180 Systems launches three new web sites

ERP Portal

The objective for this site is to provide an unbiased portal to ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems, ERP Value Added Resellers (VAR's) and relevant ERP articles.

CPM/BI Portal

The objective for this site is to provide an unbiased portal to CPM (Corporate Performance Management) and BI (Business Intelligence) systems, CPM/BI Value Added Resellers (VAR's) and relevant CPM/BI articles.

BPI Portal

The objective for this site is to provide an unbiased portal to BPI (Business Process Improvement) systems and relevant articles. BPI is about efficiency and effectiveness as well as about GRC (Governance Risk and Compliance).

IBM offers $5B for Cognos

November 13, 2007 from CBR – “The deal, valued at $5bn, or roughly $58 per share, would absorb the last-remaining top tier BI (Business Intelligence) pure play vendor still standing...

With the field's top three vendors (Business Objects, Hyperion, and now Cognos) sold off, players in what's left of the independent BI market are pointing to opportunities and omissions now that the usual suspects are off the map.”

180 View – ERP systems have been characterized as data rich and information poor. By including BI in ERP (which partly explains the acquisition of Hyperion by Oracle and Business Objects by SAP), organizations should not need to customize their systems to extract or slice and dice their ERP data. Although IBM does not sell ERP systems, they do have big opportunities with Cognos. A portion of IBM's existing clients will be interested in Cognos, and IBM can also offer their services to Cognos customers. As well, Cognos will be used by some of the customers of the ERP vendors including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. As IBM does not compete in the ERP space, IBM could be recommended by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft… for Cognos implementations as IBM is not an ERP competitor.

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.

Enterprise software survey 2007

September 2007 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Our annual CAmagazine software survey is back and this year it’s bigger than ever. We combined all our surveys — accounting/ERP, customer relationship management, business intelligence/corporate performance management and professional services automation — into this issue…”

Exact to Acquire Longview Solutions

September 17, 2007 from Canada IT.com – “Exact Software, one of the world's leading providers of business software solutions and Longview Solutions, a leading provider of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software solutions, today jointly announced the signing of an agreement for Exact to acquire Longview.”

180 View – The trend continues as ERP vendors extend their system to include Corporate Performance Management. Oracle acquired Hyperion. SAP acquired OutlookSoft. I am waiting for Microsoft to acquire Cognos. In the meantime, Cognos continues to grow with the recent acquisition of Applix.

Cognos Renews CFO Focus with Applix Buyout

September 27, 2007 from CIO Today – “Cognos is acquiring analytics software provider Applix for approximately $339 million. Cognos CEO Rob Ashe said that within the context of the company's overall strategy for serving large and midsize enterprises, the move will further extend the company's capabilities to offer innovative financial performance management offerings…”

180 View – Co-incidentally, we were working with a client interested in acquiring a Corporate Performance Management system. Cognos declined to respond to our RFP and Applix did respond but before the Cognos acquisition. There is some overlap between the systems. We think the acquisition will not only increase Cognos market share, but will also favourably raise the price for an acquisition of Cognos.

2007 Budgeting and forecasting study

2007 by PricewaterhouseCoopers – “The research was executed via 200 cross-industry web surveys and four in-depth interviews with organizations whose revenues are greater than $2 billion.

PricewaterhouseCoopers identified five key trends impacting budgeting and forecasting processes:

1. Budgeting and forecasting processes face significant transformation; linkage to strategy is top of mind.
2. Today's process is too granular and not focused on value-added activities.
3. Underlying technologies and applications lack integration.
4. Finance and operations must be more closely aligned.
5. Standardizing processes and systems is a primary focus of improvement efforts.

Key indicators

1. Fifty-six percent of budgeting and forecasting effort is spent on low value activities including data collection and consolidation, reviews, approvals, and report preparation.
2. Seventy percent of respondents are dependent on spreadsheets for all or a portion of their financial planning activities
3. Management and employee dissatisfaction with the current planning process is high due to the level of granularity and lack of alignment with business strategy
4. Sixty five percent of respondents believe that the strategic relevance of budgeting and forecasting will increase over time, while only five percent expect a decrease
5. More than half of respondents reported that creating closer links between strategy and operations was one of the top two priorities

Conclusions

“To improve and refocus budgeting and forecasting, organizations need to standardize, streamline, and integrate these activities with the company’s short- and long-term goals. If done properly, budgeting and forecasting processes can play a leading role in an organization’s strategic direction by becoming a way to rapidly assess and adapt to a changing marketplace. Companies that take full advantage of an ongoing strategic budgeting and forecasting process will:

• Use budgeting and forecasting as a tool to integrate strategic planning and day-to-day operations.
• Reduce the budgeting cycle time (perhaps even by creating an ongoing rolling forecast process) and improve forecasting accuracy by standardizing data collection and consolidation across the organization.
• Deploy rolling forecast concepts, which extend forecasting beyond year¬end. This reduces the dependency on manufactured deadlines that are not aligned with a constantly changing marketplace.
• Shift the focus of the budgeting and forecasting process from data collection and reporting to target setting, analysis, and ongoing measurement.
• Break organizational silos by using the budgeting and forecasting function as a way to increase collaboration between finance and operations.
• Increase the organization’s understanding of creating value through the budgeting and forecasting process and supporting it with a robust performance-management function.
• Consider developing or using a methodology that provides a flexible approach to changing business processes, technology and systems, organizational structure, and data.”

180 View – The report is 50 pages long and worth a read. Too bad that only organizations with revenues exceeding $2 Billion were included in this study. We think that mid-sized organizations suffer the same problems as the large ones. Our guess is that the indicators would be even greater for the mid-sized organizations.

What many boards and executives STILL don’t know about the health of their businesses

April 2007 from Deloitte – “In March and April 2004, the Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed 249 senior executives and board members around the world and interviewed a number of corporate directors in North America, Europe and Asia. The report concluded:“While the overwhelming majority of board members and senior executives say they need incisive non-financial information on their companies’ key drivers of success, they largely find such data to be lacking or, when available, of mediocre to poor value…

Almost three years later, Deloitte and the Economist Intelligence Unit worked together to see whether things had changed and conducted the research along much the same lines as before. A global survey fielded in December 2006 obtained responses from 175 senior executives and board members. Then, through January 2007, in-depth telephone interviews were conducted with senior executives and board members at large companies.

Some key findings include:
(1) Existing performance measurement frameworks are inadequate, and the majority of executives perceive a growing need to better understand the underlying drivers of their performance through non-financial measurements.
(2) Though companies are aware of the pitfalls of focusing exclusively on financial performance, the ability of executives to measure and monitor performance through non-financial measurements appears to be inadequate. Companies either do not have or are not sharing critical nonfinancial performance data with their boards.
(3) Despite the dissatisfaction with the quality of non-financial measurements of performance, current impediments to the broader use and greater sophistication of non-financial performance metrics include undeveloped tools, organizational skepticism relating to the value of these tools, unclear accountability for nonfinancial performance, time constraints and the concern that such metrics may convey too much information to competitors.

180 View – Every problem for someone is an opportunity for another. There are many consulting firms and software developers that are standing by to help.

The non-financial data is a key to the balanced scorecard. See our white paper
“Corporate Performance Management - It's ready - Are You?” for a discussion of balanced scorecard under Scorecarding.

SAP to buy OutlookSoft to get closer to CFOs

May 8, 2007 from InfoWorld – “Business applications vendor SAP is making another acquisition aimed at filling out its product portfolio to better meet the needs of CFOs. The company announced late Tuesday plans to buy U.S. corporate performance management software company OutlookSoft for an undisclosed sum…

180 View – In March, Oracle purchased Hyperion. Both Hyperion and OutlookSoft are Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions, which includes strategic planning, scorecarding, budgeting and forecasting, consolidation and business intelligence. For more about CPM, click here. A few years ago, ERP was extended to include CRM. Today CPM is being added to the mix.

Oracle Buys Hyperion

March 1, 2007 from CRN – “Oracle said it would create a more comprehensive business intelligence software suite following its US$3.3 billion acquisition of Hyperion on Thursday. The two firms said the deal, which is expected to close sometime next month, would allow Oracle to integrate Hyperion's business performance management software into its own business intelligence (BI) product. Oracle's first BI product was released at the beginning of last year.

Hyperion started out primarily as a provider of financial reporting services but has also become successful with its online analytical processing (OLAP) engine, which allows users to quickly analyze complex queries. A few years ago, Hyperion made a strategic acquisition of its own when it spent US$140 million to buy Brio, which gave it an improved query tool…”

180 View – The acquisition represents the growing trend by ERP vendors to provide an end-to-end solution. Initially ERP was a back office application (financials, distribution…) Then it included the front office (CRM, eCommerce…). And now it includes Corporate Performance Management / Business Intelligence. In the short run, this aquisition should be good for all concerned. But what happens when sales fall off as a result of Hyperion prospects who are reluctant to acquire Hyperion because they don't use Oracle ERP systems?

BI and CPM markets in 2007: When two become one

January 22, 2007 from IT Director – “For years analysts have asked suppliers "so which market are you in - BI (Business Intelligence) or CPM (Corporate Performance Management)?" Suppliers were somewhat coy about the answer. BI and CPM were perceived as distinct and separate markets. BI was the high margin Cash Cow and CPM was the Question Mark in the portfolio. Suppliers did not want to risk cashflow from the large $7bn BI market by gambling on the smaller $1bn CPM market. Hence supplier commitment to a CPM marketing message or a BI marketing message vacillated depending on whether cashflow or new market penetration was the current key directive. But all has now changed.

2006 was a great year for the CPM vendors and most registered 30%+ revenue growth. Sniffing opportunity, supplier indecisiveness vapourised overnight. The answer to the "which market are you in?" question has been categorically answered: "BOTH".

All the BI vendors are now firmly positioning themselves in the PM market. Business Objects will shortly unveil ambitious PM plans based on their acquisitions of ALG and SRC. Cognos boasts an Innovation Centre that delivers industry sector CPM solutions in Cognos Performance Blueprints. It now talks openly of "Cognos BI/PM solutions". SAP (with SEM) and Oracle (touting both its own CPM suite and the ex-PeopleSoft EPM suite) are pushing new BI and CPM solutions as part of their 'enterprise solution stacks'. SAS is leveraging its analytics market leadership position into enterprise PM products. Microsoft will launch its PerformancePoint PM suite in 2007.

Paradoxically Hyperion is moving in the opposite direction. Having led the CPM market from its inception it is now reverting to its BI roots and will present 'Why Buy BI from a Performance Management Vendor' at the upcoming Gartner BI Summit.

So what's next for the BI/PM vendors? BI as a category will gradually disappear, as OLAP did before BI. "Content Intelligence" will become the new category and the next holy grail. Already SAS, IBM and Cognos are offering enterprise search for unstructured data - emails, Word, PDF documents and the like.

If the BI/PM vendors can combine their mastery of data intelligence (as in BI) with text intelligence (as in document management) to slice and dice, drill down, and aggregate data and text for any question a user might care to ask, then customers will really have something to rave about - a way of emulating the way we currently work with paper. The answers to "where did I put that file?", "what does this information and data mean for the business?" and "what is the context for these conclusions?" will become only a mouse click away. The adoption of SOA will make this easier. Structured and unstructured data management software tools will converge facilitated by SOA.

Expect more acquisitions and new competitors in the Content Intelligence space. HP's recent acquisition of BI/PM provider Knightsbridge is ominous, as is Google's emerging presence in the Corporates with its Google (enterprise) Search Appliance - British Airways is a reference customer.

But what of the pure-play BI and PM vendors? In PM the likes of CorVu and Pilot will provide specialist niche market solutions to government, healthcare, and other markets where specialist non-standard PM solutions are required. BI 2.0 will emerge, but in a slightly different form than most commentators are predicting. High growth vendors such as QlikTech, Spotfire, and Tableau offer fast, flexible, highly interactive and visual solutions for knowledge workers. BI 2.0 will be for the scientific, technical, and professional knowledge workers - the rest of us will access more basic BI functionality and reporting as part of enterprise-wide performance management systems.”

180 View – We disagree with the author that BI and CPM are becoming one. All organizations require BI but only the larger ones need CPM that includes consolidation, strategic planning, scorecarding and forecasting.

The Top 10 Business Performance Management vendors

July 2006 from DM Review - "Any vendor-ranking list is going to end up being subjective, controversial and open to debate. However, the benefit to end users of having a core list outweighs the pain of the arrows that I am sure will come my way from those not included.

The business performance management (BPM) vendor marketplace has, by my count, approximately 90+ vendors, and it is continuing to grow. Recently, a number of vendors entered the market with a very narrow but deep focus on one aspect of BPM. This list is not about them. The Top 10 reflects those I see as the core, established vendors in the space.

The primary criteria for inclusion in the list are: 1) a fairly comprehensive offering, covering most if not all areas of BPM, 2) a focus on the BPM market (which leaves out the ERP vendors because BPM is just one small component of their offerings), 3) a significant track record of success in the field, 4) demonstrated company viability and growth, and 5) continued innovation. There was another criterion that I had in the back of my mind as well: is the vendor's marketing and sales pitch in line with the product's reality? There were some otherwise capable vendors who insisted they did a lot more than I could find in their actual products.

Now on to the list, which is in alphabetical order. The list of 10 is intended as a starting point for those considering BPM - nothing more, nothing less.

Applix: This vendor, building on its high-performance TM1 OLAP engine, has added a planning manager, a consolidation framework and a financial reporting solution to round out its BPM offering. At this point in time, Applix provides the necessary BI, budgeting, consolidation and dashboard tools to cover the core BPM bases. In addition, thanks in large part to their core engine, Applix is well positioned to address the burgeoning operational performance management area of BPM. Applix's highly satisfied clients often place it at the top of BPM satisfaction surveys. The categories that customers highlight as being most impressive are ease of implementation, ease of use and performance.

Business Objects: A strong vendor in the BI space for years, Business Objects' primary BPM capabilities were based on dashboards. While dashboards (and the scorecards they display) are a key component of BPM, this is not enough for a full BPM initiative. The wise souls at Business Objects realized this and acquired SRC, a small but successful budgeting and consolidation vendor. In addition, SRC filled out some vertical BPM offerings for financial services and health care. More recently, the combined company focused its vertical energies on the retail market. Its clients give it high marks for product quality. With its size and breadth of offering, Business Objects can be one of the leaders in the space.

Cartesis: Strong in Europe, particularly on its home turf of France, Cartesis' North American operations had lagged behind until recently, when the firm shuffled its North American management team and sales force. The result has been a significant uptick in number and size of U.S. deals. The core product was always strong in complex financial consolidation. Cartesis had some basic budgeting capabilities but greatly enhanced the offering with the acquisition of a company called INEA that focused on BPM for financial services companies. In addition, Cartesis picked up a consulting company that had developed strong capabilities around information delivery. The recent announcements about XBRL access to benchmark data and expanded vertical focus begin to differentiate Cartesis from some of the competition. The end result is a re-energized North American team, with a product set that addresses all the core BPM application modules.

Clarity Systems: While probably not as well known as some of the other vendors on this list, Clarity does have a fairly complete BPM suite and a satisfied client base. Clarity started life as a consulting company, and this background serves them well in a continued focus on meeting customer needs. Clarity's Web-enabled solutions make extensive use of Excel, which allows users to leverage existing models they have built. An open architecture supports multiple database choices. Within its applications, Clarity uses both relational and multidimensional data structures. The current product set addresses budgeting, consolidation and dashboards.

Cognos: This vendor is one that appears on almost everyone's BPM shortlist. There is good reason for this: they have a fairly complete offering and a highly satisfied customer base. In particular, their clients point to product functionality, quality and ease of use as areas where Cognos excels. Cognos enhanced its suite significantly in the past year with its strategic initiative and long-range planning blueprint models and the release of Cognos 8. This release provides a single BI solution with robust reporting and analysis integrated with Cognos' sophisticated planning, budgeting and consolidation solutions. The recent addition of their GO! Search service that finds relevant BI content as part of enterprise search results only serves to strengthen their offering.

Extensity: Formerly known as Geac, and Comshare before that, this vendor has a strong financial performance management product set. Recent enhancements to their strategic planning and modeling capabilities complement their leading planning, budgeting and consolidation solutions. The addition of smart consolidation capabilities focusing only on impacted data improves application performance response and analysis times. At press time, Extensity announced that it will acquire Systems Union. While this will add more BI capabilities to their offering and broaden their geographic reach, it also introduces significant product overlap and organization integration challenges. Take this into account when considering this vendor.

Hyperion: With a comprehensive and strong BPM offering, Hyperion is usually near the top of the list of vendors to be considered. Customers cite Hyperion's depth and breadth of product functionality as one of the things they like best. Hyperion has made major advances in the past year. With the release of System 9, the company now provides a unified front end to its deep portfolio of BPM tools and applications. In addition, the purchase of Razza Solutions has enhanced Hyperion's ability to synchronize metadata across multiple products. The introduction of its Workforce Planning module has streamlined the headcount and salary-planning process. The recently announced acquisition of Upstream Software enables Hyperion to focus on the movement and quality of financial data.

Longview Solutions: Longview's BPM solution includes comprehensive planning, budgeting, consolidation and reporting capabilities. Customers give their highest ratings to Longview's product functionality and price/value equation. This vendor expanded its software with the release of its Strategic Tax tool, which facilitates tax data collection, planning and compliance reporting. As one of the few truly unified solutions, Longview's robust product competes effectively with the biggest vendors in the BPM market.

OutlookSoft: This vendor has a lot going for it. They have fully integrated Excel (and other elements of Office) into their offering, reducing the learning curve and resulting in high ease-of-use ratings from their clients. In addition, they were the first to offer a truly unified, fully Web-based solution. More recently they introduced predictive analytics capabilities, which the BPM Pulse survey indicates is high on the list of next-generation capabilities BPM prospects are seeking. Since its introduction in 2000, the OutlookSoft product has been entirely and exclusively Microsoft based. They just announced full support for Oracle 10g, which now gives their clients and prospects a choice.

SAS: Well-known in the BI/data mining arena, SAS has been playing catch-up in the BPM space. It's not because of their product set. Their offerings touch all areas of BPM, including some specialized areas that not all vendors address, such as activity-based costing. They also offer deep verticalized solutions that are not just window dressing for the sales cycle; rather, they are industry-specific modules that supplement and expand their cross-industry BPM products. With all of this and a new marketing focus on performance management, I expect to see them show up in more and more BPM deals.

A number of other vendors just below the Top 10 are worth noting. KCI addresses financial and operational BPM with a focus on performance and scalability. ALG Software comes at BPM with an activity-based costing and profitability optimization approach. Hosted solutions are starting to gain traction in the space, and both Host Analytics and Adaptive Planning offer components of performance management delivered as a service. For the mid-market, FRx and Prophix offer robust solutions at a reasonable cost, and Satori Group provides both BPM applications and tools with a vertical focus.

Clearly, there are many good solutions to choose from. The key is picking the right one for your organization. In the end, that comes down to having a razor-sharp focus on your requirements and evaluating how each vendor stacks up when it comes to your specific needs. Investing in a comprehensive due diligence process up front will provide significant payback down the road."

180 View - Business Process Management (BPM) is also called Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). We prefer the CPM acronym. For our article published in June 2006 on CPM, click here.

2006 Business Intelligence / Corporate Performance Management Survey

June 2006 from CAmagazine written by Michael Burns - "Our Business Intelligence survey has morphed into a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) survey. Business Intelligence is but one component of CPM. Our attached survey includes the leading Business Intelligence and CPM vendors. You will find analysis for Cognos, DynacTools, Hyperion, Khalix, Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager, OutlookSoft, Panorama, PROPHIX, SAS, TARGIT and Vanguard.

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.

BPM Viewpoint: Suite Vs. Stand-Alone: The Latest Debate

March 2006 from Business Finance - "Business performance management (BPM) was the little kid on the finance-application block when it emerged as a category of software a few years ago. Stand-alone BPM packages sit on top of mammoth enterprise resource planning (ERP) suites, giving companies budgeting, reporting and analytics capabilities that fit their needs. In Business Finance articles on the debate about suite vs. best-of-breed, there was never any doubt where BPM software from non-ERP vendors fell.

But times are changing, and the scrawny kid is bulking up. BPM systems will never challenge ERP as transactional repositories, but they are becoming bigger and more complex every year. And the "stand-alone vs. suite" discussion is beginning to surface within BPM-specific software purchase decisions. Several major players in the BPM software space completed recent acquisitions in a push to offer a broader spectrum of BPM functionality. Then late last year, they announced that they had integrated those disparate systems into comprehensive product suites.
The appeal of the suites is easy to understand. Without one, a complex company with lots of operational data coming from a wide range of source systems has to assemble a variety of software packages to cover budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, management reporting and financial analytics. In the process, the organization struggles to ensure that the applications always use the same up-to-date version of all data. The total cost of this undertaking can quickly skyrocket because of the effort required to maintain a myriad of different data connections.

But, warn many consultants, BPM buyers looking for consolidated data management and ease of integration from product bundles sold as suites need to do their homework. The promise of tight connectivity may be hollow. Some software packaged as a "suite" is tied together more at a marketing level than in the source code. The user interface may look the same across products -- which can be a plus for training requirements -- but under the covers, applications that share a name and front end may still be radically different.

The other big risk in purchasing a suite is that buyers may not obtain as much functionality from each of its components as they would get if they bought the planning, reporting and analytics pieces separately. This is especially likely for organizations in industries for which distinct vertical solutions are available. These companies may find that the extra expenditure of resources required to keep multiple unique applications from multiple vendors running in unison would be more than offset by the savings they can reap by buying an application that closely meets their requirements. They would need to customize software either way, but when they make their purchase decision, they should weigh the cost and value of each option.
Of course, determining how much customization a product will need and how much effort will be required to connect data analysis packages with data source systems is a daunting challenge. Purchasers should find out all the requirements for linking products into a smooth operation. Many a BPM project has been put on hold or canceled because the purchaser expected implementation to be far cheaper and quicker. But buyer beware: Routine vendor demos and high-level discussions with salespeople don't provide enough information. Help is available from other sources, including independent consultants with considerable BPM experience. And the due diligence process for a software purchase always should involve in-depth meetings with companies that already use products on the organization's shortlist.

This doesn't mean a BPM initiative isn't worth the effort. I regularly talk to organizations that have deployed performance management software, and many say they can't imagine managing a business without their new tool. It just means that the bigger and more complicated these systems become, the closer the correlation between the thoroughness of the due diligence process and buyers' satisfaction with their purchase."