Mid-Market CPM Requirements and Vendor Selection Criteria

In today’s fast-paced and volatile business climate, midsize businesses need a clear vision, financial agility, and strong collaborative capabilities to drive better-informed and more strategic business decisions. Mergers, acquisitions, new business models, and increasing regulatory requirements heighten the importance of having accurate, flexible tools to support corporate forecasting, budgeting, reporting, scorecard and compliance functions.

Many midsize companies currently use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, email, shared folders, and other ad hoc tools for these tasks, but they are finding significant shortcomings with this approach. As a result, more businesses are evaluating CPM solutions as a way to get these jobs done faster, more efficiently, and more accurately.

However, while their financial and planning operations may be very complex, midsize companies are often constrained in terms of their budget, IT resources, and support. In addition to evaluating the features of different CPM solutions and how these solutions stack up in terms of meeting their functional requirements, decision makers need to consider several additional factors. Based on our recent in-depth discussions with several mid-market CFOs and CIOs that have evaluated, selected, and implemented CPM solutions in the last couple of years, here are our suggestions as to the key questions that midsize firms need to answer when evaluating CPM solutions:

• How quickly and easily can business users learn to use the solution? Easy to use solutions lead to faster, more widespread user adoption. Ideally, CPM solutions should have an interface with a familiar spreadsheet look and feel. You should be able to easily configure the interface and dashboards without help from IT or external consultants, and building models should be intuitive. In a midsize firm, you don’t want to have to rely on or wait for an IT department that’s probably stretched to thin to create and run reports. When users can easily create and run reports themselves, they get the key performance indicators (KPIs) and other information they need more quickly, speeding up and enhancing the decision-making process.
  
• What is the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the CPM solution? CPM solutions need to be affordable. They must take into account not only software costs but also any resources that you will need to design, implement, configure and manage these solutions (including annual maintenance fees), as well as the hardware you’ll need to run them on. You must also consider if you’d be better off with a subscription-based service that you can pay for monthly or annually without incurring any upfront capital costs. Many midmarket buyers are considering software-as-a-service (SaaS) or cloud-based CPM solutions that offer subscription-based pricing and eliminate the need for upfront capital investments. SaaS CPM makes it easy for companies to start small and expand use as their needs grow. Since SaaS CPM solutions are delivered over the Web, they don’t require on-premise infrastructure, or internal IT support or maintenance. As a result, you can deploy them more quickly and dramatically reduce TCO.
  
• Is the vendor’s pricing transparent? No one wants to start evaluating solutions and then get sticker shock because of hidden costs. Look for vendors that provide transparent pricing on their Websites, or at least, vendors that will give you a good ballpark estimate early on it the evaluation process.
• Do you want a focused, purpose-built CPM solution, or CPM as part of a broader business intelligence solution? Solutions designed specifically for corporate performance management (such as Adaptive Planning, Clarity, Prophix. Longview and others) are typically more cost-effective and fast to deploy than broader business intelligence suites, which often include a CPM component. However, broad based BI solutions, such as IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects, are beginning to carve out CPM specific modules and offerings that integrate with the broader suite. Consider what your short and long term requirements in deciding which route will best serve your firm’s needs.
  
• Can you try before you buy? Solutions that are easy to evaluate lower your risk—both from a time and monetary perspective. Can you get a true feel for the solution, with a functional trial version? If the finance department can try the solution with real data and see the results, it can speed the vendor selection and decision-making timeframe significantly.
  
• How long will it take to implement the solution? Most mid-market enterprises do not have months to spend deploying and getting productive with CPM. Talk to customers already using the solutions you are considering to get an accurate, realistic picture of how long it will take.
  
• How well does the solution meet your data security requirements? Security is a top concern for all companies, and in some industries, regulatory requirements also come into play when considering a CPM solution. In some cases, specific compliance constraints require companies to deploy on-premise solutions. However, in many cases, a quality SaaS provider can provide better, more secure and more reliable operations than an internal IT department. Ideally, look for a vendor that is SAS-70 compliant and can readily document the physical and virtual security measures that they use to safeguard your data.

The good news is that today, more CPM solutions are available that are specifically designed to meet mid-market requirements than in the recent past (from companies like Clarity Systems, Prophix, Adaptive Planning, Host Analytics, Longview and from BI companies like SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, etc.). By carefully assessing the questions above and focusing on the criteria and features most important to your business, you will almost certainly find a CPM solution that can give you a much more connected, productive planning process than could be achieved with Excel spreadsheets.

Mid-Market companies benefit from the significantly better ROI offered by the synergistic relationship between ERP and BI

Strong value in considering/purchasing ERP plus BI simultaneously/at the beginning of the implementation cycle

ERP solutions come with a reporting toolset consisting of a predefined set of reports and with general purpose query tools to generate reports from data within ERP database. Most often, these tools are difficult and confusing to use and rely on an IT team to deliver the requested report, which can take time. ERP systems provide acceptable reports on day-to-day operations but if business requirements change, these static ERP reports need to be customized. Business users need on-demand reports, which are cumbersome and expensive to deliver in a timely manner. By using BI reporting solutions, these systems empower the business user to define and generate the needed reports, freeing valuable IT (or consultant) resources in the process, such that data and time can be better exploited to make meaningful business decisions.

I have been talking to several mid-market companies that have implemented ERP solutions followed by a business intelligence solution (initially deployed for reporting from the data in the ERP solution). Their recommendation, based on their experience of deploying both solutions, is that mid-market enterprises should consider utilizing ERP and BI together (possibly through a planned phased implementation approach), a strategy that would realize significantly higher ROI versus the alternative of considering each independently of the other.

The crux of this recommendation comes from closely looking at the customizations required to make the ERP solution useful for these companies. A significant number of customizations needed in ERP systems are related to generating reports to provide detailed information (in part, similar to that previously obtained through their formerly implemented legacy systems) for decision-making and presenting it in a useful and easy-to-understand manner—a daunting and expensive proposition. Complementing a BI solution with an ERP solution makes the generation of reports required by corporate management and various lines-of-business very easy and eliminates the need for any extensive customizations (as was required to generate these in an exclusively ERP system). The right business intelligence solutions can help extract significant value from the extensive data repositories in an ERP solution. The combination of ERP and BI should also bode well for mid-market companies in the current difficult economic environment, as companies strive for maximum efficiency by looking to cut costs and realize projects that provide them with short-term returns. The companies that have already implemented ERP could benefit by focusing on BI solutions for reporting, corporate performance management and consolidation (CPM) and strategy planning.

Mid-market customers using SAP Business-All-in-One as their key ERP solution have said that the extra time, effort, and money spent to customize their initial ERP could have gone towards paying for a BI solution (in several of the cases they were using SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI). Additionally, the reports they now get from their SAP BusinessObjects solutions (after integration) are more detailed and accurate than before. Other added benefits of this integrated solution—including savings on maintenance, IT administration time, integration and consulting support for upgrades, etc—largely result from the fact that SAP has already spent the time and effort to tightly integrate these two solutions providing better workflow and departmental self-service capabilities to develop and customize reports for their needs. With this solution, individual users can also more easily drill down from these reports to get deeper context to explain the factors influencing what is shown in reports beyond the visually attractive graphs and tables.

As a result, this combined SAP Business-All-in-One and SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI solution could provide significantly better Return on Investment (ROI) than each solution considered independently, and if the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI can be paid for by reducing the customizations required in SAP Business-All-in-One, the combined solution also has a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO). With the mid-market focused Business All-in-One fast-start program from SAP coupled with the SAP best practices for the SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI for reporting and CPM solution, mid-market enterprises will be able to benefit from fast deployment, more productive and streamlined solution.

Intuit and Microsoft – two SMB market leaders partnering on cloud platform strategies to deliver web applications

This agreement provides an end-to-end applications development environment and marketing/sales channels for application developers to develop and market application solutions to small businesses. Key elements of the agreement include:

• Broadening the applications developer community to develop SMB focused applications – Intuit to provide a SDK to help developers build applications on Microsoft Windows Azure Platform (and Visual Studio) and federate these web applications into Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) and launch these applications through the Intuit App Center (IAC).
• Expand channel for application developers to promote and market their applications – Business Productivity Online Suite into Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) by year-end – Salesforce.com’s Force.com PaaS platform. Microsoft and Intuit will join forces to expand channels for application developers by introducing them to IAC. With capabilities to buy and access these cloud-based applications from the IAC and support for single sign-on will make it easier for SMBs to use these applications.
• Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. SMBs that use BPOS will have access to Intuit’s SMB focused business applications like QuickBooks and additional applications available through the IAC.

This relationship is focused on the U.S., the region where Intuit has majority of its presence. Microsoft and Intuit will support joint marketing programs targeted at the applications developers, channels and SMB companies.

In today’s fast-paced and volatile business climate, SMB need cloud-based application as they provide much better total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to on-premise installed applications. This relationship will provide significant benefits to SMBs that have shown increasing appetite to adopt cloud based solutions. The key benefits to the SMB community from this relationship are:

• For Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform service (PaaS), the Intuit relationship is a key endorsement of Microsoft as a key player in the SMB segment and of a company that has a good understanding of how to work with application developers. This combination will provide good competition to the
• With Microsoft withdrawing from the small business accounting application area, creates a much more favorable partnership environment between the two companies to collaborate on the applications and channels front. A cooperative relationship between these two SMB focused companies will yield tremendous benefits to the SMB community.
• With more than four million Intuit’s QuickBooks customers, the Inuit App Center will present a very attractive opportunity for applications developers to showcase their applications to the QuickBooks user community.

2010 Top 10 SMB Technology Market Predictions

Fellow SMB analyst Laurie McCabe and I have teamed up to bring you our top ten technology related predictions-plus three bonus predictions–for the SMB (companies with 1-1000 employees) market for 2010. Details for each prediction follow the list below.
    

1. Pent Up SMB Demand Will Be There—But Won’t Be Easy to Capture
2. SMBs Accelerate Their Shift to Digital Marketing Media
3. The Collaboration Battle Heats Up
4. The New Face of Small Business
5. Savvy SMB Vendors Get Strategic About Social Media Analysis
6. SMBs Drive the Mobile Internet Tsunami
7. Virtualization Boosts Cloud Computing Adoption
8. SMBs’ Appetite for Managed Services Grows
9. Beyond Excel—Targeted Workflow and Analytic Tools Takes Flight
10. 2009 Acquisitions Drive New Value for SMB customers in 2010

Bonus Predictions
    

1. Time to Get Paid for Selling a Free Lunch
2. Vendors Scramble for SMB Developer Loyalty—and New Integration Needs Arise
3. SaaS Computing Lifts Off in New Areas

Details for each prediction follow the:
    

1. Pent Up Demand Will Be There—But Won’t Be Easy to Capture.
   In 2010, as the economy comes out of recession, SMBs will be more willing to spend again, but only for solutions that will provide demonstrable bottom and/or top line business benefits. SMBs will spend only if they believe that the investment will help them operate more profitably, grow revenues, increase productivity, save money or gain time-to-market advantages. SMBs are also evaluating and making trade-offs in areas that offer strategic, long-term advantages vs. those that meet more urgent, short-term needs. In many cases, IT investments must also be weighed against requirements for other core goods and services essential to the business.
   
   To have any chance at making the final cut, vendors will need to redouble efforts to illuminate their value proposition in a clear and compelling manner, and provide more quantifiable evidence that their solutions will help slash costs, increase productivity and provide payback value. Time-strapped SMBs will also increasingly demand that vendors be easy to do business with—heavily favoring vendors that offer an accessible, transparent and positive sales experience from discovery through purchase.
   

        

2. SMBs Accelerate Their Shift to Digital Marketing Media.
   In 2010, SMB adoption of digital marketing media will accelerate, as more SMBs turn away from traditional media (yellow pages, print, direct mail, etc.) and towards social networking (e.g. Facebook and Twitter), email marketing, search engine marketing, blogs, forums, etc. As SMBs become more familiar with the basics, they will seek out solutions that help them streamline and integrate customer interactions across multiple digital venues.

   Prime opportunities include more specific, tailored search optimization and management services. Examples include Lotusjump, designed to help retailers and etailers optimize organic search for hundreds or thousands of products; Yodle, aimed at helping services businesses create an integrated Web site and SEO campaign to drive foot traffic and make the phone ring; and WebVisible, which helps local businesses create more effective online marketing and advertising campaigns. Another sweet spot will be services that help SMBs manage and integrate inbound and outbound social media streams, along with more structured digital marketing tools, such as SEO, SEM and email marketing. Vendors such as Cloudprofile and Hubspot offer such capabilities now, with Salesforce.com’s Chatter slated for the second half of 2010. With the market getting more crowded and noisy by the minute, however, vendors will need to avoid overloading SMBs with techno-babble, and focus instead on providing SMBs with an exceptional user experience and measurable business benefits.    

3. The Collaboration Battle Heats Up.
   In an age of information overload, SMBs need better collaboration tools, integrated with daily workflow, to bring order to the chaos. SMB decision-makers and employees are reaping the benefits of social networking and collaboration tools like Facebook and Evite in their personal lives—and asking how they can derive the same kinds of benefits in their businesses. They want to make information easier to find, share and use; extend and enhance the body of shared knowledge; and connect with people they need when they need them.

   In 2010, the collaboration battle will swing into full gear, as vendors introduce more integrated solutions that pull together people, tools, services and content. After all, collaboration is the only business activity that every employee engages in every day—offering vendors an irresistible opportunity to expand their market footprints and installed base presence. For instance, IBM LotusLive and Lotus Foundations make powerful Lotus collaboration capabilities affordable and digestible for SMBs; Microsoft continues to extend SharePoint and hosted messaging capabilities; and smaller players, such as HyperOffice and Zoho, feature services built for small business from the ground up. At the same time, business solutions vendors from SAP to Salesforce.com are embedding richer collaboration capabilities into their offerings. Even networking vendors, such as Cisco, are getting into the game under the unified communications umbrella.    

4. The New Face of Small Business. In 2010, vendors need re-examine the evolving small business market with a new segmentation lens to better identify the composition of the small business market, and how they can create the most compelling offerings as the sands shift. Triggered by the recession, generational changes, and globalization, a tectonic shift is changing the face of small businesses. The generational shift has been underway for a while, of course: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that the number of workers between ages 33 and 44 will decline rapidly through 2020, and that more people in the labor pool are likely to be either under 30 years old or over 50. Meanwhile, more people are opting to start their own businesses: the U.S. Department of Labor notes that 650,000 new businesses started up in 2006, compared to roughly 570,000 in 2002.

   Different types of entrepreneurs, small business owners and their employees have diverse requirements and expectations for technology solutions. While older workers may tend to stick with the familiar, younger new business owners and workers are unlikely to have much allegiance to existing market leaders. As baby boomers in the U.S. retire, younger Gen X and Gen Y workers—and soon Millenials—will replace them. But, many retiring or laid off older workers will move on to start new businesses, out of economic necessity and/or for lifestyle preferences. In addition, persistently high unemployment will accelerate the entrepreneurial trend across all age groups. Meanwhile, globalization is fueling the need for small businesses to expand interactions beyond their traditional geographies.    

5. Savvy SMB Vendors Get Strategic About Social Media Analysis.
   Social media is becoming a mainstream way for vendors and service providers to engage with small and medium businesses. Most vendors already have a social media presence and publish content regularly through social media channels, while many have integrated social media into their customer service approaches and/or using tools to measure brand performance. However, only a handful have developed an effective approach to extract meaningful strategic insights from social media conversations, engagements and information. In 2010, vendors will augment tactical use of social media with a more sophisticated, strategic plan to monitor and analyze broader SMB trends and directions. By listening, synthesizing and analyzing conversations at a higher level, vendors can strengthen market insights for use in marketing, product planning, channel development and merger and acquisition strategies. Coupled with more traditional research, domain expertise and analysis, this strategic perspective on social media conversations will provide actionable insights and a competitive edge.
6. SMBs Drive the Mobile Internet Tsunami. In 2010, SMB adoption of smart mobile devices and services will increase at an even faster pace, as the number of mobile applications and services grows exponentially. SMBs with services businesses are already serving up local ads in local searches delivered on iPhones and Blackberries—as evidenced by the fact that vendors providing local search solutions saw their revenues jump by 50% to 100% in 2009. Things will continue to heat up as new Google Android-based smart phones continue to swarm the market, Dell’s new division focused on mobile devices debuts, Apple’s iPhone AppStore expands, and vendors such as RIM and Nokia launch their own application stores in response to Apple’s success. Vendors that can go beyond devices and applications to help SMBs create more engaging content, and develop more effective e-commerce and permission-based strategies to reach their target customers on these devices can gain a significant advantage going forward. 
7. Virtualization Boosts Cloud Computing Adoption. For the foreseeable future, SMBs’ will continue to take a hybrid approach to technology, combining on-premise and public cloud-based solutions to satisfy business requirements. In 2010, vendors will offer a greater range of targeted solutions for hybrid environment requirements to spur SMB interest and traction. Virtual desktops, business continuity/disaster recovery, on-demand computing and storage will feature prominently in vendors’ lineups. As SMBs contemplate Windows 7 migration strategies, they will more closely evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud delivered virtual desktop solutions vs. deploying new Windows 7 desktops/laptops—as well as the added benefits around security, backups, updates, etc. that virtual desktops provide. Growing adoption of virtualization will also open the door for SMBs to consider high availability and disaster recovery solutions, which until now, have been highly desirable, but largely unfeasible for smaller companies. Look for VMware to lead the way, with others, such as Citrix and Microsoft playing catch up.
8. SMBs’ Appetite for Managed Services Grows.
   SMB business requirements continue to become more complex, and their reliance on technology is increasing. But most lack the resources to keep IT infrastructure up and running at peak performance. Increasing business reliance on IT infrastructure will fuel rising demand for managed services providers (MSPs) to increase performance, reliability, availability and service levels—but at reduced or at least neutral costs.Although demand for point services (for things like backup and recovery, security and virus protection) will remain healthy, more SMBs will seek out comprehensive managed services offerings in order to free up resources to focus on core business requirements and get the benefits of “one throat to choke.” By coupling cost-effective, round the clock remote management services with onsite support, vendors will make managed services more affordable and accessible for SMBs. Examples include Dell’s ProManage Managed Services, which combines the advantages of remote management services with a scalable network operating center along with a team of local Dell and partner support professionals around the globe that provide onsite support; Mindshift, which offers horizontal managed services, as well as vertical managed services solutions for industries such as legal, healthcare and professional services; and HP, which is approaching the SMB managed services segment through its HP Smart Management Services for SMB and Total Care Business Solutions.
9.  Beyond Excel—Targeted Workflow and Analytic Tools Takes Flight. Today, SMBs often rely on disjointed, ad hoc methods to manage many tasks and workflows, such as spend management, expense management, sales compensation and corporate performance management—to name a few. For the most part, they tackle these and other jobs with Excel spreadsheets and a messy mix of emails, paper documents and manual processing. Besides being a headache for everyone involved, this cumbersome approach has many other drawbacks, such as limited reporting abilities, high error rates, a lack of real-time visibility and collaboration capabilities, and limited flexibility.Until recently, most solutions to help manage these processes were too expensive and cumbersome for the typical SMB customer. However, the rise of cloud computing has given wings to many software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that give SMBs purpose-built tools that help streamline workflow and provide critical intelligence to help improve top and bottom line performance. In 2010, vendors’ mid-market offerings in areas such as corporate performance management (CPM), with vendors such  as Adaptive Planning and Clarity Systems; sales compensation management, with players such as Xactly; and spend management, with entrants such as Rosslyn Analytics, which recently launched RA.Pid, a free self-service solution for SMBs. Meanwhile, traditional enterprise BI players, such as IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects will need to continue to carve out more digestible BI offerings for the mid-market, offering up solutions and/or end-to-end on demand business process services to customers.
10. 2009 Acquisitions Drive New Value for SMB customers in 2010.
    In 2009, many deals were struck that portend great impact on the SMB market, channel and competitive landscape. Among the most notable were
    HP’s acquisition of 3Com, which gives HP the ability to provide a full complement of networking and connectivity solutions for SMB customers. In a market long dominated by Cisco, the HP-3Com combination gives SMBs a strong alternative, with attractively priced, competitive networking products and services with a compelling value proposition. Intuit’s acquisitions of PayCycle, Mint.com and BooRah continue to build and refresh the vendor’s portfolio of services for it’s core small business and consumer segments—which often overlap in the “prosumer” category. Intuit will likely continue on an aggressive acquisition trajectory in 2010. Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions makes Avaya the runaway market share leader in voice and unified communications in the SMB market, with roughly twice the market share of Cisco. But at the same time, Cisco’s pending acquisition of Tandberg will enable it to bring cost effective, standards based video conferencing solutions to SMBs, creating new awareness and interest in the SMB video conferencing market. We also expect 2010 to spawn a new round of acquisition activity as vendors converge collaboration, social media and business solutions.

    

Bonus Predictions:
    

1. Time to Get Paid for Selling a Free Lunch. There may be no such thing as a free lunch in the physical world, but there is an abundance of free and very low-cost software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools for everything from personal productivity and collaboration applications (such as Google, Zoho and Dimdim) to financial management (including Freshbooks, Sage BillingBoss and Workingpoint) for small businesses. With more people starting their own businesses—often on a very tight budget—use of these services is will continue to rise. But in 2010, vendors with this model will start feeling the pressure to scale.

   The business models for these services are predicated on the assumption that a small percentage (usually in the range of 5% to 10%) of customers will convert to a premium paid offering. Many vendors also get advertising revenues, and some see data aggregation services as another way to generate income. To profitably scale their businesses, these vendors need to stimulate rapid viral adoption (which enables both advertising and data aggregation sales) and achieve their conversion rate goals for premium services. But the combination of rapid, high volume viral growth and paid conversions is a tough code to crack. While Google may not need to worry about cracking the code anytime soon, smaller, venture-backed vendors have a much shorter time horizon to make it work. Many will not be able to, and will need to either get acquired or shut their doors. However, some will get the formula right—with good odds on FreshBooks and Zoho.    

2. Vendors Scramble for SMB Developer Loyalty—and New Integration Needs Arise. Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) are giving SMB application developers lower cost, lower risk options to develop and bring new solutions to market. In 2010, both traditional platform vendors, such as Microsoft and IBM, along with newer PaaS and IaaS types such as Salesforce, Intuit and Amazon, will need to fight tooth and nail to get both commercial SMB developers and end-user customers to create applications for their environments. Meanwhile, since its highly unlikely that most customers will only want solutions from one of these ecosystems, vendors that provide integration solutions, such as Pervasive, Boomi, and Cast Iron, have a whole new market opportunity ahead of them—integration between these different platforms and ecosystems.

        

3. SaaS Computing Lifts Off in New Areas. Cloud poster child Salesforce.com celebrated its 10^th birthday and hit the $1 billion in annual revenues mark in 2009—and software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM is now a mainstream—even preferred–choice for SMBs. SaaS is also gaining a solid foothold in HR, marketing and content management are other areas in which SaaS is gaining a solid foothold. In 2010, the rate and pace of cloud computing adoption among SMBs will continue its upswing. 

   Key areas to watch include the historically elusive SaaS financials market. Smaller companies are showing a good appetite for self-service online accounting solutions such as Intuit Online Edition and Workingpoint, and point solutions for things such as invoicing, from vendors such as Freshbooks and Sage Billingboss, and others. Moving upmarket, firms such as NetSuite, Intacct, FinancialForce—and after a hiatus, SAP Business By Design–should enjoy good growth spurts in midsize companies, especially in those that are faced with a costly upgrade of a legacy packaged financials solution. Both internal IT and business decision-makers move to cut upgrade, maintenance and application management costs, while also speeding time to solution value. This momentum will be further fueled as SaaS vendors make progress in bringing integrators, VARs and CPAs on board to amplify marketing and sales capabilities.
       

Increasing interest for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) in Mid-Market Enterprises

In today’s world overloaded with buzzwords, terms such as “Business Intelligence (BI)”, “predictive analytics” and “Corporate Performance Management (CPM)” are confusing to mid-market enterprises.

BI technologies provide historical views of a company’s business operation. Some of the enterprise –class BI solutions now include predictive analytical capabilities also. BI is a term used to describe the technology used to access, analyze and report on data relevant to an enterprise. It includes ad-hoc query, reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), dashboards, scorecards, search, visualization, etc. Initially, most BI vendors lacked the ability to build models that can project in the future. However, in the past 3-4 years, the enterprise-class BI vendors have added some of these capabilities to replicate functionality offered by CPM vendors. BI and CPM are complementary solutions, and the BI platform provides a natural-basis to build a CPM solution. BI solutions are usually very complex and expensive for most mid-market companies. However, some of the more focused and template/wizards driven “Express” or “Fast-start” solutions, which are more affordable (especially if they are available in a online or appliance) and can be implemented in a reasonable amount of time – are becoming interesting for the mid-market if the vendors can show measurable benefits and short-term ROI.

In the CPM world, “predictive analytics” is generally used to refer to software solutions that automate and manage process related to corporate performance – financial forecasts, budgets, financial strategies, financial consolidation, scorecarding, and reporting. Another term used to identify CMP is BPM (Business Performance Management but this is sometimes confused with Business Process Management – two very different areas). Some CPM solutions regularly monitor some key performance indicators (KPI) in terms of actual vs. budget and, whenever a significant discrepancy is identified, help perform root causes to identify sources that could be causing this.

The BI and CPM solutions do not need to come from the same solution provider, as the two technologies are complementary and could co-exist. However, there may be economies and synergies related to getting them from the same vendor (if offered). In some instances, mid-market ERP solution vendors are now developing deeper integration to some CPM solutions (like NetSuite with Adaptive Planning).

In the current tough economic conditions, this segment is under tremendous pressures to improve financial processes, measurements and management of the mid-market enterprises. To adress the above, mid-market businesses are increasingly deploying CPM solutions to improve planning (forecasts and budgets), manage costs/optimize profits and more importantly risk and compliance.

The following companies provide enterprise and mid-market CPM solutions:

• Enterprise CPM solutions: Clarity Systems, IBM-Cognos, Oracle-Hyperion, SAP Business Objects, SAS
  
• Mid-Market CPM solutions: Adaptive Planning, Host Analytics, ProPhix, mid-market versions of the above solutions

Increasing interest and deployment of these solutions by mid-market enterprises is demonstrated by the double-digit growth rates most of these mid-market solution companies are experiencing. The CPM applications are targeted at the mid-market company CFOs, C-level executives, finance team and corporate strategy teams.

How were majority of these mid-market companies addressing the financial planning issues until now? Majority of these companies are using Excel spreadsheets. Using Excel, has significant accuracy limitations and  the amount of time spend on the planning process. It also denies the organization a collaborative, connected and productive planning process. Mid-market organizations need to take a more objective view to replace Excel based planning and replace them with CMP solutions. Some basic analysis on time (and accuracy achieved) spent on Excel planning and the results achieved will quickly show the benefits and ROI that can be achieved by CPM solutions – these can be split into the “hard” benefits quantifiable by replacing Excel and the many potential “soft” benefits derived from using a CPM solution.

Could Video Conferencing become the SMB segment ‘Killer App’ ? At least Cisco thinks so with the Tandberg acquisition!

Good move by Cisco. The key beneficiary of Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg will be the SMB and mid-market. Cisco already has video Telepresence solutions. However, these Telepresence solutions are primarily enterprise solutions – way beyond the affordability of the SMB (1-499 employees) or the mid-market enterprises (500-1000 employees). Both segments together are referred to as SMB in this blog.

The SMBs and vendors (that service this segment) are rapidly comprehending the business value and short-term ROI that Video Conferencing solutions offer. The global SMB video conferencing solutions and services market opportunity is around $150M in 2010 and forecasted to grow at an annual rate of around 9%. The SMB segment purpose built, cost effective, standards based solutions (from vendors like Tandberg and Polycom) coupled with rapidly declining prices of high throughput network bandwidth are now making the SMB video conferencing market very interesting.

In my 2 previous blogs, I have addresses the market opportunity for these solutions and vendors that provide solutions: Video Conferencing Solution – Now Affordable by the SMBs, SMB’s turning to Conferencing Solutions in tough economic times

Tandberg has an extensive video conferencing solutions family purpose built for the SMB market. With the introduction of the Quick Set C20 solutions, they have priced these solutions more in-line with what the SMB market can afford. What Tandberg lacked was a channel that could sell and service the SMB market – hence, not much of a installed base.

What does Tandberg bring to the Cisco-Tandberg party?

• A complete set of video conferencing solutions for the SMB market that are standards based
  
  • Personal, desktop to conference room based video conferencing solutions
    
  • Desktop video conferencing phone with E20 and the MPX desktop solutions
    
  • PC based video conferencing with Movi
    
  • Conference room based solutions from standard def. to HD with the Quick Set C20
    
• Almost no product overlap between Cisco and Tandberg in the SMB segment
  
• The recent acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Div. by Avaya makes them the market leader in the SMB IP Communications segment. Cisco’s differentiation for these products was diminishing. Adding video conferencing to the Cisco product portfolio will provide the required differentiation.
  

What does Cisco bring to the Cisco-Tandberg party?

Interest in Social Media among Small Businesses Correlates to Number of Years they have been in Business

 

Related insight to my recent blog Small Businesses interest in Social Media increasing rapidly , related to the Number of Years a small business has been in existence. See figure below:

Adoption and use of social media is correlated to ‘Number of years in business’ and indirectly to the age of the owners. As the figure above shows, longer the small businesses have been in existence (indirectly correlated to the age of the small business owner), the usage of social media declines. Small businesses that are in existence for 10 years or less, most likely will have Gen X or Gen Y business owners who have grown-up in the internet age and are well tuned to and more likely to use online communication and collaboration – are much more likely to adopt social media. In their personal lives, they have extensive experience in using web-based tools like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and real-time communications tools like chat and text-messaging – for one-to-many and one-to-one communications. They are more likely to be influenced by online communities and collective ratings of products.

Small businesses that have been in existence for more than 10 years would have Baby Boomers as their owners. Boomers interact with others in their communities around shared interests and common issues, but they prefer to use more traditional communications tools like e-mail and voice communications. Boomers participate heavily in word-of-mouth and value personal recommendations and expert opinions, but they have not embraced social networking in any significant manner. It is difficult for people to change habits quickly. However, if the owners of these long established businesses find that their customers and prospects are increasingly communicating on the social media sites, then it would be prudent to hire a Gen X/Y person who is very familiar with these social media tools to help you develop a social media strategy to cater to your audience based on the social media tools they use.

Even though small business use of social media tools is increasing, not all small businesses need to invest in social media – this needs to be decided based on the nature of your business, your business location and your audience (customers, prospects and partners). Some small businesses that serve local communities in rural areas may continue to do business in the traditional manner, until their audience is ready to communicate with them using these new tools and their revenues and customer satisfaction is impacted by it.

Small Businesses interest in Social Media increasing rapidly

In a recent very small business (businesses with 10 employees or less), Social Media ranked at the top of the list among the tools used by small businesses to market/promote their business (see Figure 1). The use of all ‘Digital Media’ tools by SMB has seen a dramatic increase in the past 2 years at the at the expense of ‘traditional media’ tools. Many businesses are finding that marketing campaigns using traditional media tools are seeing reduced effectiveness in reaching their target audience. Consumers and businesses are placing less trust on information provided through traditional marketing vehicles, as those are mainly static tools supporting one-way conversations – other than word-of-mouth. The new digital media is changing the rules of marketing and even small businesses need to proactively participate in this change.

Figure 1

Why has social media seen this dramatic increase? This is primarily driven by 3 factors:

• Change in the consumer and business workers personal communication environment and habits
• Low barrier to start participating in the social media communications – tools like Twitter, Facebook, WordPress are free. Social media is much more than traditional forms of viral marketing – it is an effective and inexpensive way to convert contacts into a referral network
• Much more real-time communication support to start conversations with existing customers and prospects

As the data shows, most small businesses are already participating in social media to varying degrees. Most of the social media adoption by small businesses is happening in an adhoc and sporadic manner. Majority of it is being driven by their use of of these social networking sites for personal communications. This use of social media in business today is more experimental, some to get a feel of the type of small businesses that are starting to participate in such communications and others to experiment with the type of conversations that are taking place and the type of communications they could have using this medium. As small businesses get more comfortable with these communications media over time, their importance in the marketing communications mix will increase. However, there are several issues that need to be resolved before they become mainstream communication tools for the small businesses. Some of them are:

• Efficient and productive ways to monitor and participate in social media – small business do not have the time to individually monitor the various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, etc. They need tools that can integrate with their existing business solutions to pull-in conversations that could have relevance to them. Some new solutions from vendors like Salesforce.com will help small businesses harness the power of social media through solutions like Service Cloud, Salesforce Answers and Salesforce for Twitter and Ideas. New vendors that provide some solutions in this area include Lithium, Helpstream and Elgg.
• Finding areas where social media can add value and provide business benefit – potential areas include product marketing and customer service
• Integrating Social Media solutions with current marketing tools – Now that we know small businesses are interested in social media, it would be a good (for ISVs) to integrate social media interaction with your current marketing solutions like CRM, e-mail marketing, marketing automation, etc.
• Customer sentiment monitoring – This is area small businesses can monitor conversations that are taking place about their products, brands and competition. Although this area today is primarily leveraged by larger consumer focused companies, over time this information can be leveraged by small businesses also.

To make this communication and collaboration effective and supportive of key business objectives, small businesses need to craft a social media strategy as part of a marketing plan to positively reinforce brand awareness and improve customer relationships.

Key elements to this plan should include:

• Integrate social media into your current marketing plan, don’t abandon what is working to get on the social media band wagon
• Find out where your target audience (existing customers and prospects) gathers online and learn how they are engaged. Start by asking your current customers where they are and then join in.
• Match your audience to the social media tools they use – some people like Twitter other prefer Facebook or LinkedIn. Focus on relationship building.
• Don’t limit yourself to most immediate “universe” of your target. Find people who touch your universe and engage them too.
• Listen to what people are saying about you in the social media world
• Use social media to drive traffic to your website
• Develop plan to measure the success of your social media efforts (topic for another blog)
   

Deciding what survey software to use?

Being a market research, we make extensive use of market surveys, to measure market/customer needs and sentiments. For years I was outsourcing the programming, testing and hosting to outsourced survey houses. However, driven by the current economic conditions and reduced market research budgets, this year I decided to do try the survey programming/testing exercise myself.

My survey software solutions requirements are more complex compared to the standard small consumer type survey. They are usually long (30-40 questions each with several options), with complex and branching, follow-on questions based on previous responses, etc.

Finding the right survey software could be a hard task. There are a large number of vendors to choose from, a cursory look at any of them give an impression that most of them are almost alike. One needs to consideration several factors before picking the right solutions. Some of things you need to know and look for before deciding:

• Survey tool features (considering the complexity of your survey)
• Ease-of-programming and hosting
• Cloud-based or on-premise server based
• Price (use of software and survey hosting)
• Reporting functions
• Performance of solution, especially when reporting
• Training provided
• Support (both telephone, web and user forums)

After evaluating numerous survey tools from several vendors (Checkbox, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, Vovici, Zoomerang, QuestionPro, NoviSystems, SurveyCrafter, etc.), I selected SurveyGizmo solution for my fairly complex survey needs.

SurveyGizmo is very easy to use; value priced and provides the most extensive set of features among all the survey software solutions I evaluated. It has a simple user interface with an extensive list of question types and survey action that makes designing and testing survey very easy. The reporting functions are also very good. Several other vendors that I evaluated had very poor performance, especially when using the reporting and analysis functions. They also provide very flexible pay-as-you-use pricing, without the need to commit a significant amount of capital upfront (as some of the other vendors do) – this is especially important in the current difficult economic climate.

 

Prognosis on SAP’s Business ByDesign – SaaS based ERP solution for the core mid-market

I came across a good analysis on some aspects of SaaS vs. on-premise vendors and solutions in the smoothspan post Why Do SaaS Companies Lose Money Hand Over Fist?

After reading through the post and various responses, I have some comments that could shed more light on the SaaS vs. on-premise topic and how this relates to SAP’s continued focus on Business ByDesign.

• The global ERP market opportunity driven by the large number of SMB/mid-market companies. In the U.S. there are 11 times more mid-market companies and on a worldwide basis the number is 13.5X.

  	# of U.S. Companies	# of Worldwide companies
  Enterprises (1000+ empl.)	9,000	52,000
  Mid-Market (100-1000 empl.)	100,000	700,000
  Ratio – Mid-market/Enterprise	11X	13.5X

   

   

• The enterprise market is heavily penetrated by ERP type solutions, mostly on-premise solutions. The U.S. mid-market has less than 42% ERP penetration. This penetration of ERP solutions is much lower outside the U.S. Existing SaaS solution vendors until now have primarily focused on the U.S. market, with less than 15-20% international sales (other than Salesforce.com). SAP being a global company, has the potential of ramping up fast in the international markets which is very under penetrated, where SAP already has established relationships and market presence (significantly more than any of the SaaS vendors). This presents a significant upside revenue opportunity for SAP in the mid-market (especially in the 100-500 employee segment which is outside of the sweet spot of other SAP midmarket solutions – BusinessOne and Business All-in-One).
  
• One also needs to look at the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of SaaS vs. on-premise solutions. A recent paper investigated details on this, The TCO of Cloud Computing in the SMB and Mid–Market Enterprises; A total cost of ownership comparison of cloud and on–premise business applications. Thee general conclusions are:
  
  • Considering a 4 year TCO, works in favor of the SaaS ERP solutions when the number of users is less than 400 users. Beyond these numbers of users, the on-premise TCO starts to become better (lower). These would be mostly enterprise companies, who favor on-premise solutions.
    
  • When considers a TCO beyond 4 years, on-premise solutions are better (lower). Again, these tend to be larger companies.
    
• Most of the SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com and NetSuite have a much higher sales and marketing expenses ratio (~ 54% of revenue as shown in the smoothspan post Why Do SaaS Companies Lose Money Hand Over Fist?) primarily driven by their direct sales model. For Business ByDesign, for which SAP is promoting a channel driven model, this percentage should be lower.
  
• R&D spending of 16% by SaaS companies – the strategy that needs to be explored by vendors looking to develop SaaS products, they need to seriously consider SaaS platforms like force.com (from Salesforce.com) and QuickBase (from Intuit). The developers that have used these platforms, have significantly reduced both their initial R&D spending and also their product development timeframe, brining SaaS solutions to market in some cases 1-2 years sooner. These SaaS/cloud platforms-as-a-service were not available when SAP embarked on development of ByD (or would they have used one, even if it was available…I am sure they have developed a significant internal expertise with this development experience). It is prudent for SAP to control the roll-out of Business-ByDesign until the product, delivery and channel kinks have been worked out. Prediction – Past experience with German engineering should alert the ERP market that in 2010, SAP will probably deliver a successful mid-market SaaS ERP solution for the core mid-market.
  

Reviewing the above, including good reviews from the current customers of Business ByDesign, it would be prudent for SAP not to scale back efforts on the roll-out of Business ByDesign – as strategy they have consistently communicating to the market.