Business analytics sharpen vertical edge

Corporate performance management — sometimes called “business analytics” — is a segment of the business intelligence (BI) market that is undergoing rapid consolidation.

Since spring, there has been a steady stream of CPM mergers and acquisitions: Oracle bought Hyperion, then Business Objects purchased Cartesis, SAP landed Outlooksoft, and Cognos nabbed Applix. One could argue that this trend actually started a year ago, when Microsoft acquired ProClarity, a deal that bore first fruits last month when the software powerhouse released Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, its first comprehensive CPM offering.

Driving CPM industry consolidation has been BI software vendors’ desire to field ever more comprehensive analytics application suites for chief financial officer (CFO) organizations. Though the CPM industry provides specialized solutions for a dizzying range of horizontal business requirements and vertical industries, most major BI/CPM vendors covet the lucrative CFO market, due both to its considerable size and to its potential for trickle-down cross-marketing of CPM tools to other functional groups within enterprise accounts.

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Corporate performance management — sometimes called “business analytics” — is a segment of the business intelligence (BI) market that is undergoing rapid consolidation.

Since spring, there has been a steady stream of CPM mergers and acquisitions: Oracle bought Hyperion, then Business Objects purchased Cartesis, SAP landed Outlooksoft, and Cognos nabbed Applix. One could argue that this trend actually started a year ago, when Microsoft acquired ProClarity, a deal that bore first fruits last month when the software powerhouse released Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, its first comprehensive CPM offering.

Driving CPM industry consolidation has been BI software vendors’ desire to field ever more comprehensive analytics application suites for chief financial officer (CFO) organizations. Though the CPM industry provides specialized solutions for a dizzying range of horizontal business requirements and vertical industries, most major BI/CPM vendors covet the lucrative CFO market, due both to its considerable size and to its potential for trickle-down cross-marketing of CPM tools to other functional groups within enterprise accounts.

In some ways, financial analytics is the most viral of all CPM applications, inasmuch as these tools have the potential to touch every part of an enterprise. Each of the major acquiring vendors has been hard at work assembling comprehensive, BI-integrated CPM suites of tools for financial planning, modeling, forecasting, budgeting, consolidation, reconciliation, monitoring, costing, reporting and analysis.

As noted above, Microsoft has just launched one such solution. Business Objects wasted little time in integrating Cartesis and some earlier financial CPM vendor acquisitions — SRC and ALG — into a new suite, EPM XI, that was also rolled out last month. And it’s highly likely that we’ll see similar rebranded, CFO-focused all-in-one suites in the coming year from Oracle/Hyperion, SAP/Outlooksoft and Cognos/Applix.

However, there’s one little problem that all of these BI vendors face as they push forward with their CFO-focused business analytics strategies. All of them are chasing the same horizontal CPM niche — i.e., addressing the needs of CFOs in enterprises of all sizes — hence are increasingly crafting all-in-one solutions that are comprehensive in their financial analytics functionality but increasingly indistinguishable from one another.

In other words, the financial analytics segment is well on its way to commoditization — hence overcrowding, aggressive pricing and puny profit margins.

So there’s either a grand irony or tragedy in the works, depending on your viewpoint or vested interest in the business analytics wars. One of the unstated motives of BI vendors in sharpening their CPM portfolios was to escape commoditization in the core BI arena, which has become a very mature, overcrowded segment of the SOA universe. At the coarsest level of analysis, most BI vendors’ solution families have converged on look-alike assemblages of browser-oriented query, reporting, dashboarding, and online analytical processing functionality. Fueling the commoditization trend has been the steady invasion of open source, on-demand services, appliance-oriented packaging and service-oriented architecture (SOA) approaches throughout the BI world.