FSN: Filling the mid-market performance management gap

Filling the mid-market performance management gap

13th March 2006
Mid-market business intelligence and performance management have become distinctly unfashionable. Many BI vendors appear to have abandoned this segment in favour of richer pickings in the large scale enterprise market. After years of investment in best of breed solutions, large multinationals find themselves with all manner of reporting tools and performance management applications and no ready means of reporting across their accumulated portfolio of business applications. As a result, many of them are seeking to simplify their overall systems architecture, leaving business intelligence suppliers competing vigorously to become the vendor and platform of choice. The stakes are high and multi-million dollar contracts are becoming more commonplace. But in the process, many vendors appear to have lost interest in the mid-market.

Adrian Mcnay, Managing Director of Touchstone, a major UK reseller of sytems agrees that the mid-market is underserved. “Mid-market businesses are beginning to realise the value of better data analysis delivered to their desktops more quickly because it helps them to become more competitive. But one of the barriers to widespread adoption has been the price of the products from the major BI suppliers who want to concentrate on the enterprise market,” he told FSN.

However, not all vendors have abandoned their roots and through subtle re-positioning certain vendors are taking advantage of the vacuum created by the flight of their competitors. Systems Union Group is a good example. Although its origins are steeped in traditional financial applications it is emerging as a powerful mid-market supplier of finance and performance management applications.

Its early reputation was built on the strength of its unified ledger design which took advantage of the power of computers to simplify transaction processing whilst simultaneously opening up the possibility of more sophisticated analysis. For example, SunSystems was one of the very first mid-market accounting packages to offer extensive user definable analysis at the transaction and master file level. As a result, the package found favour not only in the mid-market but also in complex head office settings in large corporates.

Building on this analytical foundation, it was a natural step for System Union Group (SUG) to develop a business intelligence offering, using its “Vision” product. In those days the technology was more primitive and significant effort had to be expended to create a data dictionary or description of the underlying finance applications so that business users could take advantage of the reporting and analysis tools to query the underlying transaction data.

These days, life is much easier because SUG provides ready to use plug-ins or “serducts” that automatically reach into SunSystems (and many other popular finance applications) to surface the underlying data in terms that typical business users can understand and use. The simplicity of the serduct is pivotal to SUG's success in mid-market business intelligence and performance management.

Typically, owner managed businesses have modest technology budgets and limited IT skills so it is important that applications can be created easily without external assistance and extended without having to throw away the initial investment. In this sense, the serduct is ideal because it offers a low risk and adaptable entry point into business intelligence whilst providing a firm foundation for more sophisticated performance management applications, such as budgeting and planning, at a later date. For example, changes in the structure of the underlying finance system are easily accommodated without having to throw away existing reports and serducts can be acquired or developed as needed, to take advantage of other operational systems and databases.

“The serducts remove a whole area of complexity”, Neil Chandler, of Systems Union Group told FSN. “Whilst other vendors promote complex data integration tools (ETL), we can provide users with instant access to their data. So whether a company's information needs are driven by compliance, new accounting standards or a desire to improve operational performance we can provide an easy means of capturing the data they need.”

McNay agrees that SUG is one of the very few suppliers making a serious play for the mid-market. He told FSN, “They realise that pricing has been an issue and have therefore pitched their products at a sensible level.”

The step-wise development of business intelligence is also an interesting point of differentiation between SUG and the traditional business intelligence vendors. Chandler is quite realistic about the concerns and capabilities of mid-sized enterprises and actively encourages them to start by using business intelligence for, say, relatively straightforward operational reporting and measurement of KPIs (key performance indicators). Once they gain confidence they can build on their investment and branch out into the world of closed-loop performance management using SUG's packaged applications for budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation. The idea is to de-risk the transition to performance management by giving mid-sized organisations a range of ready to use business applications which build on their initial investment and take advantage of SUG's collective experience of best practice. “The mid-market needs ready built applications. It doesn't have the time and resources to develop highly customised applications,” says Chandler .

However, organisations like SUG know that mid-sized businesses can be every bit as complex and challenging as their larger counterparts - they just happen to be smaller! So the systems architecture has to satisfy also the need for more specialised and tailored reporting applications. Once again, the serduct can be deployed to populate a customised OLAP cube (multidimensional database) from which business users can slice and dice information as required.

Effectively, the serduct capability provides a uniform layer for managing data access across a broad spectrum of complexity ranging from simple operational reporting to more involved business intelligence and performance management applications. In this way, it provides business users with a familiar and harmonised view of the business irrespective of the terminology used in the underlying operational systems, their functional role within the organisation or the application they are using to see the data.

“Our performance management and business intelligence applications are relevant whether a customer is using our finance solution or another package,” says Chandler , pointing out that SUG is equally at home supplying a finance system, a performance management application, a business intelligence solution, or all three.

Touchstone's McNay expects the influence of Microsoft will help to stimulate interest in mid-market performance management. “Their newer products such as Reporting Services and Analysis Services will encourage mid-market companies to expand their analytical capability and this may well attract other suppliers into the SME space.”

Ironically, what Systems Union Group is achieving in the mid-market seems beyond the reach of most large enterprises. Perhaps the high end of the market can learn a lesson or two from the mid-market. Start simple, build on it gradually but above all, choose a sensible and robust systems architecture in the first place!

[SPONSORED LINK : To find out more about Systems Union Group please click on this link]

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