which pieces make sense for them, and hoping those particular pieces actually work well together.
Technorati Tags: SAP, Business Objects, Oracle
Exact Software of the Netherlands has announced its intention to acquire Canadian performance management vendor Longview Solutions for a little over US$ 50 million. Not as significant as other recent deals in dollars or the multiple paid, but significant in its ultimate impact on the business performance management market in the U.S. After the acquisitions of SRC, Geac, Cartesis, and OutlookSoft, they were one of the last of the truly independent (not part of an ERP or BI company) BPM application vendors.
Continue reading "Another One Bites the Dust: Longview to be Acquired" »
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