Caveat Emptor: The Impact of Vendor Consolidation on Business (Corporate) Performance Management Buyers

October 17, 2007 from Business Intelligence Network – “In the enterprise market, end users now have fewer choices. If you wish to purchase from your preferred database or ERP vendor, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Infor and mid-market focused Exact Software each have a value proposition and products worthy of consideration. The companies recently acquired by these vendors will each attempt to maintain their “open” status regarding connectivity to other transactional systems, but depending on the company, that may get more difficult over time. If you wish to buy your performance management and business intelligence applications from a source database independent vendor, Cognos, SAS, and Clarity Systems are the leaders left standing – for now. In addition, for mid-market to small businesses, there are still plenty of choices. Less well known, but still enterprise-strength KCI has successful clients in the upper end of mid-market to enterprise level. Budgeting upstart Adaptive Planning has stirred up the mid-market with their easy-to-use, hosted planning application, and have started to move up to larger enterprise clients. Centage, Prophix, Alight Planning, Host Analytics and Satori Group are all slugging it out in the mid-market and SMB category.”

180 View – The article refers to Business Performance Management, but we think it’s more often called Corporate Performance Management (CPM). CPM typically consists of strategic planning, scorecarding, budgeting and forecasting, consolidation and business intelligence functionality. It’s a logical progression for ERP vendors to extend ERP to include CPM. It’s happened with the Tier One ERP systems with SAP’s purchase of OutlookSoft and Business Objects, and with Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion. And it’s also happening with mid market ERP systems with Exact’s purchase of Longview. The trend will clearly continue.