Each year, Gartner, analyst and driving factor in the decision making for many companies, releases its Magic Quadrant for many different products, services, and vendors.
What is a Corporate Performance Management Suite?
Corporate performance management suites (CPMs) facilitate efficient, compliant and transparent processes within the office of finance. They enable CFOs and other business leaders to effectively guide strategic direction and increase organizational agility.
How did Gartner Amass Data on CPMs?
Gartner conducted a survey of application leaders in organizations using CPM products. The survey participants were customer references nominated by each of the 16 CPM suite vendors in this Magic Quadrant. These participants were asked 21 questions about their experiences with their CPM vendors and solutions.
What Does the CPM Market include?
The corporate performance management (CPM) application suite market is mature and composed of vendors offering solutions that are widely adopted by large and midsize organizations. (Midsize businesses have approximately 100 to 1,000 employees, and annual revenue of less than $1 billion.)
Gartner categorizes CPM deployments into one of two types:
- Office-of-finance CPM — largely involves the improvement of financial processes
- Strategic CPM — supports organizationwide transformation and growth
Performance management, defined by Gartner, is “the combination of management methodologies, metrics and technologies that enables users to define, monitor and optimize results and outcomes to achieve personal or departmental objectives, while enabling alignment with strategic objectives across multiple organizational levels: personal, process, group, departmental, corporate or business ecosystem.”
Five Components of CPM Suites
When comparing different processes and efficiencies of applications in the Magic Quadrant, Gartner used the following components:
- Financial Consolidation and Close Management
- Financial and Management Reporting and Disclosure
- Financial Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting
- Strategic Planning and Forecasting, and Strategy Management
- Profitability Modeling and Optimization
What does Inclusion on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Mean?
In the definition and inclusion of a company onto Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, these performance management suites were subjected to rigorous testing and analysis. Inclusion into this means that these 16 companies operate more accurately and efficiently than others, and will provide improved return on investment and security for years to come. Specific defining factors include a company’s ability to execute and its completeness of vision.
The following graph will display the companies on the Magic Quadrant.
Gartner’s Quadrant Descriptions
What do each of the quadrants mean? Following is a short description of where each suite fits.
Leaders
Leaders have a large percentage of the CPM suite market share and demonstrate superior CPM sales levels.
Challengers
Challengers must have strong sales revenue and multinational capabilities. They offer good breadth of functionality, but their solutions may lack one or more CPM components.
Visionaries
Visionaries have a strong strategy for delivering a CPM suite. They are distinguished by the openness and flexibility of their application architectures and offer depth of functionality in the areas they address, but may have gaps relative to broader functionality requirements.
Niche Players
Niche Players do well in a specific segment of the CPM suite market, or have limited capability to innovate or outperform other vendors in the market.
Host Analytics Featured in the Gartner CPM Suite Magic Quadrant
Host Analytics is a pure-play, multitenant cloud-based CPM vendor and was the first in the market to offer a full multitenant SaaS CPM suite. Its offering includes support for financial consolidation, disclosure management, budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting, dashboards, modeling, analysis and collaboration. The vendor has been evaluated in Gartner’s CPM Magic Quadrant since 2009.
Related: Host Analytics Delivers Record Subscriptions in Fourth Quarter
Let Brittenford Systems help you drive adoption across your company with a familiar Excel interface that is easy-to-use and become a better business partner with the Host Analytics EPM Suite. As a proud partner of Host Analytics, Brittenford can provide additional information on its capabilities. Please contact [email protected] to learn more.
