In an effort to raise the profile of performance-management software and promote its recently launched Coda-Intelligence financial analytics platform, Coda CEO Jeremy Roche said the CPM market is struggling to find an identity and that vendors need to take steps to simplify the functionality and the marketing of applications. The messaging provides little differentiation from that of the BI tools vendors, he said. Because the essence of performance management is methodology for the structured use of analytic applications and BI tools this isn’t really a surprise, but it makes life very confusing for businesses looking to address performance-management issues. Despite all the hype in recent years, most companies are only just starting to put in place performance-management systems, partly because many of these solutions are only just becoming usable and affordable, but also because of the over-complex way our industry markets its solutions.
He said the market is shifting, citing Microsoft which has released more affordable, accessible tools that are integrated with desktop applications, enabling more people to use them. He also called for vendors to deliver lighter more usable technology based on common platforms and using familiar formats.
The nub of the matter as far as Coda’s business is concerned is that organizations are using BI technologies to develop their own corporate performance-management systems. Its application-level response is the Coda-Intelligence financial analytics platform, which attempts to answer to Coda’s call for a common platform in that it is based on Microsoft technology.
