Published on the 18/11/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
ANZ chief financial officers remain wary of the cloud for their own use, even though they’ve had a decade of signing cloud cheques for CMOs and CIOs…
Host Analytics, which sells cloud based enterprise performance management (EPM), wants to do to Oracle’s Hyperion, the current market leader, what Salesforce did to Siebel, says CEO Dave Kellogg.
Kellogg, currently in Australia to present at events in Sydney and Melbourne, has however thus far only signed up 15 ANZ customers through its local partner Inside Info, and acknowledges that at present 95 per cent of all EPM deployments are on premise. Gartner has Oracle, SAP and IBM as the leaders in the EPM space, with Infor and SAS as challengers. HostAnalytics is one of a series of companies described as “visionaries” with Gartner acknowledging it as the first pure-play cloud vendor in this segment of the market.
While CFOs had been happy to sign off on cloud purchases for sales and marketing, they have been slower to embrace the concept themselves according to Kellogg. Most companies which had deployed EPM were still on premise, with another cohort of CFOs largely reliant on spreadsheets to manage the business.
Kellogg said; “I’ve worked with $10 billion businesses that are still on Excel,” but noted that come budget time many of them realised the limitations of this approach.
He does however recognize that there is still a reluctance among CFOs to embrace cloud. “They will go (to the cloud) when all their friends go. The responsibility for us is to get the herd moving, then it will stampede,” said Kellogg.
For ANZ companies there has been an additional barrier to overcome in terms of data sovereignty issues and latency, said Stuart Barnard, managing director at Inside Info. He said he had convinced Host Analytics to offer a locally hosted version of the system to tackle the issue, which it announced this month.
Barnard said that he was hopeful of at least doubling the number of clients in ANZ over the coming year.
Kellogg said that HostAnalytics had inked an arrangement with Amazon Web Services which would host its system locally, and that this could become a model for the company internationally in the future.
