Host Analytics announced a new module is available for the company’s Cloud EPM Suite.
The new platform, which uses HTML, NoSQL, and in-memory computing technologies, is designed to bridge operational and financial planning processes wherever users work. This includes in Excel spreadsheets or through a Web browser or mobile device with a “write once, run anywhere” architecture.
“Business is becoming more metrics-driven and quantified than ever, and savvy organizations are trying to use data not just to analyze the past, but to try to better understand the future. Modeling isn’t a new concept and operational users do a lot of it,” Lance Walter, chief marketing officer of Host Analytics, told eWEEK. “The problem is that they do most of that today in desktop spreadsheets. Those spreadsheets aren’t secure or scalable, nor are they connected back to the master corporate plan.”
Walter said Modeling Cloud was designed to give business users the freedom and flexibility that they love about Excel, but with secure, centralized data in the cloud, and in a way that can connect their models back to the corporate plan on a weekly or daily basis.
“That lets companies be more agile and adapt to changing environments more quickly,” he said.
Self-service interactive query and analysis lets finance and business users analyze data, while advanced modeling lets users create new members, calculations, sub-models, and even business dimensions in models with no support from IT.
In addition, Excel-based reporting allows organizations to harness the full feature set of Excel for information presentation from a centralized, secure data store.
With Modeling Cloud, users can create a report in Excel and view it unchanged on a mobile device, or create a report in a Web browser for a power user to analyze in Excel.
Modeling Cloud also integrates with the rest of the company’s Cloud EPM Suite, enhancing the existing planning, close, reporting, and analytics modules for a complete EPM solution.
“EPM will continue to spread beyond finance,” Walter said. “From a technology perspective, that means that mobile will play a larger and larger role. It also means that organizations will want to integrate data from more and more non-financial operational systems, which could be anything from web traffic to CRM data to supply chain information, well beyond the traditional general ledger and ERP integration typical in EPM deployments.”