Software, Planning and Consulting Prove a Strong Combination
There are over 25 vendors in the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) space. We have a major goal to help customers make better buying decisions, and of course achieve a high degree of success in solving business problems. In our approach, we ask each vendor to give us access to two customers and an outside consulting firm. We document our findings in these reports. Clearly, the vendor will select customers that are successful. But, for us, telling the vendor’s customers’ stories identifies valuable best practices, and inevitably significant insight into the vendor’s ability to deliver value.
There is a constant battle in the marketplace among IBM, SAP and Oracle – giants in the EPM space. As these vendors battle each other, they are also challenged by smaller vendors playing the “nimble” card. As we interviewed two of IBM’s customers and one of their consulting partners, we observed that IBM was agile in its approach and could quickly muster resources to handle complex problems, both business and technical. This type of approach will serve it well against both large and small EPM vendors.
We interviewed the individuals mentioned above, and summarized the Constellation Research, Inc. (CR) findings.