Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

Noteworthy Performance Management Vendors for 2008

Published: March 19, 2008

Seven noteworthy performance management vendors, the best mid-market performance management vendor of the year, and the best new performance management vendor were identified by the BPM Pulse survey conducted by BPM Partners.

Last month's article looked at the core performance management vendors for 2008 identified through our annual BPM Pulse Survey. As a reminder, the core vendor list includes the subset of the performance management vendors we track that at a minimum address most of the business performance management (BPM) basics – budgeting, consolidation, scorecards/dashboards; have a focus on BPM; appeal to a wide range of prospects; are proven in the field; and possess a satisfied customer base.

This month, we are going to review our list of noteworthy vendors in addition to our choice for best new vendor and mid-market vendor of the year. These noteworthy vendors are very good at what they do within a subset of performance management capabilities, and usually excel in one or more areas. Over time, if they choose to broaden their offerings and/or grow their performance customer base, they may be included on a future list of core vendors.

Noteworthy Vendors

Let’s start with the noteworthy vendors. Out of the 100+ vendors we review each year, these seven stood out from the pack:

Centage's Budget Maestro solution includes integrated budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation and performance reporting capabilities specifically designed to meet the needs of small to midsize businesses. They are on this list because they have one of the few solutions that is scalable from a single user to small workgroups or for deployment within a department of a larger organization.

IBI’s (Information Builders) Performance Management Framework is a complete metrics cube and scorecarding system designed for business end users. It enables users to create cascading dashboards with strategy maps, ties to projects/initiatives and collaboration capabilities. IBI recently introduced vertical packages for manufacturing and healthcare that make them stand out in the performance dashboard arena.

ISIS Solutions is unique as a pure-play predictive analytics vendor adding powerful, user-friendly analytics capabilities to traditional reporting. Common language queries can be configured within the application to empower users to leverage the “12 essential analytics” for improving performance.

KCI Computing’s CONTROL provides one unified solution for the BPM continuum – planning, budgeting, modeling, forecasting, consolidations, reporting and analysis – for medium to large enterprises. The familiar Microsoft Excel interface, real-time calculations and consolidations, optional 64-bit technology, predictive and offline/disconnected capabilities, graphical point-and-click administration and ease of use enable KCI to compete with leaders in the business performance management market. Their BPM Pulse rating of 4.6 (on a 5 point scale) also indicates they have some of the most satisfied customers of any BPM vendor.

Satori Group’s Business Intelligence and Performance Management offering, i-Performance, provides: budgeting and rolling forecasts, financial reporting and analytics, profitability analysis, and dashboards for the legal, architecture engineering and construction (AEC), professional service and consumer packaged goods verticals. In addition, applications can be delivered as a virtual software appliance, deployable on-premise or as a hosted solution. The comprehensiveness of their offerings combined with the vertical focus and alternative delivery options make them a fairly unique vendor.

Tagetik’s unified corporate performance solution, with successful implementations across Europe, is coming to the U.S. this year. The open architecture solution is database and application-server independent and is embedded with built-in functionality that unifies multiple BPM applications including planning, budgeting and forecasting, profitability modeling, financial consolidation and statutory/management reporting including dashboards and scorecards. The product also includes extended business performance management process support for credit analysis; IT performance management; and governance, risk and compliance. A standout for its unified solution, independence and process support, this vendor is a strong candidate for our core list once they build up their U.S. customer base.

Varicent is a leading vendor specializing in the sales performance management (SPM) area, which includes enterprise-wide incentive compensation modeling and management, sales territory and quota management, and compensation plan performance analytic reporting. Varicent has continued to develop vertical market-specific applications targeting the financial services, high tech, retail and services industries (among others) and leverages an open application architecture. The Varicent SPM solution is available either as an on-demand hosted version or on a traditional on-site enterprise license basis. This vendor is noteworthy because they have led the way in moving from old line incentive management into full-blown sales performance management.

Mid-Market Vendor of the Year

Each year we single out one mid-market vendor as the mid-market vendor of the year. This recognition is for a successful mid-market vendor that we feel has made the most progress in terms of customer growth, product expansion or other key measure in the past year.  And the winner for 2008 is (drum roll please):

Prophix: This vendor offers performance management solutions that are targeted primarily at small to midsize companies and divisions of larger corporations, providing functionally rich budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation, reporting and dashboard applications. Prophix has recently enhanced headcount and labor planning, and variance alerting capabilities. We singled them out this year for delivering three targeted versions of their solution with an Express edition for smaller user groups, an Enterprise edition for larger user communities, and their new SQL Server edition for larger applications.

Best New Vendor

The best new vendor title recognizes a software company that in the past year has introduced a performance management product that we believe has had the most positive impact on the market. For 2008 that vendor is:

Alight Planning: Planning and budgeting may not be as sexy as data visualization or new types of dashboards, but it is an essential area of performance management that can always benefit from new alternatives. Alight offers a complete set of collaborative budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting capabilities for mid-sized businesses through Fortune 1,000 divisions. What’s unique is Alight’s singular focus on driver-based financial planning and analysis software that features a units, rates and amounts architecture, automated sensitivity analysis, goal seek operations and intuitive modeling with object-based linking.

This list combined with last month’s core vendor list should give you a good overview of some potential solutions for your own performance management initiative. As always, pull together your detailed requirements first and make sure the vendors being considered demonstrate how they would specifically address your most unique and complex needs. As you can see, there are many good solutions out there, but the key is finding the one that is the best fit for your unique business requirements.

If you found this article helpful and would like to receive the latest insights each month from Craig Schiff and other experts featured on the Business Intelligence Network, please subscribe to the Business Performance Management Newsletter.