EPM in the next gear

EPM or Enterprise Performance Management is the new colour on SAP’s canvas recently. And it’s not a surprise to see why when we see how predictions made about this market are panning out.

Turn over pages from the past, and we see how research firm Gartner estimated that by 2008, more than 80 per cent of publicly traded companies will have a formalized CPM (corporate performance management) strategy and road map as significant elements in their compliance and governance framework.

Circa 2009, and it wasn’t a surprise to see EPM shape up as natural extension of reporting and analysis arms for any BI vendor, whipped up and bolstered by relevant apps and data capabilities.

The timing today seems more right than any other time. A stronger regulatory leash, heightened alertness for surprises like the recent financial fiascos, followed naturally by unprecedented pressure on earnings, productivity and operational efficiency, etc, make it all the more acute.

"SAP has been rapidly gaining market share, with a more modern, easy-to-use enterprise performance management solution that is more functionally complete and extends beyond finance to all parts of the organization, setting us apart from competitors that offer hard-to-use point solutions on arcane architectures, claims Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, SAP BusinessObjects Performance Optimization Applications, SAP.

Is that old wine in a new bottle or a medicine that has arrived just about at that time for enterprises wriggling out of the quagmire called slowdown that changed all risk definitions? We try to find out in this interview.

Atul Patel, Senior Director for Business User Solutions & Partners across Asia Pacific and Japan for SAP, gives an overview of this new genre of business suite.

EPM at a time when risk and operational efficiency have become almost the Halleluiah for enterprises around the world, that’s interesting. Explain the context.

EPM helps in areas like planning, budgeting, forecasting, statutory reporting, cost analysis, managing operational processes, and profitability. It also links to BI, risk and compliance management.

This is possible because these solutions have high data volumes with a rich and intuitive flavour which is also augmented with user-friendly interfaces.

Any objective reference point that reckons EPM as confidently, also from a relative competition dimension?

This year itself, IDC has reported SAP as the market leader in performance management and analytic applications, based on software license and maintenance revenue. The market analysis, titled "Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2009-2013 Forecast and 2008 Vendor Shares," found that SAP leads in the performance management and analytic applications market, with a 20.3 per cent share of the market.

The IDC report also shows that year-over-year growth rate in this market segment for SAP was 13.9 per cent - higher than the growth rate for the next five competitors, as well as the market as a whole, which grew 8.9 per cent.

How much is this market worth chasing?

What SAP calls, the enterprise performance management (EPM) market, represents $8.37 billion out of the total $24.1 billion business analytics software market. Customer adoption is positive, looking at numbers like about 200 in APJ and around 24 in India.

How do you plan to evolve EPM stack further?

Our roadmap outlines extending functionality into domain areas like strategy management, financial consolidation, extensible business reporting language (EBRL), spend performance management, and supply chain performance management to name a few.

Organisations today are looking to find ways to improve operational and financial performance. SAP has a unique offering here with its Enterprise Performance Management solutions. These enable to make finance a better control ingredient, quick adaptability, and better tabs on performance.

They can help optimize financial and operational strategy. And you can also add reduced IT maintenance costs, improved data integrity, better technology ROI to its advantages.

Exactly how?