Host Analytics is a corporate performance management (CPM) SaaS offering which last week briefed me on some changes that they believe will turn up the heat on the CPM market. The company, which claims 8,000 active, and more importantly paying, users from enterprises like JP Morgan Chase, Procter & Gamble, Otis Spunkmeyer and Pitney Bowes, released version 9.0 of its cloud CPM suite. 

Host analytics as it stands provides for a range of analytical functions, from budgeting and planning through to scorecarding, dashboarding and reporting – and mostly though easily understood and used workflows that enterprise staff will be comfortable with. What we’re saying here is that Host Analytics understands that enterprise users have a particular workflow and pattern that they’re quite attached to – finding ways of working within those parameters but leveraging the power of connectedness is what vendors selling into enterprise need to work on.

Key changes in this release include;

• increased support for multi-national organizations – consolidations and the like
• enhancements to the budgeting solution that add dimensional attributes for reporting and modelling flexibility
• improved Excel integration (loathe as I am to admit it – enterprise still uses Excel primarily) for dynamic access to data
• support for SEC-required XBRL reporting and web services integration to ERP, CRM and HCM data sources
• new task lists, wizards and Web 2.0-based toolbars and menus 

Also last week Host Analytics introduced Team Edition – Financial Consolidation, a midmarket offering and Excel replacement that they believe improves the accuracy and reliability of the financial-close process by “controlling the potentially lethal combination of velocity and complexity found in the close process.”  In other words facilitating speed, hiding complexity but ensuring robustness.

The company also announced partnerships with Quest Partners, RTC Consulting LLC and XBRL solution provider NeoClarus, and launched an online customer community that adds a theme-du-jour “social” element to Host Analytics’ offering.

This image below shows a typical budget input template.   Budgeting/discrete modeling with Excel-like templates that write back to a database – all the benefits of SaaS with a look and feel that even the most die hard corporate type will feel comfortable with;

And when you take that data and depict it as a scorecard, it comes through like this;

The new products, partnerships and customer ecosphere cap an apparently busy Spring for Host Analytics.  Last month the company raised nearly $9M in a Series B financing round. Not overly big news a year or so ago, but impressive in today’s constrained economic climate.