IBM Planning Analytics Prospects

IBM Planning Analytics (formerly IBM Cognos TM1), is essentially a high-performance, multidimensional in-memory database for planning and (OLAP) analysis. Planning Analytics is targeted at power users who build individual planning and analysis applications based on the in-memory database. The solution offers Web and Excel front ends and has capabilities for publishing content on the Web.

Planning Analytics is a scalable planning and analysis product used in thousands of implementations worldwide, from small-scale departmental scenarios with just a few users and small data volumes to installations with thousands of users. Performance satisfaction is high among users, an impressive finding given the large size of many Planning Analytics deployments. Indeed ‘Convincing performance’ is the main reason why customers buy Planning Analytics. Its in-memory database is clearly capable of handling large data volumes as well as large numbers of users, leading to a top rank in all of its peer groups, outpacing other big competitors like Anaplan, Infor, Oracle, SAP and Tagetik. IBM has invested heavily in scalability and performance improvements in recent versions of the product, which is a major differentiator to rival products from IBM’s point of view.