Finance turns to Performance Management in the Cloud
In a recent article published in Financial Systems News, Managing Editor Gary Simon explores why the tide appears to be turning in favor of hosted finance solutions and whether the market has reached a tipping point.
“The transformation from traditional on-premises solutions to applications managed by a third party somewhere in the Cloud has been slow coming to the relatively conservative financial reporting and performance management space.
Some vendors are making inroads into larger enterprises. For some organisations the 24/7 environment of the Cloud, instantly accessible from anywhere in the world provides the basis for collaboration on an unprecedented scale, unencumbered by IT operations and clumsy infrastructure.
Guy Haddleton, CEO of Anaplan puts it succinctly. “We didn’t quite realise at first how much of a premium users place on IT independence. It’s a win/win for end users and the IT function. The IT professionals can leave the introduction of, say, a new sales planning system to the end users and reduce their project queue. By the same token end-users can get on with building the applications without waiting for IT resources.”
On a recent trip to London Haddleton told FSN, “The emphasis in Anaplan is to empower users to build the applications for themselves. What we have found is that the applications spread rapidly from one process or function to another as users discover more and more ways of automating business processes.”