BARC Score Report Ranks IBM as Leader in Integrated Planning & Analytics

The 2022 BARC Score named IBM as leader in Integrated Planning & Analytics. BARC (Business Analytics Research Center) is one of Europe’s leading analyst firms for business software, focusing on the areas of data, business intelligence (BI) and analytics, corporate performance management (CPM), enterprise content management (ECM), customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

This BARC Score report focuses on the market for integrated planning and analytics (IP&A) products and portfolios.

“Today, the reality in many companies is that IP&A is an often proclaimed but seldom achieved goal. Reasons such as internal policies or difficulties with historically grown system landscapes could account for this … However, the lack of coherence of data and functionality resulting from using multiple tools for planning and analytics, and using Excel instead of specialized software tools, are frequently cited reasons for user dissatisfaction, inconsistencies and error susceptibility with planning and analytics in companies today,” writes BARC.

BARC Score – IBM

BARC assessed several components of IBM’s “comprehensive portfolio of on-premises and cloud analytics and performance management solutions,” which includes IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson and IBM Planning Analytics with Watson. The BARC Score states:

• IBM Planning Analytics offers flexibility for business power users to create budgeting, planning and forecasting as well as analytics applications based on a high-performance in-memory database.
• Comprehensive Excel-based functionality for preparing individual applications in IBM Planning Analytics (modeling, custom planning forms, etc.) and publishing them to the web.

BARC Score Inclusion Criteria

BARC has two categories for being included in this report:

• The vendor’s products and portfolios
• Financial results relating to those products

Vendors included in the report must have functionality for planning, as well as:

• Formatting reporting
• Ad hoc query and reporting
• Analysis
• Dashboards

All vendors must generate a minimum of 20 million EUR of software revenue per year, have a presence in Europe and in at least two additional geographies. The product must also have a significant number of implementations.