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Featured Dresner Research
Research Insight and Wisdom of Crowds® reports offer the most comprehensive and objective insights available for data, analytics, and performance management. Our process is global, encompassing thousands of organizations across all industries, functions, and organization sizes.
Wisdom of Crowds® Market Reports
Wisdom of Crowds® Market Reports offer in-depth research and reporting on key industry and technology topics, including user trends, perceptions, intentions and other drivers. Each report includes a section with objective and inclusive vendor ratings.
Analytical Platforms 2024
Analytical Platforms are integrated technology environments that include all needed functionality to support multiple analytical or BI use cases, including data engineering, data catalog, self-service BI, data science and machine learning, embedded BI or analytics, and cloud support.
Our 4th annual Analytical Platforms Report reflects a dynamic landscape where the conversation around platforms gained considerable momentum. In this edition, we delve into the critical question facing many organizations today: whether to adopt a single-vendor technology platform that offers a comprehensive suite of core analytical and BI capabilities, or to pursue a “best-of-breed” approach that combines specialized solutions from multiple providers. This decision is increasingly pivotal as organizations work to consolidate resources, streamline analytics operations, and ensure scalability.
Sales Performance Management 2024
Sales performance management (SPM) enables the sales organization to develop plans and manage and analyze performance for staffing, revenue, and territories, among other areas. SPM includes sales planning and sales analytics.
Dresner Advisory’s 7th annual report examines end user behaviors around SPM adoption, budgets, and overall success, analyzed by organization size, geography, and other attributes. The report scores the importance of the main areas of SPM including features, integrations, and technologies, as reported by end user respondents. According to the report, adoption of SPM is highest in sales, finance, and marketing with broader functional broader functional adoption growing over the past several years. Rolling sales forecasts, account segmentation and scoring, and predictive sales forecasting are the top three SPM features.
Financial Consolidation, Close Management, and Reporting 2024
The 2024 Financial Consolidation, Close Management, and Financial Reporting Market Study, is part of the Wisdom of Crowds® series of research. Financial consolidation systems combine and aggregate financial data from multiple operating entities to produce an overall consolidated financial view of the group's operations.
The 2024 study examines current usage, priorities, and objectives and includes a new analysis of why organizations implement FCCR software, thus helping data leaders understand how these solutions are a vital component of a BI and analytics strategy. The study shows an increase in FCCR adoption among younger organizations, and priority ratings by younger organizations increased across all aspects of FCCR, an indication that younger organizations are leveraging FCCR to help manage growth.
Research Insights
Published throughout each month, Research Insights are thought leadership articles, covering important topics and issues, with pointed advice and recommendations for readers.
How to Win Friends by Influencing the Business: The Positive Effect of Data Leadership on BI Objectives and Achievements
The objectives of business intelligence (BI) initiatives remain fairly consistent over the years, with most organizations, across industries, leading BI business cases with the rather generic goal of “better decision making.” This vague objective does not specify:
· Which decisions will be made better
· What better means (i.e., in what ways will they be made better?)
· How much better those decisions will become (for example, two decisions, improved by 0.01 and 1,000 percent, respectively, both could be considered “better”)
As such, this goal for BI initiatives often fails to align well with strategic goals and business outcomes—a fundamental gap that hurts data leaders and their teams trying to sustain and grow their budgets. Organizations that emphasize the goal of better decision making tend to prioritize at a lower level more precise, external-facing, and outcome-driven objectives—which in turn better align to business value. Examples of such more-precise objectives include revenue growth, customer experience, and competitive advantage.
The Golden Age of EPM: Prepare to Unlock Additional Business Benefits
Dresner Advisory Services believes that a “golden age” of enterprise performance management (EPM) software is dawning. EPM solutions are mature and highly functional in all areas, widely available in the cloud, and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that enable organizations to deliver demonstrable business benefits easily.
We define performance management as an approach that fortifies the management cycle with enterprise-class modeling, planning, business intelligence (BI), and analytics in a single, or closely linked, system. EPM software primarily enables these capabilities. We have tracked the market for these solutions since 2019. Our 2024 EPM Market Study shows a high degree of market maturity, with 71 percent of organizations using EPM software. Also, 67 percent of organizations consider their use of EPM software extremely successful or very successful.
Single-Vendor or Best-of-Breed Analytics? Which Is Best for Your Organization?
Analytical platforms continue to mature and gain traction in the market. In 2024, a slight majority of organizations (55 percent) favor deploying and using an integrated analytical platform from a single vendor, while a minority of respondents (albeit a sizeable one—45 percent) prefer to use an analytical platform that the organization built itself from best-of-breed components.
The argument of whether to choose best-of-breed components and integrate your own analytical solution or go with an analytical platform from a single provider starts only once a market reaches a certain level of maturity. Such evolution is a natural part of the maturation and adoption of all technologies—business intelligence (BI) and analytics included. Before that point, best-of-breed components abound; and many early platforms cannot compare, resulting in a de facto predisposition by most organizations to choose the best tools available, and bear the burden of integration and maintenance of separate products as the cost of superior functionality. Fast forward to that maturity point, and new entrants (often larger vendors) have integrated many core analytical features into their own single-platform offerings, differentiating themselves not only by analytical functionality but also ease of use that eliminates much of the management and integration requirements associated with assembling a best-of-breed solution.
Special Reports
Specialized reports rely on data collected directly from customers on a subset of vendors to provide an unbiased comparison within the broader market context.
Vena vs. Workday EPM
This special report examines the offerings and positioning of two major players in the EPM market: Vena Solutions (Vena) and Workday Adaptive Planning (Workday) and compares them on key aspects such as usability, integration capabilities, performance, scalability, and support. The goal is to provide a clear understanding of how each platform meets the needs of modern enterprises and supports their overall performance management initiatives.
Anaplan vs. Pigment EPM
This special report examines the offerings and positioning of two major players in the EPM market: Anaplan and Pigment and compares them on key aspects such as usability, integration capabilities, performance, scalability, and support. The goal is to provide a clear understanding of how each platform meets the needs of modern enterprises and supports their overall performance management initiatives.
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