Comshare, IPS-Sendero To Launch Collaboration Around Cost Performance Management

The two companies will work together to cross-certify personnel and develop what will be an IPS-Sendero private-labeled version of Comshare's corporate performance management (CPM) software by the middle of next year, both sides said Friday.

"This whole space of CPM is heating up, and the way it's growing is through partnering with leading players in the various verticals," said Terry Redding, director of business development at Comshare, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Atlanta-based IPS-Sendero specializes in risk management and profitability management, he said.

What IPS-Sendero gets is the benefit of Comshare's business intelligence and corporate performance management expertise, said Chuck Rowland, managing director of non-U.S. business at IPS-Sendero.

This deal is emblemmatic of the growing ties between analytics and operational realms of expertise, analysts said.

"Comshare is an analytics company, IPS is an operational company. Both have global presence, both are in the same industry and the link between analytics and operations is getting stronger and faster.....Where it used to take a company armies of people to do these massive spreadsheets and coordinate them, you now need software to automate that," said Bob Blumstein, research director at IDC, Framingham, Mass.

"In the financial institutions [now] we find that margins are falling due to competition," so measuring performance and cutting costs is key, Rowland said.

"CPM is typically thought of as budgeting, planning, forecasting, financial consolidations, analytics and reporting. The other vendors who play there do not offer the sophisticated risk analytics and transfer pricing methodologies," Rowland noted.

The companies will start to certify each other's consultants starting next week and hope to bring to market software integrating both companies' expertise next year, Rowland said. IPS-Sendero expects to have its private-labeled version of the Comshare product out by the second quarter of 2004. The product will be offered worldwide.

VARs and integrators who implement and maintain datawarehouses will increasingly need analytics expertise as well, as demand for near-real time reporting increases, observers said.

Comshare's CPM product, actually dubbed Comshare MPC (for management planning and control), starts at around $45,000 and runs on Windows NT and 2000 servers.

Comshare's Redding expects the company to partner with other specialists in other verticals over time. "This is a VAR opportunity in areas that to this point were more boutiques," he said.