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With the ongoing shifts and consolidation of the business performance management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) vendor landscape, most industry experts would predict that the lion’s share of new business would fall in the hands of the 4-5 major vendors that remain once the merger and acquisition dust settles. Although these larger vendors support that claim, a growing contingent of mid-sized vendors of BPM and BI products continue to thrive through this period of transition.

Although the mega-vendors have BPM and BI capabilities that are both wide and deep in terms of functionality, this healthy (and spunky) group of 2nd tier vendors is finding unique ways to differentiate their business offerings. The good news for these vendors is that the market is responding favorably to their efforts – and rewarding them with business that builds upon their strengths.

Two ways that companies have found to successfully tell their unique value proposition and separate themselves from the de facto leaders include:

1. Digging deep into a very specific business process that is not optimized/automated in many companies, or
2. Taking a targeted approach for a sub-set of the market that may be underserved from either product offering or commercial terms by the major BPM/BI vendors.

Let’s take a look at a couple of alternatives that may address immediate business issues that you are looking to resolve.

SEC Reporting in a Box

All publicly held companies know of the challenges involved in getting the necessary annual report, 10Qs, 10Ks and other mandatory reporting information filed with the SEC. Historically, a team within finance would be responsible for fulfilling that role, manually modifying the reports, assuring that SEC standards are met and distributing them internally for review before publishing. Clarity Systems FSR (Financial Statement Reporting) solutions help automate the reporting process by providing workflow, audit trails and continuous connections to source systems. If you have also chosen Clarity’s Budgeting, Planning and Financial Consolidation systems to support your other BPM processes, automated processes exist to populate the FSR application to help expedite the reporting process. Benefits include reduced labor costs, improved accuracy and a more “auditable” reporting process.

The Taxman Cometh

The year-long process of tax preparation, reporting and submission often requires a team of high-value personnel focused exclusively on supporting the tax process. Unfortunately, much of their time involves mundane data collection and tax rule validation. Global tax requirements increase complexity, requiring additional local experts to assure tax compliance regulations are met. Longview Solutions offers a pre-packaged tax solution that automates many of the manual processes of tax preparation and enables the tax team to focus on higher-value tax analysis and potential scenario modeling for future tax impacts. The solution reduces the time required in tax preparation and provides a transparent system that ties the preparation process to the mainline financial analysis required for many companies.

What About Us Little Guys?

Many BPM success stories often tout the benefits of BPM to a large enterprise – a single version of the truth across multiple entities, complex financial consolidation processes and distributed planning. But what if you are a growing company that is currently using spreadsheets, but are starting to feel the pain of maintaining and distributing multiple spreadsheet models? Companies like Adaptive Planning, Centage and Prophix are all providing entry points for small to mid-sized companies that allow organizations to grow from a single user, to a small department to a hundred or more users as their deployment expands. In addition, larger vendors who have formerly been more focused on the larger enterprise deployments of BPM are also starting to see opportunities in the smaller to mid-sized market.  Most recently, Infor, who has rolled up a series of BPM and BI companies under the Infor brand, has launched an aggressively priced offering to help target the growing momentum in this segment. To succeed with such an approach, these vendors must offer an attractive starting price to get an initiative kicked off, and focus on ease of administration and usage – key traits for a successful deployment in a smaller enterprise. Several vendors offer these software solutions in a hosted environment, which also reduces demands for IT infrastructure and support.

Conclusion

The larger BPM and BI vendors will continue to expand with technology that will help further integrate their overall solution and offer attractive capabilities that validate their leadership. In any evaluation, you should at least consider solutions from these larger leaders based upon your existing systems or any previous experience your team has had with these systems. But it is also worth noting that there are some successful 2nd tier players that you should consider as well. These companies will likely not have the breadth of the bigger players, but they will have commercial flexibility and, if chosen wisely, could have a purpose-built solution that is intended to address your short-term BPM and BI challenges in a unique way.

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