Oracle Hyperion's Performance Manages to Top Gartner's CPM Magic Quadrant

Gartner has named Oracle Hyperion as the leading vendor in the quickly maturing corporate performance management (CPM) suite market, with Cognos, Business Objects, and SAP also in the research firm's top quadrant. (It's important to note that the report was produced before the completion of two industry-shifting acquisitions: Cognos by IBM and Business Objects by SAP.)

CPM is one of the fastest-growing software markets, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 14.4 percent through 2011, according to Gartner. And yet even that torrid pace represents a drop from recent highs: The market grew at 20.2 percent in 2006, the last year for which full figures are available. The 2007 results won't be available until sometime in the third quarter of this year.

One vendor that was created expressly through company acquisition, Infor, is the only company Gartner placed in the Challengers' quadrant; Infor, however, told analysts in September that it was taking a break from acquisitions.

Gartner listed the following companies as Visionaries:

• SAS Institute, which just missed making the Leaders' quadrant due to an incomplete marketing effort, according to report co-author and Gartner analyst Nigel Rayner. Better marketing in 2008 could push SAS into the top quadrant, Rayner adds;
  
• Clarity Systems;
  
• Exact Longview, which "benefited from the change in ownership of OutlookSoft and Cartesis through acquisitions, [and] is now one of the few specialist vendors that offers an alternative to the large [business intelligence] pure-play and megavendors," according to the report; and
  
• Microsoft, which Rayner sees as a candidate for the Leaders' quadrant in the next report, as the company's CPM strategy matures.

The vendors named as Niche Players were:

• Board International;
  
• Lawson Software;
  
• Tagetik, which Gartner named an emerging vendor in 2006, and which, according to the report, has since capitalized on market opportunities to achieve license revenue; and
  
• RocketCorVu, which scored lowest among included vendors in terms of both ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Some smaller vendors -- including include KCI Computing, proDacapo, Prophix Software, Winterheller Software, and Exie -- are also beginning to gain traction in the CPM space, but have yet to meet all of Gartner's inclusion criteria for the Magic Quadrant.

Rapid market development has also led to significant consolidation in the market, meaning a handful of vendors listed in last year's report no longer operate as separate entities. Those include:

• Applix, dropped because it was acquired by Cognos, which in turn has since been acquired by IBM;
  
• OutlookSoft, no longer on the list due to its acquisition by SAP, which is planning to integrate the OutlookSoft offering with its Netweaver business intelligence platform.
  
• Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management and Oracle CPM, which were both eliminated from the report in the aftermath of Oracle's March 2007 acquisition of Hyperion Solutions and Oracle's subsequent plans to focus on the Hyperion product set.

"Those are pretty big acquisitions," Rayner says. The report also notes that, as a result of the market consolidation, companies such as Clarity and Exact have made the shortlist of vendor evaluations more often, which has led to growth. The consolidation spree may not be done yet, either: Rayner names Board International, Clarity, and Tagetik as potential acquisition candidates going forward, most likely by ERP vendors looking to enter the CPM space, in 2008.

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