The segment „Planning in and around Power BI” is growing fast. As it is an obvious idea to think about using the same solution for planning as for reporting, more and more vendors are positioning themselves in and around Power BI for planning tasks.

Up to now, three vendors (Acterys, Power ON and Visual BI with  Valq) are already listed on the Powerbimap with planning offerings that are natively integrated into Power BI with a variety of Power BI custom visuals. One important characteristic of the embedded solutions is that they allow to enter data DIRECTLY within the Power BI user interface.

Initially coming from rather “light” planning scenarios like sales planning without complex calculations and KPIs, those solutions grow more and more to full CPM solutions, offering also other modules like consolidation and more advanced workflow functionality. That’s why they are on the way to become direct competitors to the established CPM vendors, while those vendors add Power BI integrations to their offering. The last group includes well-known names like Tagetik, Kepion, Lucanet or Prophix.

In the last weeks, two established German vendors out of that segment announced their Power BI stories: Jedox and Evidanza. Both have existing planning solutions and a significant customer base, and both use their own database solutions for planning. The new integrations enable their users to utilize Power BI as a front end while keeping the core planning functionality in their existing solutions. This means that in terms of modelling and setup still another technology has to be maintained, but customers get the benefit of using Power BI and the large eco system around it for all reporting purposes with low effort for integration.

The new integration of Jedox additionally also allows to embed reports and views in Power BI, which can be used for data entry and workflows within the Power BI user interface. This means that the functionality is getting closer to the “natively embedded” products. Jedox, which has developed a significant global footprint in the CPM market in the past years will create additional attention for this market segment. The company has a comparable offering and partnership with Qlik for a couple of years already.

It will be interesting to see which approaches get the best acceptance of the market – in both segments (embedded and attached planning solutions) we expect additional vendors to enter the market in the next months. In order to offer the market an overview of the different approaches and products, we are planning to have a closer look at that segment with a study to be released later this year. In this document, we plan to have a detailed analysis of the level of integration and compare the different concepts of the vendors.

Links:

Jedox landing page “Microsoft and Jedox”
Evidanza landing page “Planning for Power BI”
Jedox Blog: A new data service for Power BI
Tagetik on-demand webinar: “Power BI und Tagetik” (German)