This is the second part of my article on innovation in business performance management (BPM). Part 1 discussed the importance of innovation as well as the reasons many vendors find it difficult to innovate. This article looks at a number of vendors currently active in the performance management space that are providing innovative solutions.

Innovations can take many forms. Some innovations involve being the first to successfully utilize a new technology to address a specific business problem. Other software innovations focus more on product functionality – addressing a set of users and requirements that have previously been underserved, or coming at a business problem from a different angle. Not all innovations are large, dramatic and game changing. As a matter of fact, most are minor variations on what has gone before, but they are different enough to help that vendor stand out from the pack, which is really their goal in the first place.

Let’s take a look at some of the most innovative vendors in the performance management space. For reasons discussed in Part 1, the majority tend to be smaller companies.

Any discussion about innovation in performance management would have to include Adaptive Planning. Their primary innovation was to deliver performance management capabilities in a SaaS (software as a service) model. They weren’t the first to try this model in performance management, but they were the first to do it successfully on a large scale. This is a company that lives and breathes innovation. They were also among the first in BPM to leverage open source and to offer free limited-use versions of their software for download or on-demand use. They continue to be a leader to this day with recently released collaboration capabilities that are ahead of the competition and facilitate internal as well as external collaboration through online communities integrated with their product offering.

Varicent,  a rapidly growing sales performance management vendor, took an aging but important software category and updated it by adding BPM concepts. Incentive compensation management had been around for a while, mainly focused on automating the process and reducing errors associated with variable compensation programs. Necessary, but not exciting. This vendor changed the focus to optimizing sales performance. They added multidimensional analytics (by representative, by region, by product) and performance dashboards. Unlike most operational analysis that still relies on IT to build a solution from business intelligence tools, they have delivered a pre-built performance application for the sales department.

More broadly addressing operational analysis is a company called myDials. They provide pre-built dashboards for all major areas of the business, leveraging existing systems and data.

Tagetik, a successful European BPM vendor, new to the U.S. market, takes a different approach to performance management. Their product is designed around a business process platform. This enables them to easily deliver specialized applications such as cash management by project, credit reporting and analysis, and others in addition to standard BPM capabilities. Thanks to their key architectural innovation, they can continue to be a functionality innovator for years to come.

An area of performance management that is addressed somewhat superficially by most vendors is an area that a number of newer, smaller vendors have seized on as an opportunity. Our BPM Pulse survey has shown an increased demand in recent years for more robust strategic planning, modeling and forecasting capabilities. A number of vendors have jumped in to try to meet this need.

Alight Planning is one vendor that is entirely focused on forecasting and modeling. Their entire system is built around a rates, units, amounts model. Purpose-built systems such as this are easier to use and have more functional depth than the broader BPM solutions on the market.

Whitebirch Software covers much the same ground as Alight, but from a portfolio optimization and advanced modeling approach. The goal is to help companies determine their best investments or to help capital equity portfolio managers to better understand the companies they invest in.

Coming at strategic planning from a slightly different perspective is River Logic. With a supply chain approach and demand planning outlook, they help a company solve for the optimum business decision parameters based on a set of constraints. This flavor of BPM fits well with the unique needs of manufacturers.

Carpio Systems also helps companies solve for the ideal decision mix. Their solution is more cross-industry focused and utilizes graphical sliders that allow users to see the immediate impact that adjusting one parameter has on all the others. This vendor also covers all the standard BPM bases as well. There is, however, one other fairly unique and therefore somewhat innovative aspect to their solution. They offer a version customized for the MicroStrategy business intelligence (BI) platform. This customization is so complete from a look and feel as well as integration perspective that it is hard to tell when you are running this vendor’s application or the MicroStrategy BI toolset itself. As one of the few, if not only vendor offering packaged BPM applications built on this platform, they are uniquely suited to address the BPM needs of MicroStrategy’s large installed base – another innovation that leads to differentiation.

The larger vendors aren’t totally left out of the innovation picture. SAS was one of the first out of the blocks with performance management capabilities for “green” or sustainability initiatives. Cognos, Oracle and SAP have followed suit in this area where we expect to see rapidly growing demand. We have already seen strong user demand for more tightly integrated governance, risk and compliance solutions. While many vendors provide some capabilities in this area, SAP is leading the way in offering the most comprehensive solutions. Cognos/IBM offers industrial-strength BPM via a SaaS model as an option and is one of the few also delivering BPM via a hardware appliance.

Innovations from vendors large and small like those described here should keep performance management fresh, exciting and expanding in scope for many years to come.

Recent articles by Craig Schiff

• Overspending on Business Performance Management
• A Turning Point for Business Performance Management?
• Why Performance Management? Part 2
• Your Performance Management or Business Intelligence Platform – Is it Frozen in Time?