Sr. Research Analyst, Business Analytics and Decisioning Software
Group Vice President, Analytics and Information Management
Leaders
WorkdayFeatured Vendor
Anaplan
IBM
OneStream
Oracle
SAP
Major Players
Board International
insightsoftware
Planful
Prophix
Syntellis
Unit4
Vena Solutions
This IDC study represents an assessment of enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting application vendors as of 2022 through the IDC MarketScape methodology at a worldwide level. This assessment provides both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of applications in this market. The evaluation is based on a comprehensive and rigorous framework that assesses each vendor relative to the criteria and to one another. Key findings include:
Rapid innovation in this software market is expected to continue as technology providers are reacting to demand driven by continued market volatility; and as several specialty vendors have experienced injection of new capital following acquisitions by private equity firms
Although some organizations continue to view enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting as only a process involving the office of finance, the market volatility of recent years has highlighted the value of this software and processes it supports in enabling agility and resilience. Organizations evaluating new enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting technology should consider the following:
With continued uncertainty over market conditions, organizations should consider leveraging external intelligence or data as a service as part of their evaluation of enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting software. IDC research shows that combining software with third-party data enhances the potential value organizations can derive from their internal data.
This section briefly explains IDC’s key observations resulting in a vendor’s position in the IDC MarketScape. While every vendor is evaluated against each of the criteria outlined in the Appendix, the description here provides a summary of each vendor’s strengths and challenges.
Workday is positioned in the Leaders category in this 2022 IDC MarketScape for enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting applications.
The technology vendor is represented in this market with its Workday Adaptive Planning offering. Workday Adaptive Planning is sold as a standalone EPM offering and as an integrated solution with Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management. The solution is built on Workday’s Elastic Hypercube Technology, which provides scalable and performant modeling, reporting, and analysis. Released in 2018, the Elastic Hypercube Technology meets the needs of customers with complex environments, especially for large enterprise customers. It has a built-in intelligence to optimize calculations to only those dimensions that are required by each query, thereby improving response times.
Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud-native application that can be used via web browser or Microsoft Office applications. While many of its customers begin with using the application for financial planning, they expand into other types of planning within their organizations. The company has developed a series of new features in the past couple of years to meet customer demands. For cross-functional planning, Workday introduced a merged cube feature that enables users to plan and build models across multiple dimensions. Workday also released an alternate calendars feature that enables reporting on multiple calendars with different time granularity. In addition, its intelligent demand forecasting platform leverages machine learning to analyze historical and external data to generate more accurate forecasts.
Workday’s road map includes an enhanced data access layer to simplify operational data flows from Workday Prism Analytics to Workday Adaptive Planning, enabling users to preview a software feature before going live in a production environment and enhancing its machine learning forecasting capabilities by adding additional algorithm types and hyperparameters.
Workday Adaptive Planning customers have cited that the platform is very user-friendly for both data modelers and business users and that it scales to their business needs. Some customers also liked the fact that they can access the platform in a Microsoft Office environment.
Customers mentioned that Workday’s customer support could be improved, as staff weren’t always readily available to answer questions or resolve any issues that they had.
Consider Workday Adaptive Planning if you need a scalable solution that can be deployed in multiple or complex operational environments and via a web browser or Microsoft Office applications.
To be evaluated in this IDC MarketScape, a software vendor had to meet the following inclusion criteria:
Exclusions are:
For the purposes of this analysis, IDC divided potential key measures for success into two primary categories: capabilities and strategies.
Positioning on the y-axis reflects the vendor’s current capabilities and menu of services and how well aligned the vendor is to customer needs. The capabilities category focuses on the capabilities of the company and product today, here, and now. Under this category, IDC analysts will look at how well a vendor is building/delivering capabilities that enable it to execute its chosen strategy in the market.
Positioning on the x-axis, or strategies axis, indicates how well the vendor’s future strategy aligns with what customers will require in three to five years. The strategies category focuses on high-level decisions and underlying assumptions about offerings, customer segments, and business and go-to-market plans for the next three to five years.
The size of the individual vendor markers in the IDC MarketScape represents the estimated market size of each individual vendor within the specific market segment being assessed.
Vendors in the IDC MarketScape for enterprise performance management software for planning, budgeting, and forecasting applications were assessed with special emphasis on the breadth of their portfolios and geographical presence, the innovative features in their products, customer satisfaction and perception, and the overall health of their companies.
IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys, and the input of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions on the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor’s characteristics, behavior, and capability.
The enterprise planning, budgeting, and forecasting applications are prepackaged software applications that combine data ingestion, modeling, analysis, and visualization functionality along with built-in functionality for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and workflow management. Modern applications in this market are cloud based and incorporate advanced analytics and/or AI/ML to augment or automation processes involved in financial analysis, budgeting, forecasting single or cross-functional planning, and scenario analysis.
These applications are a subset of the broader enterprise performance management applications, which in addition to abovementioned functionality incorporate functionality for close and consolidation, financial reporting, cross-functional risk management, and various performance management methodologies, such as objectives and key results.
