The tidal wave of acquisitions in the business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) market has changed the landscape of available tools and applications. Some companies evaluating their options for improving their processes and systems are having difficulty planning the best course forward.

The good news is that while the consolidation of offerings may give customers pause in the short term, the long-term outlook for performance management is bright and paved with innovation. The future will bring new levels of integration among data sources and business processes, and will allow BPM customers to extend performance management to new areas of the organization.

As the dust settles, now is a great time for companies to evaluate their information goals and assets, and to choose a performance management strategy that will meet those objectives.

A New Playing Field

The landscape of vendors after 2007's market consolidation can be simplified into three basic categories: platform, warehouse, and independent vendors (see exhibit 1).

Platform vendors are those that offer a complete solution; these products encompass not only performance management applications, but also database, middleware, and presentation solutions, to comprise a complete suite. The presentation tools can include data visualization, dashboards, reporting, and even Microsoft Office tie-ins. Warehouse vendors offer a combination of interoperable tools and applications, but customers may need to go to multiple vendors to put together a complete solution. Finally, the BPM independents offer self-contained tools and applications that are proprietary or database-agnostic. A company that chooses a warehouse or platform strategy may be able to complement the larger system by adding a specialized or best-of-breed performance management solution from one of the independent vendors whose vertical focus or specific features meet its business needs.

Many companies that are looking to invest in performance management processes and software today are interested in linking BPM applications with other business software, including ERP and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. While this is possible with most performance management applications, data integration, security, and other challenges can be prohibitive. Part of the impetus behind all of the recent merger and acquisition (M&A) activity of the platform and warehouse vendors comes from this desire to better integrate data and users into a common framework. Exhibit 2 shows the different areas of performance data that platform and warehouse vendors are aiming to combine. The goal is to provide BI and BPM customers with a comprehensive view of enterprise data that extends from key performance indicator (KPI) goal setting and measurement down to the specifics of each customer, product, order, or employee involved in achieving those goals.

Traditionally, information at the top of exhibit 2's pyramid has been limited to key decision-makers, while information at the bottom has been available to a wide audience of operations users. This disparity has always led to a communication gap between strategy and execution that must be solved from three perspectives: process, people, and technology.

From the technology standpoint, there are many challenges to deploying a complete solution. Historically, security concerns and costly data integration and reconciliation requirements have separated finance's and operations' systems. Some BPM vendors have addressed these challenges by providing their own tools, while others have aligned with extract, transform, and load (ETL) and data quality and cleansing (DQ) vendors to facilitate the integration. A major benefit of the recent market consolidation is that vendors can now work to eliminate the barriers separating layers of the pyramid. The vision of the platform and warehouse vendors is to enable customers to unite proactive and reactive decision-making from top to bottom in order to support planning and execution of corporate strategy.

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