Performance Management is Hot says Gartner

Chicago was host to the Gartner BI conference this past week. I had a chance to attend and tried to focus most of my time on the CPM side of the house attending most of the performance management related sessions, here’s a recap from the events that took place:

CPM is still hot according to Gartner, with strong growth in the market over the past several year, the future looks bright for once upstart now well established category of performance management. Nigel Rainer had a session on CPM where he called out five key focus areas of corporate performance management functionality including; planning and budgeting, dashboards and scorecards, financial consolidation, profitability optimization, and financial management reporting. Rainer also had spoke to hosted solutions in the CPM realm as an area to watch in the next 2-5 years. This holds true particularly in the mid-sized business market where organization have neither the budget nor the IT staff to support user demand around performance management applications.

There was lots of interesting commentary around XBRL and hosted solutions as the future of the space, there was a mention of XBRL filing being made mandatory by the SEC. Rainer spoke to XBRL as a new way to revolutionize the way companies provide financial information to the org. Rainer pointed to the SEC’s financial explorer portal which provides financial details of several dozen publicly traded companies using XBRL tagging. http://209.234.225.154/viewer/home/

John Van Decker and French Caldwell had an interesting session on GRC and financial governance, the net here was that most of the smaller governance vendors will get sucked up by the already consolidated CPM/ERP vendors and added to the portfolio. They also spoke to the overall vision of document management and collaboration as a key piece of the future of GRC.

From a vendor perspective there were a number of other very interesting presentations from the other BI vendors including Oracle and SAP/Business Objects, where they showed roadmap and tried to paint an integrated story. The session that I did sit in on was SAP/Business Objects where they mostly talked around SAP/Business Objects integration or BI/ERP cooperativeness and focused mainly on the Business Objects product stack feature some of their newly acquired technology such as their text mining functionality acquired from a company called Insight.

THERE We Go...

FINALLY the Business Objects Gartner press release makes its appearance.

Given the multitude of changes going on internally right now in the BI and performance management structure (one look at the new management team line-up shows Marge Breya out of marketing and in Juliette Sultan's old job heading up BI, Mark Doll out of the EPM GM role (and back to E&Y), a new marketing lead (from Pilot Software via SAP), and Greg Wolfe back in charge of the Americas), one can imagine that folks may be just a bit distracted. However, and not to dig too far into the weeds, some folks that were "clickable" are not on the front page, but if you click on John Schwarz link, you see all the old BOBJ management team in their old roles (including Marge, Mark, and Greg). Helloooo webmaster!

But that Philip Smeed video is AWESOME--a thousand cocktails to you sir!

Surprise, Surprise, Puppy Surprise

Big news from Gartner yesterday with the release of the new BI quad. The quad itself positions Microsoft as the dominant vendor in the "ability to execute category," partly due to their partner and sales model and mostly due to the new functionality built right into their core platforms which they are using to deliver BI, The Office System and SQL.

The time seems to be now for Microsoft to release the hounds, and deliver on their BI strategy as the major players in the space (Business Objects and Cognos) will be consumed with integration efforts. In addition to this the company just released the v1 product PerformancePoint Sever, which is not really a v1 product but more of a combination of a more mature product portfolio with the ProClarity tools and Business Scorecard Manager (a 4 year old scorecarding tool built in house at Microsoft). What is new is the planning and budgeting functionality which is added into PerformancePoint and is delivered in the all familiar environment of Excel. Add in some new BI functionality in the latest release of Office 2007 and an upcoming launch of SQL Server 2008 and you can quickly get the picture for why Microsoft is that clear leader in the ability to execute column. Oh wait, how could I forget the most important piece, PRICE. Which could actually be more of a factor than anticipated given recent economic rumblings, just ask you stock broker.

What will happen when SAP, Oracle, and IBM get their acts together? Will HP jump into the game and pick up MicroTradgedy? Only time will tell but all of this gives Microsoft a good opportunity to give a real kick of the BI can in 2008, it’ll be interesting to see how many puppies are really inside. Heck just ask the product manager for Crystal Reports what happened when Reporting Services released back in 2002.

Information Week Breaks the Seal...

It's interesting how all the BI vendors go to great lengths to adhere to the strict guidelines and protocols established by Gartner and the other analyst firms on what you can say about your own particular rating in the annual magic quadrants races, waves, and vendor evaluations. And it's reflected in the type of bland, non-newsy press releases that vendors tend to issue in these cases, like Cognos here, and Microsoft here (strange that we haven't heard from BOBJASAPCO (Business Objects an SAP Company) yet, they're usually right on the ball with these types of announcements when they're happy with their placement--could it be that they're not? hmmm...

In any case, all that is out the window now as Mary Hayes Weier writes today in Information Week about the Microsoft Surge into the leader's quadrant at the expense of some of the other traditional BI vendors. I'm not sure how taboo or copyrighted any of this information actually is, but it does provide some welcomed insight into the actual report, and lists some of the other vendors and the general area in which they placed in this review cycle.

Overall there's a lot to be happy about in both the Gartner report and this article if you're based up in Redmond today. Expect this article to be forwarded around to A LOT of prospects and customers. What strikes me is the refreshing context that an article like this provides, in contrast to the careful dancing and posturing that all the BI vendors go through in their official announcements. Ultimately I think this helps the customer and the market.

Rumor has it...

We may be close to seeing a new BI magic quadrant in the coming weeks. Any chance there's a shake-up in the leader's group? Will Business Objects retain its crown from last year? Will Microsoft finally move the millimeter or so it needed to get in the leaders group? Will any of the new and up-and-coming vendors make a splash that will shake up the industry?

Don't look at us, we have no idea, we're just stirring things up...

Process Management Gone Wild

It took Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise doing a Q&A with Janelle Hill from Gartner on the state of play in the business process management segment, as well as the recent IE Dozen Editors choice awards, to prompt me to make some comments on the state of play in process management.

The Q&A with Janelle was related to Doug's blog commenting on Gartner's BPMS problem. Doug mentions that Gartner has a problem because vendors are upset this may be the last BPMS MQ, a notion that Janelle rejects - at least mostly. It is under review, but Doug comments on the concern of one unnamed vendor that Gartner's concept of a Business Process Platform (BPP) favors the big vendors. Like the ones who sell platforms. Ya think? Doug also notes that the genie is out of the bottle for process vendors, and he is likely right. The game is on and process is now something that is offered by a variety of vendors.

The leaders quadrant for BPMS, in rough order of placement (yes, high and to the right matters)

Pegasystems
Savvion
Lombardi
BEA
Tibco
Metastorm
Global 360
Software AG
Appian
IBM

On the outside of the leader section looking in: Oracle, Adobe, EMC and more. To quote a friend from Texas, this looks like a goat rodeo, and there are a lot of goats. And a couple things that make you go, hmmm.

Among the big headlines for Business Process Management:

First, the category has clearly arrived. BPMS is one of the fastest growing in software, yet what is interesting is how many different types of organizations are spending on capability to make process explicit in their offering and aggressively market it.

Second, the top three players in the space combined for less than $200M in revenue in FY '07. This suggests that not only are they potential acquisition targets, but that the bar to distinguish themselves with innovation has just been raised. Claiming leadership in this market is more difficult now, and the competition punches much harder.

Third, two of the big 4 platform guys are notable by their absence - SAP and Microsoft. SAP gets mention in the report for recognition of the importance of process management and some gaps, especially on the human side, but they are working on it, mostly in the Netweaver end of the house. MSFT is missing in action, but I have heard that the good folks in Redmond are up to something on BPMS. They are also a strong lead feeder to the .Net players in this space like Metastorm.

Finally, can it really be a category when everyone is a leader? Among the concerns here for customers as well as for vendors is the overall criteria and scoring. There are many marked differences among the leading vendors, yet they are hard to discern from the MQ, much less by someone new to the party. This is like when my brother founded the math club in high school and one of the bi-laws was that everyone in the club had the title of president, that way they could submit their college applications with a little something extra. Now think about what happens the next time someone in IT issues an RFP for process management. Goats gone wild.

My guess is that the shelf life of this quad will be about 18 months, much like the last one, and then it will not be renewed. High and right is full, no more leaders please.

One other note from the BPMS Magic Quad. It was published on December 14th by Janelle Hill and Eric Deitert with a couple other analysts. Gartner announced this week that Deitert has left Gartner for a position at Pegasystems, where he was a former employee. Just another thing that makes you go hmmm...

Piecing Together the Gartner CPM Magic Quadrant Results

Well, we knew when we broke for the holidays that the Garnter CPM magic quadrant release were just days from coming out. We deliberated about doing a post-festivus alert, but knowing that everyone was quickly headed out of town, decided that the world would have to wait with bated breath for our in-depth analysis of the latest results.

Now while we're not able to actually publish the quad itself, it being copyrighted and all, it's pretty easy to piece together where the main players fell out in the mix based on the 55 font type press releases and wire service reports that have been pinging our inboxes every day since the results were announced.

The big winners:

Oracle/Hyperion: The combination of the two companies nearly complete, they make for a compelling offering in the CPM space; and with the long-time leadership of Hyperion, this one was a no-brainer. Oracle has been on quite a roll lately, racking up leadership awards from all the main analyst firms. Now whether they all equate to Oracle being #1 in BI is another story, but there's no question that the BI pieces have come together for them in the past year.

Cognos: Although their acquisition of Applix was not fully factored into the mix, Cognos was positioned in the leaders quadrant this year, as they have in every year since the quad was released. Another strong showing from Team Ottawa in their last quad as an independent vendor. As IBM has not been represented on the quad in the past, expect the big name change in the leader's quadrant for next year.

Business Objects: The big mover this past year, BOBJ was also positioned strongly in the leaders quadrant, along with soon-to-be lord and master SAP. The combination of the two company's offerings should make this coming year's competition interesting, product roadmap challenges not withstanding. As has been well documented, the Business Objects strategy of buying their way into the leadership position with acquistions of SRC, ALG, and finally Cartesis was enough to push them over the top.

Not-so-Big Winners:
Now while everyone's a winner in our book, you can always tell these companies by the fact that they don't rush out press releases touting the fact that they came in behind the pack, like, for instance...

SAS: Nope, move along, nothing to see here. SAS isn't exactly touting the fact that they aren't in the leaders quadrant again this year, something that must be disappointing to them, seeing as they are rated about the same as they were in 2006--close, but actually falling a bit behind the new leaders given how much the market has changed.

Microsoft: We should really label Team Redmond as having an "incomplete" this time around, as Gartner points out in their review that the PerformancePoint Server product was not fully taken into account into the evalutation, as the product was not actually out in the market in-time to hit the cut-off date. As such, Microsoft was dinged a bit on their ability to execute, but those of you with the quad in your hand will recognize the rightward tilt of the completeness of vision that vendors fight most with Gartner on that they actually did pretty well on. With a full year of PPS selling and positioning in the marketplace, it will be interesting to see how much MSFT is able to move in the coming year.

Other Miscellan-ee-i that we can disclose and have opinions on:

--Total number of vendors in leaders quadrant in 2007 vs. 2006: 4 vs. 2
--Total number of vendors on the quad in 2007 vs. 2006: 13 vs. 16 (so much for all-consuming consolidation)
--Biggest winner: I'll go with SAP actually. If you compare last year's and this year's measurements, while Hyperion/Oracle and Cognos are still clearly the leaders, their position really didn't change that much. However, with Business Objects moving into the leaders quadrant along with SAP, they are well positioned for a strong year, again pending product issues (and those are huge, by the way, so while I don't discount them, they are well set up)
--Biggest loser: Has to be SAS. They were so close last year to the leaders quad, and barely moved up this year, actually losing ground to several competitors. Getting to be a tough market!
--Vendor to watch: I'll leave aside the obvious choice in Microsoft, and actually go with Infor. Their completeness of vision continues to move right, and they themselves are getting very close to the upper right region.
--Off-the-wall New Year prediction: This is the last year for a stand-alone CPM quad--there's already rumblings that it will be BI and CPM next year--we shall see!

2008 - All About Process Management

The word of the day is process. The word for 2008 is Process Management. At the most recent Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando, the keynote laid out their 10 strategic technologies for 2008. The strategic technologies were defined as capable of disrupting IT, business or both, requiring strategic investment (Eg: real money), and Gartner is suggesting you don't want to be late or left behind. Check this eweek slide show for the overview. Gartner's top 10.

1. Green IT
2. Unified communications (seems like we have talked about this before)
3. BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT
4. Metadata management
5. Virtualization 2.0
6. Mash-ups and composite applications
7. Web platform and WOA
8. Computing Fabric
9. Real World Web
10. Social Software

Among the things of note is that business process shows up on the top of the software stack as a must have. Maybe this is response to the Moore's Law effect currently happening to analyst BPM forcasts - the size of supposed market doubles every 18 months according to Forrester, IDC and Gartner. Also interesting that Gartner makes reference to starting with process modeling for all classes of users with the idea that complete process management suites are required to bridge the gap between process as a discipline and whatever is happening in IT regarding SOA.

This topic is likely top of mind for many organizations as they look to unlock the next generation of repeatable performance based on process. Watch this space for more details.