The New Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrants for Cloud Financial Planning & Analysis and Cloud Financial Close Solutions
If all you’re looking for is the free download link, let’s cut to the chase: here’s where you can download the new 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions and the new 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions. These MQs are written jointly by John Van Decker and Chris Iervolino […]
Putting the A Back in FP&A with Automated, Integrated Planning
I was reading this blog post on Continuous Planning by Rob Kugel of Ventana Research the other day and it reminded me of one of my (and Rob’s) favorite sayings: We need to put the A back in FP&A This means that the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team at many companies is so busy […]
The Strategy Compiler: How To Avoid the “Great” Strategy You Couldn’t Execute
Few phrases bother me more than this one: “I know it didn’t work, but it was a great strategy. We just didn’t have the resources to execute it.” Huh. Wait minute. If you didn’t have the resources to execute it, then it wasn’t a great strategy. Maybe it was a great strategy for some other […]
Host Analytics World 2016 EPM Keynote Address
We’re just finishing up day 2 of a fantastic Host Analytics World 2016, with over 800 people gathered together in San Francisco to talk about enterprise performance management (EPM). Here are a few pictures to give you a feel for the event. Here’s 49ers football legend Steve Young delivering his keynote address: Here’s me delivering […]
CAC Payback Period: The Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric
Many of the most watched software as a service (SaaS) metrics relate to the cost of acquiring customers. For example, the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio, which (in my preferred definition for enterprise software companies) measures the amount of money a company spends on sales and marketing to acquire $1 in new annual recurring revenue (ARR). I […]
SAP Cloud for Analytics: Tilting at Windmills
Back in the early 2000s when I was running marketing at Business Objects, Gartner’s then-lead BI analyst, Howard Dresner (known as the father of BI and the person who named the category) started pushing a notion called enterprise performance management (EPM). Back then, EPM meant the unification of BI and planning/budgeting. The argument in favor of […]
CFOs: More Strategic Than Ever
I was digging through my reading pile and found this about nine-month-old report by Accenture and Oracle entitled The CFO as Corporate Strategist by Donniel Schulman and David Axson of Accenture. Those who follow Host Analytics might remember David Axson at several of our user conferences. (Note: the 2015 conference is May 18-21 — save the date!) […]
Why, as CEO, I Love Driver-Based Planning
While driver-based planning is a bit of an old buzzword (the first two Google hits date to 2009 and 2011 respectively), I am nevertheless a huge fan of driver-based planning not because the concept was sexy back in the day, but because it’s incredibly useful. In this post, I’ll explain why. When I talk to finance people, I tend […]
Accenture’s Key Considerations in SaaS Financial Applications
The first stop in the Host Analytics cloud EPM roadshow was held today before a packed house at the lovely Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto. The event featured a keynote address from Accenture Managing Director Tamara Emerson. One of her slides was about considerations whether you should look at SaaS/cloud financial systems. Here is […]
