Infor Is the Top Performer in Performance Management

The performance management market is maturing, and leaders are beginning to emerge and consolidate their positions, according to the "2007 Performance Management Vendor and Product Scorecard," a research report from Ventana Research. Results of the research show Infor to be the overall leader in the field, scoring 97 percent compliance with Ventana's PerformanceCycle methodology. Close on Infor's heels were Cognos and Symphony-Metreo, tied for second place with 94 percent overall. Business Objects, with its 90 percent score, rounded out the top end of the competition. Ventana rates vendors and products with 337 yes-no questions relating to functional requirements and capabilities. They are further divided into Align, ensuring that workforce actions and plans are coordinated with corporate goals; Optimize, preparing an organization to implement future changes; and Understand, reviewing the historical performance of people and processes. These scores are also used to help compute the Overall score. Vendors are invited to participate and then screened; a number of major vendors, including IBM, Microsoft, SAP, and SAS Institute did not respond to the invitation or declined to participate. Cognos sat atop the leaderboard for Align, outscoring Infor 99 percent to 97. Softscape came in third, with 92 percent, followed by Pilot Software and Symphony-Metreo, tied at 91. The low score belonged to Actuate (61). Only two companies managed to break the 90th percentile for Optimize: Infor with 96 and Symphony-Metreo with 94. Business Objects came third (88), then arcplan (85) and Cognos (83). All other competitors were below 80 percent, with the lowest being Softscape (57). Understand, according to the report document, was the tightest competition of them all. After leader Infor's 98 score, Actuate, Information Builders and Oracle were snarled in a three-way tie at 96.2 percent. The next level was another tie, with Cognos and Symphony-Metreo both achieving 95.6 percent. Business Objects and its sore of 94 made the seventh company above 90 percent for Understand. It's a sign that this category is well covered by the industry that the lowest score was LongView Solutions' 83. "The Ventana Research Scorecard is important because it helps organizations evaluate software capabilities against the most in-depth product requirements and capabilities for Performance Management across the enterprise," said Mark Smith, Ventana's CEO and executive vice president of research, in a written statement. "All the vendors that participated should be applauded for allowing these products to be evaluated in this rigorous method." Related articles: Cognos's Quest for Real-Time BI CCPM Market Is Poised For Progress

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