Craig Schiff , President and CEO, BPM Partners

Overview

It seems every year there are more and more reports covering the business performance management space of budgeting, planning, forecasting, consolidation, reporting, and analytics. None of these reports (even the ones from BPM Partners) tell you everything you need to know to make the right purchase decision. However, they are useful as a starting point, a way to get educated and begin to identify your short list. As you would expect, some reports are more useful than others. It all depends on what you are looking for.  Let’s briefly look at each of the major reports and show you where you can get a free copy.

Available Reports

There are a number of reports available today that focus on various aspects of performance management. Here is a key to the major reports:

BARC Planning Survey – Presentation of survey results with analyst commentary for planning in general and 22 products in particular, from a European-based research firm. Also offers Business Intelligence focused reports.

BPM Partners Vendor Landscape Matrix – Analyst overviews, feature checkboxes, ‘best fit’ analysis, pricing, and customer satisfaction scores for 17 budgeting, planning, reporting, and consolidation vendors.

Dresner Advisory Wisdom of Crowds EPM Market Study – Presents survey results with a focus on enterprise planning and rankings of 13 vendors. Also offers similar reports focused on Business Intelligence.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud FP&A Solutions– Analyst review of strengths and cautions for 15 vendors. Similar report available for 10 Cloud Financial Close vendors.

Nucleus Research CPM Technology Value Matrix – Analyzes usability and functionality of 18 performance management vendors. Also offer ROI case studies.

While the reports listed above are typically updated on an annual basis, there are also several analyst reports that are either specialized one-shots or infrequently updated. They include Aberdeen – ROI of Sales Planning Analytics, Bloor – From Insight to Action, Forrester – Total Economic Impact, and IDC – MarketScape: Worldwide EPM Market.

Free Copies of Analyst Reports

Now that you have an idea of what reports are available, here is how to get your own copies of the ones that are most relevant to you, all at no cost.

BPM Partners offers a free subset of its Vendor Landscape Matrix report comparing two vendors of your choosing, available here: Vendor Snapshots

For all other analyst reports the links provided below will take you to each vendor’s PerformancePlace page on this site. The free report links for the listed analysts are in the ‘Industry View’ section of each page.

Axiom Software (Kaufman Hall) (Gartner), Board (BARC, Bloor, Dresner Advisory, IDC, Nucleus Research), CCH Tagetik (Wolters Kluwer) (BARC, Gartner), Host Analytics (Dresner Advisory, Forrester, Gartner, IDC, Nucleus Research), IBM (Aberdeen, BARC, Gartner), Jedox (BARC, Dresner, Gartner), Longview (BARC), OneStream (BARC, Dresner Advisory, Gartner, Nucleus Research), Oracle (Gartner), Prophix (BARC, Dresner Advisory), SAP (BARC, Gartner), Vena (Nucleus Research)

Note on free copies: As you’re well aware, nothing is ever totally free. In most cases the vendor you request the report from will probably follow up with some marketing outreach. It’s only fair since each of these reports would normally cost hundreds of dollars or more. Therefore, it makes sense to request the report from a vendor that you wouldn’t mind hearing from and potentially learning more about.