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Blog: Craig SchiffMarch 6, 2008Decision TimeMost 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" » January 23, 2008The New Vendor LandscapeAs 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. November 12, 2007Last of the Big BPM Purchases: IBM/Cognos?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?" » October 8, 2007Bet You Can't Eat Just One ... SAP to Acquire Business ObjectsThis 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 September 17, 2007Another One Bites the Dust: Longview to be AcquiredExact 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" » September 5, 2007Cognos to Acquire ApplixCognos announced today a $ 339 million cash agreement to acquire Applix. Based on Applix trailing 12-month revenues of approximately $ 61 million it looks like a good deal for their shareholders. For the two companies, employees, customers, and prospects there is a lot that makes good sense about this deal. First of all, these are two growing, successful companies with highly satisfied customers and strong technologies. The recent major acquisitions in the space (SAP/OutlookSoft, Oracle/Hyperion, Business Objects/Cartesis) have changed the playing field. In the end, size does matter. By acquiring Applix Cognos picks up 3,000 more performance management customers they can sell their applications to, and 200 additional performance management experts join their staff in sales, services, and development. Applix has the high-performance TM1 OLAP engine, an extremely satisfied customer base, and strong partner network. However, as a relatively small company in a space dominated by big players they were missing out on being involved in many performance deals. With Cognos' larger sales force, marketing, and deep R&D pockets this is a big win for Applix. What about customers and prospects? Continue reading "Cognos to Acquire Applix" » August 23, 2007The Future Looks Bright for BPMI recently met with the executives responsible for defining the product roadmaps at SAP/OutlookSoft and Business Objects/Cartesis. I am very impressed with what I heard. While many of the details discussed are still confidential, there are certain observations I can share. For starters, the executives in charge of these decisions are precisely the right people for the job. In both instances they have a depth and breadth of performance management expertise that is hard to match. These are not political appointments or rushed into mistakes made after a major merger. These guys (and women) know their stuff. Most surprising to me is the recognition by management of the true strengths and weaknesses of each component of their combined product set. Continue reading "The Future Looks Bright for BPM" » June 6, 2007How Did I Miss This One?It seems that during the recent rash of mega mergers in the business performance management space a smaller acquisition slipped in under the radar. Corvu, one of the early performance dashboard vendors has been acquired by a company called Rocket Software. Their long-term competitor performancesoft (PBViews) was acquired a while back by Actuate. It is difficult to be a dashboard only vendor and Corvu had been trying to branch out, with limited success. So, I guess the acquisition is good for them and their customers, but Rocket Software doesn't seem to be focused on performance management and has only a minimal focus on business intelligence. Technorati tags: Corvu, Rocket Software, Actuate, performancesoft May 8, 2007SAP to Acquire OutlookSoftThere is no let up in acquisition activity in the performance management space. On the heels of Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion, Business Objects' purchase of Cartesis, we now have SAP announcing a deal to acquire OutlookSoft. How can end users looking to purchase a business performance solution (BPM) keep track of the players when it is difficult even for industry insiders to keep up? Is this a good deal? I believe so. SAP had to do something to answer Oracle's Hyperion deal. Neither SAP nor Oracle were as strong in the BPM space as the companies they acquired. However, while SAP users will now be far more likely to consider OutlookSoft for BPM, the big question that remains is this: will non-SAP users look to SAP/OutlookSoft for BPM? This is the same question that exists for Oracle/Hyperion and Infor/Extensity(Geac, Comshare). Continue reading "SAP to Acquire OutlookSoft" » April 23, 2007Business Objects to Acquire CartesisThe rate of acquisition activity in the performance management world continues to rise. While this deal isn't of the magnitude of Oracle's purchase of Hyperion, it is still significant. On the surface it may appear that Business Objects already had addressed performance management with its acquisitions of SRC and ALG. However, what Cartesis adds to the mix is great depth around financial consolidation and management reporting, particularly when it comes to meeting global statutory requirements. Business Objects's prior additions were light in this area. As a matter of fact, I consider Cartesis' offering second only to Hyperion in the area of financial consolidation, intercompany eliminations and the like. The other area addressed by the acquisition is governance, risk, and compliance. Cartesis had been working on a module related to this to be released shortly. The other thing this deal does is further reduce the number of platform independent performance application vendors. Continue reading "Business Objects to Acquire Cartesis" » April 6, 2007No More Excuses?Most surveys on budgeting and planning find that respondents using Excel as their primary budgeting tool say it is an extremely painful and unreliable process. However, those same surveys also find that the majority of companies still rely on Excel for budgeting! Why is that? For larger companies it tends to be that the senior decision makers who can do something about it aren't close enough to the line managers and finance analysts to truly understand what a chaotic and labor-intensive process they are going through. The executives in small to mid-size companies are closer to the front lines and tend to understand the issues. Their challenge though is that they don't have the dollars, IT resources, and infrastructure in place to solve the problem. A BPM vendor targeting this market thinks they have the answer. Continue reading "No More Excuses?" » March 1, 2007Consolidation Continues: Oracle Buys HyperionExciting news certainly, but who will truly benefit? The shareholders of Hyperion who are receiving a nice premium on their stock should be happy. What about the customers of Hyperion and prospective BPM purchasers? I don't think so. There is always risk to customers of smaller vendors being acquired in terms of product direction, existing sales and services relationships, and just general disruption and distraction. I am not sure that the combination offers anything new to potential purchasers that they couldn't already get elsewhere. What about the other BPM vendors? I do think this presents an opportunity for them as independent, focused BPM solution providers being able to sell to users of any ERP system, especially those who have not standardized on Oracle enterprise-wide. I think the concept of this combination is intriguing, but the realities are less so. While Oracle states this will enable them to 'provide the first integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System that spans planning, consolidation, operational analytic applications, BI tools, reporting, and data integration, all on a unified BI platform', I have to disagree. Continue reading "Consolidation Continues: Oracle Buys Hyperion" » February 22, 2007SAP Acquires Pilot SoftwareI know I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but yet another vendor has done an acquisition to flesh out their BPM 2.0 capabilities. In this case it's SAP purchasing Pilot Software. Pilot Software has been around for many years and in many different forms. In its latest incarnation it was focused on operational performance management with the PilotWorks product set. Our 2007 BPM Pulse survey confirmed the growing importance of this area of performance management. SAP had previously announced its intention to use 'fill-in' acquisitions to supplement organic growth. I'm glad to see them focusing some attention on performance management. As a matter of fact, we have been seeing them more and more lately in the field competing for business performance management deals. Technorati Tags: SAP, Pilot, BPM February 1, 2007Microsoft PerformancePoint Update - PricingMicrosoft has just announced its pricing model for PerformancePoint and it's a game changer. It is orders of magnitude less than current business performance management offerings. As such it is a major step forward for the potential of pervasive BI and BPM. It will be licensed like other Office products with a single server + single client access license (CAL). The price will be $20,000 per server and $195 per CAL. The license will include scorecarding, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and financial reporting. Basically a full performance suite for a fraction of the price of today's offerings. Now of course questions still remain about the depth of fucntionality in version 1.0, but at that price point even if they just cover the basics its still a good deal. We will have to wait a little while longer to see commercial product though. They have changed their release timeframe from 'mid 2007' to 'second-half 2007'. Technorati Tags: Microsoft, PerformancePoint, BPM January 24, 2007Hyperion to Buy Crystal BallMore specifically, they have announced their acquisition of Decisioneering, makers of Crystal Ball software. This purchase makes perfect sense to me and enables Hyperion to more effectively address two important areas of BPM 2.0: operational analysis and predictive analytics, coupled with risk assessment. This follows on the heels of Cognos' acquisition last week of Celequest, also to enhance their 2.0 capabilities. A year or two ago the major vendors were acquiring BPM basics such as budgeting or dashboards. Now they have very clearly moved on to next-generation acquisitions and seem to be following the outline for 2.0 we have developed. If you include the Business Objects/ALG purchase of last year the last 3 key BPM vendor acquisitions were all targeted at BPM 2.0 capabilities. January 17, 2007Cognos Acquires Celequest - Good MoveI spend a good deal of my time lately looking at the elements of BPM 2.0 and which vendors have what is needed for success in this next generation of Business Performance Management. I liked Celequest because they had an operationally focused, real-time dashboard which is an important component of the next generation. The fact that is was also available as an appliance or hosted addressed another area of BPM 2.0 - easier distribution and access to reach more users. When looking at Cognos from a next generation perspective it was clear they already had a lot of the right stuff. They have core BPM down cold with robust planning, consolidation, and dashboards. Their BI capabilities give them the raw power to do much of the focused analysis required in 2.0. The addition of Celequest however will help cement their position as an early leader in the next phase of Business Performance Management. October 19, 2006Update: HyperionWe received some interesting information at a recent meeting we had with Hyperion. The most surprising thing for me was that they are still selling the Hyperion Enterprise product. Now this was a great product in its day (full disclosure: I was one of the four original product designers), but hasn't it been surpassed by HFM and other newer products? Well, they have repackaged it for the mid-market which is a fast growing segment for them. They are also continuing to enhance it, not just fix bugs. Apparently there's still life in the old dog. On the System 9 front they are downright bullish. Although we have heard from some users that the initial release was somewhat buggy, all new clients are coming on with System 9. They are adding on average 50 new consolidation and 100 new planning clients per quarter. If you add in migrations from older versions you can see that they have a fairly robust adoption rate. They have also come up with a sales/marketing answer for the most significant knock against them - not providing a truly unified solution: 'if you want to do it all in one system use HFM, otherwise we also offer a multi-product best of breed approach'. From an actual unified product perspective, to Hyperion's credit users seem to like the high-level look and feel unification provided by System 9. September 18, 2006Hyperion vs. OutlookSoft Lawsuit SettledThe patent infringement lawsuit brought by Hyperion against OutlookSoft almost two years ago has been settled. It appears that the verdict was in OutlookSoft's favor and there are no product changes to be made or penalties to be paid. The good news for customers is that the cloud hanging over both companies heads because of this (there was a countersuit as well) has been lifted. No longer having to worry about potential future legal fall out, these firms and their products can be evaluated based solely on their individual merits. With their legal issues behind them these vendors can focus on their marketplace competitors: Cognos, Microsoft, the ERP vendors and the BI vendors (as well as each other). September 12, 2006Business Objects to Acquire ALG SoftwareI just read this announcement and the first thought that comes to mind is: why? ALG is known for planning applications built around activity-based costing (ABC) methodologies. More recently vendors of this type of application have marketed it as 'profit optimization' or 'profitability management'. The reason is that ABC has gone in and out of favor, mainly because it requires the collection of detailed costing data that many companies find difficult to accomplish, although once you make the effort there is significant payback. ALG is a niche player in the business performance management (BPM)market dominated by the likes of Hyperion and Cognos. Business Objects entered this market with the acquisition of SRC Software last year. Combining SRCs performance applications with its own BI tools Business Objects had the opportunity to join the top ranks of BPM vendors. However, that hasn't quite happened. Continue reading "Business Objects to Acquire ALG Software" » May 1, 2006Extensity (Geac) Acquires Systems UnionIn case you missed it Geac (along with its former Comshare product line) became Extensity earlier this year. Now, the venture-backed entity has made a significant acquisition: Systems Union. Clearly they are following an 'assembler' strategy to build a bigger, better, and more competitive company. Our research and field work supports this strategy. Purchasers of business performance management favor the vendors with more complete offerings, even if they don't require all of the pieces today. This combination takes Geac from being a pure applications BPM vendor to an applications and tools vendor, not unlike Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, and SAS. In addition, it gives them a broader geographic reach as U.K.-based Systems Union had significant success outside of the U.S. On the downside, there is significant overlap in their product lines. While they have vowed to continue to support overlapping products, my question is: when someone wants budgeting for example, which product will they lead with? That will determine ongoing investment in the various products. While overall a good deal for potential purchasers and existing customers, it does take Extensity from the unified solution camp of Longview, OutlookSoft and others, into the realm of the integration-challenged, both at a product level and company level. For their own take on the merger read the release. New Logo for HyperionSome view company logos as fairly trivial. However I've seen software vendors agonize for weeks (or months) over logo designs, tag lines, and the like. I have also seen these same companies pay graphic designers and marketing consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to try and get it right. So, with that in mind, we should at least spend a few moments forming our own opinion when they introduce a new marketing image for themselves. In case you don't recall, Hyperion's former logo was a capital 'H' composed of small, colored circles of varying sizes. Those of us who were at Hyperion at the time it was launched quickly dubbed it the 'Fruit Loops' logo. So much for all the time and money invested in it. In later years they removed the colors and rendered it in black and white only. Now they have launched a brand new logo and tagline. Take a look and form your own opinion. http://www.hyperion.com . For my opinion, continue reading this entry. Continue reading "New Logo for Hyperion" » April 11, 2006Vendor News From All Over: Microsoft, OutlookSoft, ApplixMicrosoft announced its intention to acquire ProClarity. Makes sense. The two companies products are tightly intertwined. ProClarity puts a prettier, simpler (non-MDX) face on Microsoft's BI offerings. What does this signal about Microsoft's intentions in the BI/BPM space? It appears to me that they are looking to reach deeper into the enterprise, beyond the core IT power users of their tools. This requires, an easier, more intuitive interface, which ProClarity provides. Enterprise BI today is often utilized as part of a business performance management (BPM) initiative. This move takes Microsoft another step down the same BPM path that several BI vendors are now following. Which may explain the next piece of news: OutlookSoft has announced support for Oracle Database 10g. Since its inception OutlookSoft has only offered BPM solutions on the Microsoft platform. This is a major departure for them, possibly precipitated by Microsoft's move. As a software vendor, if your platform provider starts offering competing applications, life can get pretty rough. It's true that Oracle already has BPM applications, but neither Oracle nor Microsoft can offer the platform choice that OutlookSoft will be offering its clients. The last bit of news from the past week involves operational performance management, one of the fastest growing segments of BPM. Applix has announced a partnership with Varicent. Applix has recently focused its powerful TM1 engine on operational performance management. Varicent dives deep into one aspect of operational BPM, Sales Performance Management. The combination leverages Applix's high performance slice and dice capabilities and Varicent's deep domain expertise. All of these announcements indicate that more and better choices are coming for adopters of BPM. February 11, 2006Hyperion's Controversial Upgrade FeeHyperion users with an up to date maintenance agreement are being asked to pay an 'enablement fee' to upgrade to Hyperion System 9. Users are asking 'isn't that what we pay maintenance fees for in the first place?'. You can read Hyperion's response here. This is an important issue for all software vendors and customers - when are new releases covered by maintenance fees and when are they not? In general, maintenance covers continued hotline support, bug fixes, and product updates. Most product updates are really just a collection of bug fixes with some minor enhancements thrown in for good measure. What do you do however, when a product update is more major than that? When key aspects of the product have been re-architected/re-written? I believe this is the case with System 9. Continue reading "Hyperion's Controversial Upgrade Fee" » January 24, 200610 Core Performance Management VendorsEvery year around this time we hold our annual Beyond the Hype webcast - 'an unbiased look at BPM vendors and trends'. One eagerly anticipated aspect of the presentation is the naming of the 'core' vendors for the year. These are the vendors that we believe have the most comprehensive, capable, and proven solutions for performance management. The webcast took place on January 19th and this is the list of 10 that we revealed (in alphabetical order): Applix, Business Objects, Cartesis, Clarity, Cognos, Geac, Hyperion, Longview, OutlookSoft, SAS. To hear the reasons behind each one you can view the webcast replay. I would be interested in your opinion on the list and any suggested additions and deletions. January 15, 2006Actuate Acquires performancesoftPerformancesoft (the former PBViews) has just been acquired by Actuate. Yet another BI vendor has seen the BPM (business performance management) light. Actuate is strong in enterprise financial reporting and has dabbled in other areas of BPM in the past, but this move clearly demonstrates a commitment to performance management. I think its a good move for both companies. Customers have demonstrated to us in the field as well as in our latest BPM Pulse survey that they prefer a vendor that offers both applications and BI tools. Actuate has primarily been a tools vendor and performancesoft, while focused on dashboards, has delivered performance dashboard applications, not just a raw tool. I'm surprised I haven't seen more coverage of this announcement, but I think it's newsworthy. You can read the details here. December 22, 2005Interesting Marketing StrategyWe recently came across a BPM vendor with a fairly unusual go to market plan. I can't tell you their name because that is the crux of their strategy - secrecy. Basically they believe they have a very unique offering and want to keep it a secret from competitors, analysts, consultants, and other third parties. Prospective customers must sign a confidentiality agreement. The thinking goes that once this special functionality becomes public the competition will try to copy it. We became aware of them while helping one of our clients find their ideal mid-market BPM solution. Their name was on the client's list of vendors to look at. So, as part of our normal procedures we contacted the vendor and asked them to come in and do a custom demo. Their sales rep informed us they could not do that with us in the room. Our client insisted we be present to help them evaluate the product. The vendor declined to participate and walked away from the potential business. I couldn't believe this so I contacted the CEO. Continue reading "Interesting Marketing Strategy" » November 7, 2005Geac to be AcquiredAs previously noted in this blog (see Geac: Acquire or Be Acquired) Geac had been looking for a way to better compete with the largest players in the BPM market. Well, apparently they have found their solution in Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm that will acquire them. Continue reading "Geac to be Acquired" » October 22, 2005Guided Business Intelligence: XlerantA consultant I have worked with off and on over the years recently formed a software company called Xlerant. His mission is to deliver what he and his backers are calling 'guided business intelligence'. The intent is to make BI more accessible to more users by putting a wizard-like front-end on it. His first area of focus is Business Performance Management (itself a front-end of sorts to BI). Continue reading "Guided Business Intelligence: Xlerant" » October 6, 2005New Dashboard Vendor: BowstreetWith the exploding demand for corporate and departmental dashboards it should surprise no one that new product is showing up on a regular basis. What is somewhat surprising is that these products are not always coming from the usual suspects. Satori Group, developers of proCube, have recently announced their own dashboard product called OneGlance. We will provide more details after we meet with them in the next few weeks. Another vendor new to dashboards is Bowstreet, probably best known for their Portlet Factory. They have released a portal-based dashboard product and we believe it is a positive addition to the space. Continue reading "New Dashboard Vendor: Bowstreet" » August 26, 2005Cartesis Back on TrackCartesis is a French BPM vendor that had achieved significant success in the area of complex, multi-national, statutory consolidation. They had two problems however - consolidation has been one of the slower growth areas of BPM, and their North American operation was stagnating. Clearly a change was in order. That change started with new investors, a new CEO in France, and a revamp of the U.S.-based executive team. We recently met with members of that team and were impressed with their execution to date and plans for the future. |
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