Informatica has released new versions (8.5) of its PowerCenter, PowerExchange, and Data Quality solutions. Enhancements to the three data-management tools include faster access to data updates and a feature designed to prevent inaccurate data from being entered into corporate data systems.
Last week, Business Objects released BusinessObjects Edge Planning, a product designed to give midsize businesses access to sophisticated tools for performance management. It includes prepackaged applications for strategic planning, capital planning, payroll planning, productivity management, and incentive compensation management, along with visual modeling functionality that lets users manipulate projections so that they can instantly see the expected effects of a prospective business decision.
On November 14, Infor released Infor PM 10, a performance management suite that includes applications for planning and budgeting, financial consolidation, strategic management, sales forecasting, OLAP data analysis, reporting, and presentation of performance data in a Microsoft Excel-like format. The new suite, which has an Infor look and feel, is the result of the company’s efforts to combine the consolidation, planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities of Geac/Extensity with Systems Union’s business intelligence and analytics functionality. In addition to the merging of the two entities’ key product lines, this release introduces a few all-new features. An auto-consolidation feature enables PM 10 to determine, based on the data set, whether to perform a full or incremental consolidation — thus speeding up, potentially substantially, the financial close process. A status-view-monitor feature provides insight into how each entity’s budget rolls up to headquarters and where divisional budgets stand in the submission/approval process. And a new data-trail feature provides information about who changed what within the financial data and when they changed it.
It’s going well, of course, according to the vendors. On November 13, Oracle “previewed the industry’s first integrated, hot-pluggable enterprise performance management system.” Which is to say that Oracle presented its high-level plans for integrating its Hyperion and Oracle EPM product lines and then adding functionality moving forward. Details are available on the press release, but it looks like Oracle’s key areas of BPM focus moving forward will include profitability management and support for XBRL.
In related news, Exact this month completed its acquisition of Longview Solutions. Exact expects to benefit from Longview’s performance management expertise and attractiveness at the higher end of the midmarket, while the association with Netherlands-based Exact should extend Longview’s global penetration.
Late last month, Cognos announced that is had completed its acquisition of Applix. Applix is now a fully-owned subsidiary of Cognos. “The Cognos/Applix combination is a great fit strategically and culturally. Our position as the world’s leading independent provider of performance management solutions is now stronger than ever,” said Cognos CEO Rob Ashe on the announcement. That sounds good — but “independent”? Well…
Less than three weeks later, on November 12, came news that IBM is buying Cognos. In an all-cash transaction worth about $5 billion and expected to close in the first quarter of next year, IBM expects to add this major BPM player (and all of the smaller ones it has acquired over the years) to its information integration, data management, and business consulting expertise “to unlock the business value of information.” Oh yeah, and the release claims, “Together, IBM and Cognos will become the leading provider of technology and services for business intelligence and performance management.”
Anyone who’s been reading the BPM Express newsletters in the past six months — or has paid any attention via any information source to happenings at the vendors of business performance management (BPM) software — knows that the pace of consolidation has been remarkable. I don’t need (once again) to run through the list of mergers and acquisitions. Suffice it to say that most of the major players have been involved in at least one transaction in the very recent past.
That necessarily leaves current and prospective buyers of the software wondering: What now? Where is the market headed? And what do I do about it? I can’t answer that last question for you, but at Business Finance’s BPM Summit a couple of weeks ago, I attended an interesting presentation by Craig Schiff that might provide some insight into my first two questions.
As a founding member of Hyperion who spent 16 years as head of that company’s products and services division, and a co-founder and former CEO of OutlookSoft, he has seen a lot of changes in the business intelligence and performance management markets over the years. Now the CEO of consulting firm BPM Partners, he sees BPM software as moving into a new phase of development, what he calls BPM 2.0. The new generation builds on the definition of business performance management that the BPM Standards Group laid out three years ago (see Standard Setters: Driving Improvements in Business Performance from the March 2005 issue of BPM Magazine) in several ways:
First, Schiff says, BPM 2.0 technologies integrate far more operational analytics capabilities than did the first generation. Now performance management applications sometimes include tools for monitoring and measuring the performance of business functions as diverse as sales, marketing, customer service, manufacturing, research and development, IT, and HR.
Second, BPM 2.0 technologies enhance the ease of use and the simplicity of distributing the software companywide. They do so by incorporating some of the functionality that is permeating IT departments at large, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), service-oriented architecture (SOA), and open source technologies; 64-bit support; access from mobile devices, such as cell phones; and enterprise search capabilities.
And finally, BPM 2.0 technologies facilitate deeper analysis in areas such as risk, profitability, and external benchmarking. They also provide forward-looking, or predictive, analytics and enhanced scenario-planning capabilities.
These features sit on top of the original performance management functionality, which integrated into a closed-loop process a company’s strategic planning; tactical financial and operational planning; consolidation and reporting; and modeling, analysis, and monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs).
The product that adds BPM 2.0 capabilities to truly integrated performance management processes will offer very obvious benefits for companies that invest in it. And many of the acquisitions of 2007 represent the combination of an organization tightly focused on BPM products with an organization that already offers some of the broader technologies in Schiff’s definition of BPM 2.0. The stage is set for exceptional BPM 2.0 products to come to market. The million-dollar question, as always, will be: At what point (if ever) will the processes and technologies truly be integrated and closed-loop?
There is no clear answer to that question for the very recent mergers, but most industry insiders think two to three years — or more — is a reasonable time frame to expect. ERP vendor Infor, which acquired Extensity (formerly Geac/Comshare) two years ago and then Systems Union in the middle of 2006, announced this week a new performance management software suite that (it says) closely integrates Extensity’s budgeting, planning, and consolidations functionality with Systems Union’s analytics and business intelligence capabilities (see Product Briefs, above), all within an Infor front end. Regardless of whether SAP and Oracle will have launched an application within the next 18 months that tightly integrates their now-very-broad BPM and BI offerings, it seems likely that in the end, all the M&A activity will benefit performance management software buyers by enabling vendors to offer far more robust products — in other words, products that embody the BPM 2.0 vision.
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