Item: IBM Planning Analytics
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Planning Analytics is our central repository for financial data. It used to create consolidated reports, model the business, and operationalize our plans.

Pros and Cons

Real-Time Calculations
Fast Query Response Time
REST API interconnectivity
Excel integration
High-speed aggregation engine

Lack of cloud support
Lack of 3rd-party application support
No high-availability options
Hard to use UI designs
Lacks support for enterprise scale.

Return on Investment

Allowed our financial processes to grow with the business
Allowed us to handle a growing volume of data without making compromises
Allowed planning users to collaborate around clock across the world

Scenario Planning and What-If Analysis

It is growing in importance every year. However the in-built sandbox feature does not allow for sharing scenarios between users or teams. So, if you want real scenario analysis you need to engineer your system to do it a different way. This is a huge functionality gap

Key Insights

Do you think IBM Planning Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with IBM Planning Analytics's feature set?

Did IBM Planning Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of IBM Planning Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Planning Analytics again?

Yes

Support Rating

IBM continues to be slow to address old weaknesses in the product. They are slow to integrate into the cloud ecosystems of today's businesses. They continue to operate multiple code streams and fixes are slow to be released and many times require additional upgrades.

The release cycle is speeding up but IBM tends to release half baked buggy features for the first 2-3 releases in a version. This makes it hard to adopt the newest features.

Usability

For an engineer PA is easy enough to use, but integration is still hard. It only supports flat file and odbc integration points making ETL hard. It lakes support for a simple table construct which makes some types of development hard.

There continues to be no way to group data sets and assets into a cohesive namespace. Some of the UIs support folders or other things similar, but most users end up having to work with a giant list of cubes making on-boarding hard.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Planning Analytics is a best-in-class business modeling engine. It is flexible, scalable, and fast. The server is the gem in the crown and delivers the high-speed flexibility businesses need. IBM Planning Analytics is not enterprise or cloud-ready. It requires too much engineering work to make it reliably scale. The user interfaces are hard to use and don't deliver the reliability that large enterprises require.

Great potential, needs more investment

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Planning Analytics