SAP has a unique offering with its EPM solutions

At a time when risk and operational efficiency have
become almost the Halleluiah for enterprises around the world, how relevant is
enterprise performance management?

EPM helps in areas like planning, budgeting, forecasting, statutory reporting,
cost analysis, managing operational processes, and profitability. It also links
to business intelligence, and risk and compliance management. This is possible
because these solutions have high data volumes with a rich and intuitive flavor,
which is also augmented with user-friendly interfaces.

Any objective reference point that reckons EPM as
confidently, also from a relative competition dimension?

This year itself, IDC has reported SAP as the market leader in performance
management and analytic applications, based on software license and maintenance
revenue. The market analysis, titled Worldwide Business Analytics Software
2009-2013 Forecast and 2008 Vendor Shares, found that SAP leads in the
performance management and analytic applications market, with a 20.3% share of
the market.

The IDC report also shows that y-o-y growth rate in this
market segment for SAP was 13.9% higher than the growth rate for the next five
competitors, as well as the market as a whole, which grew by 8.9%.

How much is this market worth chasing?

The EPM market represents $8.37 bn out of the total $24.1 bn business
analytics software market. Customer adoption is positive, looking at numbers
such as 200 in Asia-Pacific & Japan, and around twenty-four in India.

How do you plan to evolve EPM stack further?

Our roadmap outlines extending functionality into domain areas like strategy
management, financial consolidation, extensible business reporting language (EBRL),
spend performance management, and supply chain performance management to name a
few.

Today, organizations are looking at ways to improve
operational and financial performance. SAP has a unique offering here with its
EPM solutions. These enable to make finance a better control ingredient, quick
adaptability, and better tabs on performance. They can help optimize financial
and operational strategy. And you can also add reduced IT maintenance costs,
improved data integrity, better technology RoI to its advantages.

Pratima Harigunani/CMN

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in