![]() Right now, the EPM universe is in a fragmentation stage, with customers picking best-of-breed applications in a variety of categories: Workday for ERP, Salesforce for CRM, Anaplan for planning, and Tableau for analysis and BI, to name a few. Integration is at the top of our customers’ lists. Maybe so, but from our customers’ points of view, these four are not equal in importance. On top of the move to SaaS, Forrester says EPM innovation is evolving along four vectors: user experience simplicity, social collaboration, advanced analytics, and integration with other business applications. Luckily, systems like Anaplan can be implemented in a fraction of the time it typically takes to get an on-premises solution up and running. We’ve all heard of two- and three-year on-premises implementation times (or longer), and the implementation failed anyway. on-premises) at the largest companies, that means replacing some huge systems and processes-the Oracles, the SAPs, the Hyperions, the IBMs of the world-and I can tell you from experience that that’s still no mean feat. When you’re talking about rolling out an entirely new EPM solution in a different model (cloud vs. ![]() My gut reaction when I read that is that five years is aggressive for all systems to be changed to SaaS, especially in the Fortune 2000 companies we work with, but a lot of systems certainly will be replaced with SaaS offerings. Deployment models remain a challenge.įorrester estimates that 80 percent of EPM is done on-premises today, and that SaaS-based offerings will replace most of those EPM systems within the next five years. (Don’t take my word for it hear it from our customers.) I call this a “single spine of decision-making” across the business. That’s what Anaplan does, and does so across the entire business, so that every single function can analyze the past, present, and future. Companies want to combine all three time dimensions-peer into actuals from the past, analyze what’s going on right now, and predict what will happen in the future-on one single platform. That’s hard for a lot of companies to do today because they’ve invested in a Business Intelligence (BI) tool to analyze the past, a ledger system and ERP to tell them the present, and a planning solution to see into the future. That said, I think the greatest value comes from combining all three time dimensions on a single platform, as we do with Anaplan. ( That’s why zero-based budgeting is coming back into vogue.) What they did 10 years ago-or even last year-has little bearing on, or relevance to, what they are going to do in the future. Business is so volatile, things are moving so quickly, and innovation is happening at such a relentless place that the past and the present are almost irrelevant to some companies. No question that’s so, but our customers tell me that the future dimension is most important of the three. EPM users want to see into the future.įorrester organizes EPM capabilities into three time dimensions: the past (documenting what has happened), the present (understanding what’s going on now), and the future (planning, budgeting, and forecasting). The report can be analyzed from many angles, but as Anaplan’s chief customer officer, I looked at it with our customers in mind. Hamerman, shows how each provider measures up and “helps application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals and their business stakeholder partners make the right choice to improve enterprise planning, business insight, and management reporting.” It’s a serious piece of work, and I recommend that you download and read it. ![]() The report, according to its author Paul D. Analyst firm Forrester Research recently published “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Performance Management, Q4 2016,” its evaluation of EPM providers and the 10 companies (including Anaplan, which was named a Leader) that are the most significant players in the space.
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