According to the recent BARC Score report, best-in-class companies regularly select integrated planning and reporting solutions, such as IBM Planning Analytics, over Excel or home-grown systems. This report gives an overview of the planning and analytics market and provides strengths and weaknesses of leading vendors in the space.
The BARC Score report states, “Today, the reality in many companies is that integrated planning and analytics is an often proclaimed, but seldom achieved goal … So Excel, as the lowest common denominator, is often the default first choice for integrating planning with analytics. However, the lack of coherence of data and functionality resulting from using Excel instead of specialized software tools, are frequently cited reasons for user dissatisfaction, inconsistencies or error susceptibility with planning and analytics in companies today.
The report continues, “companies that use integrated software platforms for planning and analytics experience far fewer problems than those that address both topics separately with different software tools.”
IBM Ranked a Market Leader in Report
This report covers “all of the leading vendors as well as many smaller vendors that often have less visibility, but equally offer outstanding value to their customers. The vendors included are: Anaplan, Board International, IBM, Infor, Jedox, Longview, OneStream Software, Oracle, Prophix, SAP, Unit4 Prevero, Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik, and Workday (Adaptive Insights.)
BARC’s assessment of IBM includes its portfolio of planning and analytics products – IBM Planning Analytics, powered by TM1, IBM Cognos Analytics, IBM Watson Studio and IBM SPSS. BARC lists IBM’s strengths, including:
- IBM Planning Analytics offers comprehensive flexibility for business power users to create planning and analytics applications based on a high performance in-memory database
- Comprehensive Excel-based functionality for preparing individual planning and analytics content in IBM Planning Analytics (modeling, custom planning forms, etc.) and publishing it to the web
- Well-established and expansive partner community with global product support and knowledge
The BARC Score report is based on data points from The Planning Survey, The BI Survey and numerous analyst interactions. Download your copy of the report today.