Business intelligence for intelligent business

Process-driven analytics is providing forward-thinking companies with a next generation of business intelligence by focusing on the process rather than just the data. This approach, taken by arcplan – a global provider of process-driven analytics software and services – reduces the cost and complexity of traditional deployments by leveraging existing data in real-time. CXO caught up with Marco Palatini, CEO of arcplan, to find out more.

CXO. Just how important is business intelligence today and where will it be in five years?

MP. Earlier this year, Gartner published its annual ‘Top 10 Technology Priorities in 2006’ report and BI took top spot. There’s huge demand for real-time reporting and decision-making capabilities by the operational levels of the business. There’s also a plethora of different data sources and managers need data from all of them, which adds to the complexity. Another driver is compliance, because BI underpins consistency in decision-making. All these factors put operational BI at the top of executives’ priority list.

In the next five years, we’ll see growth as well as some consolidation. This consolidation will be not only within the BI space but also in the broader enterprise software space as ERP and ECM vendors expand their BI offerings. What this means for customers is more standardised BI solutions, which address 80 percent of their requirements, but are less able to cope with the 20 percent that is specific to the organisation and therefore delivers the most value.

At some point, the complexity becomes too great, and the traditional, packaged BI solution cannot solve the problem without a massive increase in cost – either by the vendor in customising the solution, or in expenses paid by organisations in in-house or outsourced customisation. This is where arcplan excels – when problems are too difficult, too unusual for a largely standardised offering to work

A fundamental development is the movement towards service-oriented architectures (SOA). The advantage of SOA for customers is that they can better manage the complexity of their heterogeneous environments and more quickly adapt to the changing requirements of business. SOA enables analytics to be embedded into business processes and vice versa. This improves the end results of business processes.

CXO. What do you see as your strengths in the market?
MP. We’re positioned in the process-driven analytics space, which, unlike traditional BI, is directly embedded in and spans business processes. Process-driven analytics improves the end result of the business process, delivering increased efficiency or increased revenue. With process-driven analytics, existing data – whether operational, analytical or warehoused – is accessed directly and analysed across all of these sources at the same time.

All of this means that arcplan Enterprise 5 adapts to changing requirements quickly and cost-effectively and can analyse data from ERP, OLAP, relational databases and other sources simultaneously. As a result, we are able to manage complex requirements and deliver on the 20 percent of requirements that most BI vendors can’t – and that deliver 80 percent of the value to the organisation. arcplan’s solution handles complex analytics quickly, efficiently and at a far lower cost.

As for our strengths, the first is integration of data sources. The range of IT systems we support and integrate is almost limitless. Second, arcplan can be used with the look and feel of practically any application, ensuring rapid user adoption and a customer-specific environment that adapts to different levels of user experience. Third, we include SOA via a comprehensive set of web services. Many vendors talk about SOA and web services, but they make it too complicated and – crucially – too expensive. And fourth, we offer real-time analytical processing. Instead of creating a separate staging area, Process-Driven Analytics directly feeds into and from a company’s business processes. So our solution adapts to changing requirements and can deliver real results quickly and cost-effectively

CXO. In 2005, Gartner identified arcplan as one of seven ‘cool vendors in BI, BAM and data warehousing’. Why is arcplan cool?
MP. In a word, innovation. For arcplan, innovation is our DNA. We were the first vendor to have a real-time source data access in 1994. Real-time has become a hot topic for the rest of the market in the last couple of years. The first to have a web-enabled BI solution in 1996; some vendors are only just starting to catch up. The first vendor to use web sites as data sources in 1998.

We were also the first vendor to introduce search capabilities for analytics in 2001, another topic that has become hot in the last couple years. And arcplan was the first (and only) vendor with comprehensive web services in 2006.

So it makes sense that arcplan is once again leading the field in terms of process-driven analytics – and it makes sense that we are recognised as being ‘cool’.

CXO. What concrete benefits do your customers get from your software?
MP. They see better profits and cost-savings from streamlined processes based on better-quality data. IBM has saved millions with their arcplan application – they have 18,000 users using 800 applications with 85 different data sources and saved US$2m in the first year and US$1m a year in the following years. Those numbers speak for themselves!

In addition, customers find that they are able to make better decisions, more quickly, in a transparent way. These are fundamental business benefits affecting both the top & bottom lines for a company.

CXO. According to your website, 60 percent of the world’s most profitable organisations use your solutions. How do you plan to grow that number?
MP. We’ve invested a lot this year in international expansion, with new partners and new subsidiaries. We opened offices in the UK and the Netherlands and have expanded our US and Swiss operations. We also signed a master distributor agreement in China and entered into a strategic partnership with Software AG. Our new CFO Cockpit solution is seeing a tremendous growth as financial managers can see immediate benefits from this solution and the community. So we hope these actions will help grow that 60 percent figure.

CXO. What exactly does this new solution do and what advantages are there for customers using it?

MP. There are two elements to this – a community and a solution. The CFO Cockpit Community (www.cfo-cockpit.com) is an internet-based network of experts in the field of corporate control and finance. Here, members and financial experts exchange information about best practices and also about the use of CFO Cockpit solution.

The solution is an executive dashboard for financial analysis, which sits on top of a company’s financial consolidation system. It has predefined reports that can be adapted to a company’s individual requirements. A key benefit is that we can guarantee an implementation in less than a week. And because of the professionally formatted reports and graphics, it enables business users –instead of just financial analysts – to make sense of financial information and use this information in their decision-making processes. We developed this solution together with our partner Partake Consulting, in cooperation with Hyperion.

For more information, contact Tony Howell , +44 1306 741 745, e-mail:tony.howell@arcplan.com, www.arcplan.com

MARCO PALATINI, a veteran of the IT industry with over 35 years’ experience, was appointed CEO in August 2006, tasked with driving arcplan’s corporate expansion plans as well as its global business.

Prior to joining arcplan, Palatini worked with the Canadian ECM vendor Open Text for over 10 years in a number of senior management positions, before which he founded the IT company Intunix, which specialised in text search applications.

About arcplan
arcplan, a worldwide vendor of process-driven analytics software and services, provides companies with analytic solutions to improve business processes which span multiple business functions and IT systems. With arcplan, customers – such as IBM, DaimlerChrysler, CUNA Mutual, Office Depot and Bayer – rapidly deploy industry-specific reporting, dashboard and scorecard applications for budgeting, planning and forecasting, financial analysis, marketing and sales analysis, and workforce analytics.

What made you decide on arcplan?
Johannes Drosdol, Project Manager Insight-FT, DaimlerChrysler:
“Simultaneous access to various data sources and the smooth consolidation of these data are outstanding advantages of arcplan Enterprise. Changes can be modelled immediately as a result.”