Discover the IBM Planning Analytics Solution on Microsoft Azure

This exclusive Tech Data technology bundle provides partners with the opportunity to engage customers with a best-of-breed planning analytics solution, hosted in the cloud.

IBM Planning Analytics automates planning, budgeting, forecasting and analysis processes. While offering the full functionality of spreadsheets, it eliminates manual tasks to drive efficiency and ultimately improve business performance. Through consolidating data sources, this allows for creating reliable, rolling forecasts and insights in a fraction of the time and cost.

The IBM Planning Analytics on Microsoft Azure bundle offers differentiated pricing specifically aimed at the SMB market. The solution employs a simplified licence model, scaling from a small number of users to enterprise size deployments that reduces project complexity. The pre-configured Microsoft Azure environment allows Tech Data’s Business Partners to add a value ‘wrapper’ on top of the easily deployed vanilla bundle.

There’s incredible opportunity just out there waiting for youAccording to Barc & Ericson (2018) the Integrated Business Planning Market is worth $6.8B per annum worldwide. Of this figure, currently $4.4B is deployed on cloud (hybrid) and $2.1B deployed on premise.

The report continues by saying, ‘….the highest demand for future deployments, however, was found in cloud-based corporate performance management applications for advanced and predictive analytics, operational planning and forecasting, and strategic planning.’

As further evidence of this, IBM Planning Analytics is the biggest selling technology in Tech Data’s IBM partner channel.

IBM Planning Analytics is a business tool with many benefitsIBM Planning Analytics is a planning solution that scales from project planning, department budgeting and forecasting, to the line-of-business FP&A, to integrated enterprise performance management. It offers an Interactive, customisable workspace that can be deployed to all cost centre owners and business managers to deliver a consistent view of key performance indicators (KPIs) including dashboarding, variance analysis and ad-hoc analysis. Plus it is easy to complete what-if scenarios based financial modelling.

Overcome business planning problems such as:• Manually intensive spreadsheet budgeting and forecasting that’s taking too long• Financial analysts spend taking too much time to collect and validate the data• No single version of the truth• Need to deliver stronger business insight• Financial and operational plans are disconnected due to disparate data sources.

Leverage the winning formula of Microsoft Azure:• Productive - Reduce marketing cycles by delivering features faster with more than 100 end-to-end services• Hybrid - Develop and deploy where you want, with the only consistent hybrid cloud on the market. Extend Azure

on-premises with Azure Stack• Intelligent - Create intelligent apps using powerful data and artificial intelligence services• Trusted – 95% of Fortune 500 businesses run on the Microsoft Cloud today.

Features:• Uses an in-memory analytics technology giving

confidence to extract more data from core systems into the planning process

• Cloud-first focus around the user workspace and experience

• Flexible, comprehensive modelling of business structures, rules and relationships

• Self-service, interactive dashboards and compelling visualizations

• An optional spreadsheet interface, as well as a web interface to embrace all user requirements

• Dynamic, self-service hierarchy modelling to provide analysis of dimensionally rich data sets to understand root causes

• Self-service data discovery and predictive analytics to anticipate trends.

Benefits:• Connect financial and operational planning• Dynamic, real time forecasting• Ability to capture forecast data from the entire

organisation at required levels• Integrated dashboard reporting providing quicker

access and decision making• Scorecarding provides visual classification of

outcomes and the ability to tie the strategic plan to actual results

• Narrative reporting tells the story behind the numbers

• Multi-dimensional analysis beyond finance (profitability models, marketing campaign analysis)

• Advanced predictive algorithms integrated directly into planning process

• Mobile, collaboration and cloud deployment options.

More informationTo discover how to get started and get access to the tools and resources you need, contact

analytics-emea@techdata.eu

IBM Planning Analytics on Microsoft Azure - competitive differentiators:• The solution offers an in-memory calculation engine to support more complex planning applications or larger

user counts• Easy integration with end user’s corporate security provider.

Pre-configured sizing

Configuration Size Small Small-Medium Medium Large

Number of PA users 10-15 15-50 50-100 100+

TM1 Data Tier Server √ √ √ √

Planning Analytics Workspace Server √ √ √ √

Web Application Server X X √ √

Dedicated Non-Prod environment X √ √ √

The differentiated pricing for IBM and Azure elements of this technology bundle ensure it is compelling, relevant and competitive.

The nature of the IBM Planning solution will ensure it drives cloud consumption and will give increased opportunity for complementary offerings.