Analyst’s Perspectives on the CPM Space

The Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software space has been receiving a lot of attention because of the recent acquisition of Adaptive Insights by Workday. Not only has this increased awareness of the space, it has also underscored the value being derived by customers who have implemented CPM software in support of their key financial applications. The following is a summary of several related perspectives provided by software industry analysts:

NUCLEUS

• Nucleus Research is an analyst firm that focuses on ROI and measurable outcomes to provide an assessment of the value of technology. They base their research on an in-depth, case-study approach that analyzes the results of deployments. Their primary service offering is ROI analysis. However, they also provide research notes on various sectors of the software industry and include a “value matrix” as a visual summary of their market assessment.
• In the Nucleus Research CPM Technology Value Matrix published earlier this year (2018), they observed that…

Customers are finding that the marketplace is more crowded, and the competitiveness of cloud vendors is greater as functionality expands to cover more diverse use cases.

• Nucleus also noted that determining ROI has been challenging in this space, particularly with the breadth of vendors and varied use cases. Prophix subsequently collaborated with Nucleus on an ROI case study that focused specifically on the deployment of CPM.
• In the resulting report, Nucleus Report: Lochmueller Group ROI, Nucleus determined that Lochmueller Group achieved an annual ROI of 95% and a payback period of 1.4 years as a result of their CPM implementation.
• The bottom line of the report was that by deploying a Prophix CPM solution, the end-user was able to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its financial budgeting and rapidly derive real value.

VENTANA

• Robert Kugel, the SVP & Research Director of CFO and Business Research at Ventana, focuses on the intersection of information technology and the finance organization and business. His analysis of financial performance management (FPM) includes the application of IT to financial process optimization and collaborative systems; control systems and analytics; and advanced budgeting and planning.
• Rob recently provided his own overview of the Adaptive acquisition (Workday to Acquire Adaptive Insights – Jul 1, 2018) in which he pointed out that this deal enables “integrated business planning” by adding the CPM capabilities provided by Adaptive (and other vendors such as Prophix) to the Workday offering.

Integrated business planning makes it possible to shorten planning cycles to promote agility and give better visibility into expectations across a company; this enables improved coordination and strategic alignment.

Workday’s opportunity in acquiring Adaptive Insights lies in convincing corporations to adopt an integrated business planning approach to planning and budgeting to replace their existing silo-based planning and financial budgeting activities.

• In a subsequent article (Make Budgeting Easier for the Budget Owner – Jul 18, 2018), Rob argues that now is the time for the FP&A role to increase the business value of budgeting, and that to do so they need to move away from spreadsheets to dedicated planning and budgeting software (a.k.a. CPM).

To make budgeting more valuable, FP&A organizations also need to model and measure the ‘things,’ or resources…This isn’t feasible using desktop spreadsheets.

451 RESEARCH

• 451 Research has a global reach of over 100 analysts deployed worldwide. Their focus is on providing insight into the competitive dynamics of innovation in emerging technology segments. Their clients not only include IT leaders, technology and service providers, but also financial professionals and the investment community. Consequently, they are often called on to comment about the market implications of various vendors’ technologies and go-to-market strategies.
• A recent 451 Research report, written by their analyst Krishna Roy (Cloud CPM M&A signals the birth of a wider performance management horizon – Aug 3, 2018), captured what they see as a CPM market that is undergoing some significant change.

Additional consolidation will occur as performance management continues to become a corporate-wide activity and not one that is solely confined to an organization's finance department

• Shortly after their last report, 451 Research followed up with a specific analysis of Prophix (Prophix does Cloud and On-Premises CPM, with Machine Learning up next – Aug 27, 2018). In it, they highlighted that Prophix has undergone significant change by giving its product and business model an overhaul and is now making more noise in the market.

Prophix has come a considerable way since we last caught up with the company… Prophix appears to have made significant headway in the past couple of years, transitioning to a cloud and on-premises offering in order to address the growing adoption of CPM as a cloud service. Furthermore, Prophix's machine learning strategy should enable the firm to achieve market differentiation because AI has yet to be infused into CPM processes to any great degree

What all three of these analysts seem to agree on is that CPM solutions are gaining more and more attention as both industry players and end-users see the value of the software. Further information on each of these reports can be found on our website www.prophix.com and/or by contacting a Prophix representative.