Performance Management Spending Nears $23B in 2006

2006 from AMR research - "Enterprise performance management (EPM) spending remains strong in 2006, with nearly $23B planned for software, hardware, labor (internal and external), and integration services. This is according to the results of a detailed survey AMR Research conducted of more than 200 companies across all industry sectors within North America... The following are some trends we uncovered:

Not surprisingly, the dashboard and scorecard segment is on fire—a reflection of the number of inquiries we get from customers about these subjects. BI is also on an upswing, but camps are forming around three types of providers—best of breed, platform vendors, and enterprise application providers. Generally speaking, manufacturers are more strongly aligned with their enterprise application vendors and services firms are more in synch with best-of-breed competitors. Both segments have healthy platform supporters as well. We expect a more competitive market for these software firms in 2006.

Although planning, budgeting, and forecasting products show a slight decline in spending, they are deemed the most strategically important EPM investment in 2006, slightly exceeding the importance of BI. Interestingly, manufacturers mentioned these products much more frequently than services firms. More than half of the firms surveyed indicated they have an operational system in place.

The large decrease in analytic applications and slight decrease in analytic infrastructure are not easily explainable. In fact, it makes us scratch our heads and wonder why since inquiries from customers are veering more into these areas. The biggest impediments companies have in deploying performance management are access to enterprise-wide data and data from customers and suppliers outside the four walls of the firm."

180 View - Some people call it Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). Others call it Corporate Performance Management (CPM) or Business Performance Management (BPM). It would be a lot less confusing if the vendors could agree on the buzzword.

We think the decrease in analytic applications has more to do with confusion as to what it means. In our opinion there is no difference between analytics and business intelligence. However, if you speak with the vendors or do research, you will find differences, which are often difficult to understand. In our research, we did find an article on the difference between analytics and business intelligence as well as the following reader response to the article:

"This article makes a distinction where there should be none. Business intelligence is about delivering "intelligence" to the "business" and it takes many forms, from querying and reporting to OLAP and data mining. The only people who want or need to make these types of distinctions are vendors who need to carve out a market niche by confusing people with new terms for existing processes and technologies." Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research and Services, TDW
For the article and this quote, click here.