Gartner recently released new research on Critical Capabilities for Corporate Performance Management Suites that evaluates 12 vendors across 9 critical capabilities in CPM. I love this research because it goes a bit deeper than the Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites. It allows you to look at the specific capabilities that are most important to your business and see which vendors are strong in those particular capabilities.
You can download the research here and see how Gartner ranks each vendor across the 9 critical capabilities and as well as how Gartner weights the capabilities for different types of businesses:
1. Less than $250 million in annual revenue
2. $250 million to $1 billion in annual revenue
3. Greater than $1 billion in annual revenue
4. Individual business units within large organizations
Here are the scores for each vendor on each of the capabilities:
2014-08-11 vendors scores
One evaluation they did not do was how the vendors ranked across all the critical capabilities, so I took the liberty to do that math for Gartner.
Average (across all 9 capabilities)
Tagetik
3.83
Host Analytics
3.60
Longview
3.58
IBM
3.57
SAP
3.47
Oracle
3.47
Adaptive Insights
3.39
Anaplan
3.39
Board International
3.32
Prophix
3.15
Infor
3.12
SAS Institute
2.98
To figure the average across all of the critical capabilities I added the score of each vendor across all of the capabilities and divided by 9 (there are 9 critical capabilities as defined by Gartner).
I was very pleased (but not at all surprised) to find Tagetik at the top of this list because of our mission to develop a financial performance platform that delivers much more than a single point solution or a set of separate integrated products. Our ranking at the top shows that our approach is working and that our customers are benefiting from a platform that addresses multiple processes with deep financial functionality yet is easy to use, implement, maintain and upgrade.
It is very rewarding to see that finally the “one version of the truth” concept that has been the mantra of CPM vendors since Oracle, IBM, and SAP first acquired their way into the CPM market has finally become a reality. It is ironic however, that the megavendors have promised better integration since the acquisitions first happened in 2007 yet as you can see above they still struggle mightily with ease of use, implementation, maintenance and upgrade.
When you are considering a CPM investment, consider the short-term pain you are trying to address but also what you will tackle after that pain is addressed. What additional products will you need to buy, what additional technologies will you need to implement, what additional technical skill sets will you need to find, how will you integrate it all, do you want it on the cloud now and if not might you down the road? It pays to think this through before making a point solution decision.
Of course I think Tagetik has the best approach for addressing the short and long-term needs of finance with a really strong combination of deep functionality, ease of use, and TCO. It is research like this that helps buyers of CPM software understand that there is more to CPM than meets the eye; that CPM software is not a commodity; and that not all CPM software is created equal.
By Dave Kasabian, from: http://www.tagetik.com/blog/authors/dave-kasabian/2014-08-11-what-cpm-capabilities-are-critical-to-you#.U_dNO8VdV8E