Last week UNIT4, the owner of two key financial management packages, Agresso and CODA announced plans to “disrupt” the performance management software market in 2012 with what it says is a completely new approach to delivering business analytics, i.e. turnkey, rapidly deployed, business performance solutions available on a pay-as-you-use basis from a dedicated app store. Gary Simon, FSN’s managing editor caught up with Ton Dobbe, Vice president, Product Marketing for UNIT4, to discover exactly what UNIT4 has in mind.
UNIT4’s announcement caused ripples in the market as commentators tried to get under the skin of what was revolutionary about the approach. (You can read a lively discussion on FSN’s Linkedin Group here).
Ton Dobbe, started by explaining that the genesis of the approach followed UNIT4’s acquisition of a performance management software company called Exie in August last year. The aim was to integrate Exie with the Agresso and Coda product lines to offer performance management solutions to UNIT4’s user base. Tobbe told FSN the plan was not for UNIT4 to become a CPM vendor but to “add value to the CODA and Agresso applications.”
“But we wanted to get away from the traditional enterprise approach to packaging and providing performance management applications,” added Dobbe. “Our research indicated that customers wanted an alternative to the huge upfront costs and consulting/implementation effort normally associated with enterprise performance management applications.”
“Customers often require performance management capability around a specific business problem. We wanted to satisfy that need by allowing them to acquire ‘bite-sized’ elements of performance management rather than selling them a whole suite of applications that they neither wanted nor needed.”
Dobbe showed FSN aspects of the latest incarnation of the Exie software which to all intents and purposes resembles other performance management applications. (For the record it is an on-premise solution).
But it will be some time before the new apps will be available. UNIT4 is unable to say which apps will be released first although they will undoubtedly be “financial” and although the price will be set per user/per month, Ton Dobbe was unable to say what level of cost to expect.
Dobbe explained that the first apps will be in beta testing from March 2012 with the first apps expected to appear in the app store in June.
The major advantage for UNIT4 users is that the integration with the performance management apps will have been done for them and therefore the app will ‘understand’ the meta data (internal structures of Agresso or CODA) without heavy configuration. This should overcome one of the major obstacles that people face in taking a generic solution from a third party and one of the reasons that so many mid-market performance management projects fail to live up to expectations.
But Dobbe fully expects a number of customers to develop bespoke apps to meet their needs although this should be in greatly reduced timescales because of the ‘out-of-the-box’ integration. He anticipates that there will be sharing of custom developed apps with the UNIT4 app store and that customers might be given “credits” accordingly.
Challenged on whether UNIT4 had ‘jumped the gun’ and made the announcement unusually early Dobbe responded that the company wanted to take “mind share” and start familiarising customers with the new approach.
Conceptually, what UNIT4 have announced should be attractive to a mid-market that has always been denied accessible and affordable performance management applications or disqualified through lack of in-house skills and resources. UNIT4 have a track record and culture of providing holistic solutions and so UNIT4 customers can reasonably expect that the new apps, when they appear, will be a step forward. On the other hand it remains to be seen how much the apps are going to cost and how quickly they are going to appear in the app store.
