KEY QUESTIONS TO ADDRESS WHEN REPLACING YOUR LEGACY

Reinvent your Business Analytics

KEY QUESTIONS TO ADDRESS WHEN REPLACING YOUR LEGACY PLANNING AND REPORTING

2Reinvent your Business Analytics

Table of Contents

Management Summary ............................................................................................................................................... 2

1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................... 3

2. Business problem #1: Too much work ......................................................................................................... 3

3. Business problem #2: Unifying expectations ............................................................................................ 4

4. How Jedox helps ...............................................................................................................................................5

5. Return on investment .......................................................................................................................................6

6. Why Jedox? ......................................................................................................................................................... 7

7. Unified planning, analysis, and reporting .....................................................................................................8

Management Summary

Organizations that simplify and optimize planning,

forecasting and reporting free up valuable resources, so

they can focus on growth. However, many organizations

feel stuck with slow platforms that are not user-friendly,

expensive to maintain, and difficult to upgrade.

Often users were forced to select a tool like SAP

Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), or Oracle

because it came with their ERP, rather than by selecting

the most suitable tool from the market. Other tools like

Hyperion Essbase and Hyperion Planning had some

unique features 20 years ago, but have been overtaken

by newer and more modern platforms that combine

planning with visualizations and analytics.

This whitepaper reviews key issues faced by business

users and developers of legacy calculation engines

and planning systems, and compares how the modern

Jedox platform can address these challenges to provide

greater user satisfaction, less IT burden, and a rapid

Return on Investment.


1. Introduction

Slow installation and configuration, time-consuming

patches and upgrades, performance issues, and

heavy costs. These themes are now synonymous with

outdated multidimensional database management

tools. But enterprises are at a loss when it comes

replacing their legacy systems.

At the same time, the Business Intelligence (BI) field is

rapidly transforming. We are now seeing a spectrum,

with “data visualization” tools at one end, and “core”

CPM (Corporate Performance Management) tools for

planning, budgeting and consolidation at the other end.

Tableau and Hyperion Essbase are examples from both

end of this spectrum.The next goal is to unify the two

extremes into a single solution that combines superior

visual analytics with a powerful engine for modelling

complex planning and forecasting. This is where Jedox

provides unique capability. Jedox comes with advanced

planning, “Record to Report” (R2R) capabilities, visual

analytics, and powerful data integration capabilities.

Because Jedox is unified, it is easier to become an

expert. This makes Jedox fast to implement, and flexible

in solving many organizational challenges.

2. Business problem #1: Too much work

Over the last two decades, tools like Oracle’s Hyperion

Suite have been widely used by finance managers.

This is because it provides a multidimensional view of

business data to help analysts build Excel models and

analyze them from various viewpoints.

However, software like Essbase lacks the easy and

flexible reporting functionality needed by most finance

departments, and carry a heavy IT and admin load.

With the value of the original software Capex purchase

long written-down, combined with high operational

expenditure from maintenance and running costs, now

is a perfect time to understand your alternatives. When

it is difficult to move on to a new version, it can be easier

and smarter to replace than upgrade.

These are typical challenges:

⊲ Expensive implementation and maintenance costs

⊲ A large in-house IT team to maintain changes

⊲ Time-consuming software updates and patching

⊲ Slow aggregation time for simple changes −

unsuitable for real-time reporting

⊲ Reporting dashboards for financial

reporting often not user-friendly

⊲ Inadequate integration with legacy systems

⊲ Slow support response from mega-vendor

relationship management teams


3. Business problem #2: Unifying expectations

A major barrier to true organizational performance is

when disparate tools are used for reporting, analysis

and planning. Instead of intuitively reviewing and

understanding the past and using this to inform the

future, business users across all departments must go

to diff erent systems to perform diff erent functions. This

is slow, manual, and tedious.

The rise of self-service BI means that business users

have higher expectations from corporate solutions.

They expect a modern user experience, available on

any device. They expect compelling visualizations and

interactivity with social collaboration functions built-in.

And they expect rapid sustainable results – whether

deploying on-cloud or on-premise.

The challenge is how to meet these new expectations,

while assuring that current business processes like

budgeting and planning running in legacy tools, can be

easily redefi ned in the replacement solution.

Figure 1: Unifi ed BI and CPM with Jedox Jedox empowers you with powerful planning, eff ective analytics and beautiful reporting, on every device


4. How Jedox helps

Five ways Jedox helps you overcome issues faced by business and IT:

1) Unifi ed: A major concern for development teams

is the integration and using diff erent

packages for ETL (Extraction, Transform,

Load), Reporting, Planning and Analysis.

Typically, these activities have diff erent user interfaces,

which makes them hard to use simultaneously and you

need diff erent experts to maintain each package. Jedox

unifi es these functions so you can manage server

connections, user security, data integration, batch jobs,

OLAP cubes, reports and dashboards with less time

and less resources.

2) Real-time: With outdated analytics tools, you must

design and run aggregation scripts to

see your results at the consolidated level.

This is highly time-consuming. Jedox’s

high-performance analytical engine runs calculations

in real-time so you don’t worry about which calculation

scripts need to be written or managed. There are no

aggregation scripts – Jedox just works.

3) Easy to maintain: If you want to update the data dimension

in a tool like Essbase, you must add this

information to each cube. If it’s a dense

dimension, this forces a time-consuming

cube restructure. With Jedox, any dimension update

instantly applies to all cubes using that dimension. You

can adjust, rename and add to dimensions, elements,

attributes, cubes without constraints.

4) User interfaces: Many BI & CPM systems only provide a

single user interface. This is often rigid

and hard to learn. To use web or mobile,

you need to build these interfaces on

top. Jedox gives you the same foundation as Essbase

with the Jedox Excel add-in. You can use all your Excel

reports and import them into Jedox with one click

without recreating from scratch. From here, you can

use the Jedox Offi ce add-in to embed dynamic graphs

and tables in Word and PowerPoint. Critically, you can

seamlessly use Jedox from web and mobile – on any

device. Jedox web is highly fl exible so you can embed

it into other corporate tools like Salesforce and SAP

Business Portal. By providing a consistent and secure

interface you can use on any device, you can support

diff erent user groups and requirements with the same

platform.

5) Ownership: Monolithic systems are very rigid and

cannot be modifi ed by business users.

They are expensive to implement, and

create ongoing IT burden and heavy

consulting support. Jedox follows a “self-service”

approach that returns simplicity and speed to your

business users. Jedox empowers users from marketing,

sales, procurement and fi nance secure access to data

through an intuitive and consistent user experience.

Source: BARC BI Survey 12

Jedox $33

Tableau $46

BOARD $111

Infor $121

Microsoft SSAS $163

Oracle OBIEE $311

Oracle Essbase $740

QlikTech $890

SAP BW $977

SAP BO Webl $1.149

IBM Cognos BI $1.197

IBM Cognos TM1 $1.481

MicroStrategy $1.848

Jedox 69,4%

BOARD 50,0%

Tableau 45,5%

Infor 44,9%

SAP BW 38,7%

Microsoft SSAS 36,1%

Oracle OBIEE 35,5%

SAP BO Webl 30,6%

IBM Cognos TM 1 29,3%

Qlik Tech 29,0%

IBM Cognos BI 28,9%

Oracle Essbase 26,5&

MicroStrategy 24,2%

Jedox 49,2%

Infor 43,8%

Tableau 42,6%

BOARD 39,3%

QlikTech 27,8%

Microsoft SSAS 27,7%

IBM Cognos TM1 26,7%

Oracle OBIEE 24,7%

SAP BO Webl 22,5%

SAP BW 21,2%

Oracle Essbase 20,9%

IBM Cognos BI 20,9&

MicroStrategy 15,3%

Average total cost of license fees (US$´000) Projects implemented in less than 3 months

Application administered by 2 or less people


5. Return on Investment

Jedox is founded on one vison: to provide unified, smart

and scalable planning and BI that’s cost-effective, so

organizations can maximize business value. The high-

compression in-memory database with the advanced

GPU accelerator makes it highly scalable for highly

demanding big data for planning scenarios, while the

unified architecture means mid-sized organizations with

lean IT minimize their maintenance and support.

Jedox is easy to use on-premise and on private and

public cloud. Jedox has industry-leading lowest Total

Cost of Ownership. The scalable Jedox license model

means the investment to replace your legacy tools are

less than what enterprises pay for software maintenance

on their mega-vendor system.

Figure 2: Deliver more value for less Jedox enables you to deliver higher business value with the shortest time-to-value and ongoing Return on Investment.

+= +Lowest TCO

Lowest license

fees

Fastestimplemen-

tations (little effort)

Lowest effort to run

andadministrate

BI & CPM - a unifi ed 360° view of your business:

Jedox empowers you to analyze historical data

for meaningful insight, and to plan and forecast

intelligently. Jedox unleashes your capabilities

in one solution, unifying Business Intelligence

and Corporate Performance Management (BI &

CPM). Jedox evolves with your business and you

can consistently drive progress through Jedox.

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership:

With a fl exible licensing model, fast

implementation, and low internal maintenance

costs, independent global BI surveys confi rm

that Jedox provides the lowest total cost of

ownership. Jedox delivers ongoing payback

and frees up IT resources. With the Jedox Cloud

you can start today with no upfront platform,

hardware, or license costs.

Invest with a global-leader:

More than 1,700 companies in over 127 countries

rely on Jedox for their planning, analysis and

reporting processes. Mercedes-Benz, Fiat,

Bacardi, and BP trust Jedox. Invest in a solution

that delivers repeated payback. We work with

180 partners that leverage the scalable and

proven Jedox software platform to deliver

tailored solutions for your region, your function,

and your industry.

High speed analytics, mobility, and cloud

With the world’s top analysts naming Jedox the

industry-leading innovator, Jedox provides the

most advanced functionality, from extraordinary

interactive dashboards on any device, unique

GPU big-data acceleration technology, to the

Cloud. Jedox is enabling new styles of predictive

analytics and collaboration.

6. Why Jedox?


Discover fi rst-hand how Jedox empowers business users while being compatible with organizational IT goals, test drive Jedox for yourself here:

Free Software Trial

http://www.jedox.com/en/product/free-software-trial

Figure 3: Jedox at a glance Transparent. Smarter. Faster. Seamless. Transform your business with unified planning and analytics anywhere.

7. Unified planning, analysis, and reporting

Jedox empowers you to analyze historical data for meaningful insight, and to plan and forecast intelligently. Jedox

unleashes your capabilities in one solution, unifying Business Intelligence and Performance Management (BI & PM).

Jedox’s easy to use functionality gives you insight across industry, department, and organization size:

l Data discovery & fluid visualization

l Beautiful operational reporting & dashboards

l Consolidations, KPIs & Financial Performance Management

l Data entry & write-back with real-time scenario planning

l Enterprise budgeting, forecasting & workflow

l Multidimensional predictive analytics

Jedox transforms the world’s most used reporting and planning tool into the most useful. You can still use your Excel

expertise, while Jedox manages your data, your business rules, and secures your data. Traditional BI was never

adopted by more than 30% of the enterprise: slow, expensive and hard to use. Today, democratizing data means

pervasive BI – you may not even know you are using analytics because it works inside the tools you already know.

That’s Business-Driven Intelligence. That’s Jedox.



ABOUT JEDOX

CopyrightEDITOR:Dr. Rolf GegenmantelPresident Jedox Inc.

CONTRIBUTORS:Rohan KapilSenior Consultant Jedox Inc.

DESIGN:Sven AkerGraphics design Jedox AG

ContactAmericas: +1 617 532 0388

APAC: +61 1300 406 334

Germany: +49 (0) 761 15147 0

France: +33 1 42 68 52 20

E-Mail: [email protected]

Website: www.jedox.com

Blog: www.jedox.com/en/blog/

Twitter: @JedoxAG

Jedox’s unifi ed planning, analysis and reporting

empowers decision-makers from fi nance,

sales, purchasing and marketing. Jedox helps

business users work smarter, streamline

business collaboration, and make insight-based

decisions with confi dence. Our design approach

is transforming how organizations plan. Already,

over 1,700 companies in 127 countries are using

Jedox for real-time planning on the web, the

cloud, and on any device.

Jedox is a leading Business Intelligence and

Corporate Performance Management solutions

provider, available globally through over 180

certifi ed business partners. Jedox provides

software, support and ongoing training, with

implementation and maintenance expertise for

customers worldwide.

Learn more about Business-Driven Intelligence at: www.jedox.com

180Partners

127Countries

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KEY QUESTIONS TO ADDRESS WHEN REPLACING YOUR LEGACY