IBM is one of the world’s largest vendors of IT hardware, software and services. The company has a global workforce of approximately 282,000 employees and is active in over 170 countries.
IBM offers a comprehensive portfolio of analytics, performance management (in particular for planning, budgeting and forecasting, and financial consolidation and close) and advanced analytics solutions. Major offerings include IBM Cognos Analytics and IBM Planning Analytics. For financial consolidation and regulatory reporting, IBM Controller is part of the performance management portfolio. IBM supports a wide range of deployment requirements by offering both cloud and on-premises options as well as containerized applications.
IBM Planning Analytics – the vendor’s strategic enterprise planning product – is a core element in IBM’s performance management portfolio and has been on the market since the 1980s. Due to its rich functionality for planning and OLAP analysis, and its underlying in-memory TM1 technology, the product plays a strategic role for IBM and thousands of solutions have been implemented worldwide. Planning Analytics is available in both cloud and classical on-premises versions. Essentially, it is a high-performance, multidimensional, in-memory database for budgeting, planning and forecasting with Excel and web front ends. The product is targeted at business power users for building all kinds of applications (planning, analytics, strategy management, etc.). Therefore, it has no dominant focus on any one topic (financials, sales, HR, etc.) or industry. While Planning Analytics’ strength is its rich flexibility to implement tailored solutions for specific use cases, IBM and particularly its extensive partner network offer prebuilt business content for specific use cases and industries. In the latest versions of Planning Analytics, IBM has improved the web client with a modernized user interface and user experience, extended charting options and visualizations, a web-based data modeling environment and strengthened workflow capabilities. To control planning processes, a web-based visual workflow designer helps in the development of individual workflows (e.g., task management and due dates, status monitoring, approval, email notifications, etc.). Built-in AI and ML capabilities can be used to recognize anomalies or potential data entry errors and offer functionality to generate forecasts. Planning Analytics can also harness the services of advanced IBM AI capabilities such as IBM watsonx.ai.
IBM Cognos Analytics, the vendor’s enterprise BI and analytics platform, provides functionality for dashboards, pixel-perfect reports, data stories, data modeling and analysis in a unified web-based user experience. It combines ease of use with elaborate governance features in an end-to-end platform. The product can be used in large-scale scenarios supporting the needs of many concurrent users as well as large data volumes. IBM wants Cognos Analytics to be every user’s analytics copilot when navigating data. The vendor has incorporated NLQ, automated insights and intent-driven modeling and has invested in automation and ML capabilities across data modeling, dashboards, data exploration and an analytics chat assistant. The AI assistant allows users to explore data by asking natural language questions and by receiving insightful answers with a presentation-ready dashboard or report. Cognos Analytics’ AI capabilities can also identify trends and forecast results, helping companies to identify relevant influencers and correlations and calculate quick predictions.
IBM Controller is a purpose-built financial consolidation and close product for statutory and management consolidation use cases with predefined dimensions, consolidation computations and a library of pre-packaged reports for data review, system configuration and audit trail. Controller is agnostic in terms of industry and organization size and is available in the cloud and on premises. Standard functionality includes currency translation, intercompany reconciliation/elimination, complex ownership handling, multi-GAAP capabilities and options for custom calculations and flexible reporting.
