A new player has arrived on the performance management scene and they have the potential to make a big impact. Tidemark, formerly Proferi, came out of stealth mode just this week. To understand their technology approach to performance management you just need to look at some of their partners: Terremark for cloud infrastructure, Cloudera's Hadoop distribution, VMware vCloud, and SnapLogic middleware for integration. While this is clearly a step ahead of the current performance management pack, Tidemark's technology is not the main reason I expect them to be successful: It's the team. The investors, board, management, and employees consist of senior executives from Hyperion, OutlookSoft, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP. Saying they have a great understanding of enterprise applications and performance management would be an understatement. I have personally worked with several members of the team in the past and was quite impressed with not only their expertise, but their laser sharp focus on the customer. Their depth of understanding of the space is evident in the areas of performance management they elected to tackle first: Strategic, operational, and financial planning/budgeting/forecasting, Metrics management and management reporting, and Profitability modeling. According to our 2011 BPM Pulse survey results these are exactly the areas that many companies still need to address. Well, perhaps they'll find their solution in Tidemark.