EPM Software in the Cloud Requires Integration

As an application category enterprise performance management (EPM) has been gaining traction in recent years as senior level business executives look for ways to model in a way that is simpler to visualize and share than a traditional spreadsheet. Like most new application categories these days a lot of EPM adoption is being drive via the cloud.

This week one of those EPM application providers, Host Analytics, released an update to its EPM cloud application that adds support for application programming interfaces (APIs) based on SOAP protocols along with support for third-party integration services such as Dell Boomi.

Lance Walter, chief marketing officer for Host Analytics, said that while REST APIs may be all the rage on the Web, when it comes to integrating EPM applications with existing enterprise applications the dominant mechanism that those legacy applications continue to expose is SOAP. As such, Host Analytics made SOAP a higher priority, while opting to rely on third-party integration services to provide access to REST APIs, said Walter.

Other new features added to the company’s namesake EPM application include support for a user interface that is optimized for mobile computing devices, as well as enhancement to the predictive analytics capabilities that are embedded in the EPM application.

Interest in EPM applications is running high because senior business executives want to be able to make better business decisions. Attempting to make sense of what is actually occurring across a complex set of interrelated processes and business units is not particularly well served by spreadsheets or, for that matter, traditional business intelligence applications. The challenge organizations face when adopting EPM is that these applications don’t populate themselves with data. Organizations that want to make use of EPM applications need to pull data from any number of enterprise applications to make the investment in EPM applications actually worthwhile. That obviously creates a significant data integration opportunity for solution providers regardless of who sold the EPM application or the mechanisms being used to populate it.

Naturally, Host Analytics is going up against rivals such as SAP and Oracle, both of which have made EPM software a much higher priority in the last year. But while SAP and Oracle clearly have data integration capabilities of their own that can bring to bear on these projects. Host Analytics, meanwhile, is going to be much more dependent on the skills and kindness of third-party solution providers to insert its cloud application service into the enterprise as smoothly and quickly as possible.