Who are the players in the Business performance management software / corporate performance management software space?

3 mega vendors, IBM, Oracle, SAP primarily focused on 5b plus companies. These companies have bought their CPM offerings from buying companies like hyperion and adaytum etc. They focus on adding CPM onto their large ERP BI and database products. the products are also seperate products for each domain - one for consolidation one for budgeting etc
Independent on premise vendors like Tagetik and Bitam - these focus on the smaller companies and mainly in Europe. they do have all the modules in CPM but tagetik does focus on consolidations
Non Suite Niche SaaS players like Adaptive Planning - these only focus on budgeting
Full suite CPM SaaS vendors like Host Analytics - has a combined set of products and covers all the areas of CPM

I suugest looking at the Forrester Wave on BPS for more information

regards

The 3 mega vendors that Keri mentions (Oracle/Hyperion, SAP, IBM/Cognos) dominate the space due to their development within large enterprises. The three of them combined likely control far more than 50% of $ market share.

They all offer comprehensive EPM solutions including:

* Budgeting, Planning, Forecasting
* Dashboarding
* Reporting
* Financial Consolidations
* Advanced Financial Functionality (such as Complex Allocations & Activity Based Profitability Management)

Now, the reasons why these three vendors tend to dominate from a revenue based market share perspective include the following:

* Their pricing/license tends to be the highest while they offer the most robust set of features and functionality
* Larger enterprises tend to purchase more licenses than smaller firms
* They have the best established brands and sales forces
* They leverage relationships they have forged via their other product and service offerings (like their ERP packages and databases)
* Again, they offer the broadest set of functionality

Other solutions outside the top 3 include:
SAS
Infor
Adaptive Planning
HostAnalytics
Prophix
Bitam
Satori Group
Centage
KCI
Exact-Longview
Actuate
Tagetik
and more

Now among these many vendors, it is interesting to note that a recent Gartner survey that polled current customers of various EPM suites ranked Adaptive Planning #1 in Customer Satisfaction and Host Analytics #2.

As a consultant, I have worked with both of these products (note: more so with Adaptive then Host), and having worked with them in addition to the 3 big vendors, I can understand why they are at the top of the list for Customer Satisfaction.

It's true that these two packages cannot do everything that say Hyperion can. For example, Adaptive does not handle Financial Consolidations where eliminations are required, and cannot easily handle complex algorithms/business rules required to do sophisticated Profitability and Cost Analysis with substantial activity based allocation logic.

However, these two products were both built with delivery via a SaaS/Cloud model in mind. This makes it much, much easier to get up and running and to maintain. Also, the scaled back functionality makes the products easier to learn & greatly lowers the complexity involved in administering the applications. They are also less expensive (especially Adaptive and especially from a TCO perspective when you consider software, hardware and services).

With the bigger guys, you are literally dealing with many different applications in their own EPM suites (e.g., just within Oracle: Hyperion Financial Mgmt for consol, Hyperion Planning for Budgeting/Planning/Forecasting, OBIEE for Dashboarding/Reporting, Essbase Administrative Services OR Enterprise Performance Management Architect to conduct the administration and this is just an incomplete list . . . I could go on); these various applications were not originally built to work together. The big vendors are focusing effort to make their EPM suites work together more seamlessly, but they were not built from the ground-up originally with that intention.

So I have seen first hand where the simplicity and ease of use of the more focused solutions from smaller vendors has led to greater customer satisfaction than the Tier-1 big solutions. But it is important to note that the smaller vendors' solutions cannot always handle all of the requirements that a customer has.

Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]; I'm sure that I can provide you with more information and perspective.

-Bill