On October 6, 2020 Gartner released their 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions. Gartner outlined that the 2020 MQ covered solutions which support the office of finance’s efforts to manage financial planning, budgeting, modeling and performance reporting.
Gartner’s evaluation in the Cloud FP&A report was based on SAP’s ability to execute and completeness of vision.
SAP was named a Visionary.
Extended Planning & Analysis
Gartner has mentioned that by 2024, 70% of all financial planning and analysis projects will become extended planning and analysis (xP&A) projects, extending the scope of planning beyond finance. SAP has fully embraced this with SAP Analytics Cloud, connecting and integrating plans with SAP S4/HANA, SAP SuccessFactors (HR), SAP Integrated Business Planning (S&OP) and other parts of the SAP Intelligent Enterprise with what we call
Collaborative Enterprise Planning allowing the CFO and Finance to have a holistic and integrated approach to the way they view and coordinate their plans.
SAP leads as a Visionary
SAP was highlighted in the report for having planning and built-in analytics.
SAP Analytics Cloud includes not just advanced visualization capabilities, but also existing augmented analytic capabilities built into models with full transparency for end users to understand and explain predictive planning results. SAP Analytics Cloud brings together
planning and analysis, augmented analytics, and business intelligence capabilities in one applicatio... so planners have all the analytics capabilities needed to make better data-driven decisions versus having to use and stitch together separate tools.
Gartner has also pointed out that by 2024, 50% of new planning implementations will be sourced from core financials vendors, due to superior integration and product bundling. This was highlighted by Gartner in SAP Analytics Cloud
being directly integrated with SAP S/4HANA, reducing the need to move data required for planning into separate solutions. As mentioned, this also allows FP&A software to act as a lens to view core financial data. With this kind of integration, customers working with SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP S/4HANA can make instant decisions and be a proactive finance department, vs waiting for a batch process to execute and be concerned about different versions of the truth and outdated information.
SAP’s geographic coverage is highlighted by Gartner with customers residing all across the world, along with a strong partner network and over 80 industry and line of business specific
content for customers to start working with.
Recent Highlights
As mentioned before, SAP Analytics Cloud brings
Predictive Planning directly into the application for finance users to run their own predictive forecasts and scenarios. Through the SMART series of features, customers can run:
- Smart Predict: Enable finance users to build trusted and actionable predictions with ease – AI for everyone!
- Search to Insight: Enter questions in conversational language to get the answers you seek
- Smart Insights: Instant insights focused on overall impact and contributor analysis for the KPI selected by the user
- Smart Discovery: Analyze patterns in your data, simulate “what-if” scenarios and identify outliers for anomaly detection
SAP and Microsoft also partnered this year to release the
SAP Analytics Cloud, add-in for Microsoft Office. This add-in allows users to have a seamless integration with their Excel for web and desktop in the Office 365 Suite and SAP Analytics Cloud.
Learn More
- To learn more about SAP’s solutions for Planning & Analysis, including SAP Analytics Cloud and the SAP Digital Boardroom, please visit SAP.com
- For a 90-Day Free Trial for SAP Analytics Cloud please register here
- Register for the complimentary report, Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions, Greg Leiter, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, 06 October 2020. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
