THE BOTTOM LINE

Two main trends persist in the corporate performance management (CPM) market: cloud uptake remains consistent but slow, and many cloud vendors are divided when it comes to
breadth of functionality. While the financial planning and accounting teams remain separated in their software choices, corporate performance management products are branching out in functionality to cover many use cases. However, user adoption of a single CPM solution company-wide remains low. When it comes to cloud, inertia and difficulty switching vendors still keep migration lower than other software areas.

In the past few years, cloud CPM solutions were seen as either replacements for Excel or for legacy on-premise products. But as the first generation of cloud products approaches its 20th birthday, customers are finding that the marketplace is more crowded, and the competitiveness of cloud vendors is greater as functionality expands to cover more diverse use cases. Customers now have a range of planning and accounting processes spread through the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, a modularized on-premise product, multiple cloud products, or, rarely, in a single diverse cloud application.

Many vendors have roots on one side of the finance department and build out greater functionality from there. But there is still confusion around how to build a best-of-breed stack. In speaking with customers, Nucleus found that there is little interaction during the buying process between accounting and financial planning, and that both teams usually evaluate products separately and do separate deployments. So, the land-and-expand paradigm of departmental deployments which has found success in other software areas like analytics does not yet show the promise of a higher ROI for CPM.

Nucleus sees this diversity as a challenge that vendors are tackling in recent innovations and roadmaps, and we expect that customer adoption will eventually increase once stronger business cases have been established in vendors’ customer bases.