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Mercury Interactive
- Performance Management Software -
Category Directory
(508)
870-0300
289
Turnpike Road
Westborough, MA 01581
www.applix.com
Sales
$27.4
million
Business Description
Applix, Inc. (“Applix” or the “Company”) is a global provider of business
intelligence (BI) and business performance management solutions, focused on
interactive planning, budgeting, forecasting and analytics as well as
financial reporting. These solutions enable customers to continuously manage
and monitor performance across financial and operational functions within
the enterprise, with the views of past performance, the current state of
business, and future opportunities. More than 1,700 customers worldwide,
including many Fortune 100 companies, use Applix’s adaptable, scalable and
real-time solutions to manage their business performance and respond to
business challenges in real-time. Incorporated in 1983 and headquartered in
Westborough, Massachusetts (“MA”), Applix maintains offices in North
America, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia.
Industry Background
The economy of recent years has forced companies to adopt rigorous methods
for assessing the impact that any future investments would have on their
business. With reduced resources, many enterprises are pressed to make
difficult decisions as to where to increase and decrease spending in their
businesses. Many companies are focused on incremental investments in IT
projects and reductions in plans for cutting-edge technologies and large
infrastructure initiatives. However, analysts predict that the BI and
Business Performance Management markets will be growth markets in 2004.
The BI market is a large and well-established market focused on leveraging
the data collected in operational systems throughout an organization. BI is
associated with the data warehousing market and involves the analysis of
large amounts of historical data. The historical data is aggregated before
it is analyzed and this aggregation process frequently requires several
hours or days before any analyses can be performed. Often, the analyses are
performed by a few highly trained individuals within an organization.
The business performance management market is an emerging market that
extends the capabilities of BI solutions. Business Performance Management
solutions tend to focus on proactive, rather than reactive, historical
analyses and they rely on recently updated or real-time data feeds. Business
Performance Management solutions also tend to involve data from across an
organization and involve more diverse groups of users than do BI solutions.
According to the Gartner Group, as of October 2003, there were still no
clear leaders in this market segment.
Factors driving the growth in the need for BI and Business Performance
Management solutions include increasingly fierce business competition, the
need for financial transparency across the enterprise, the rapid explosion
of data, and more decentralized decision-making. AMR Research expects the
BI/ Analytics market to increase at a 7% compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”),
with a total market of more than $11 billion by 2007. The Gartner Group
expects a 5 year CAGR of 8.5% for the BI market. The Business Performance
Management market is also expected to undergo continued growth. According to
META Group, the Business Performance Management marketplace will grow by
15-20% in 2004. The Business Performance Management market grew to
approximately $1.1 billion in 2003. IDC also projects strong growth in the
Business Performance Management market with research showing a 24% CAGR,
from $6.9 billion in 2000 to $19.9 billion in 2005.
These strong projected growth rates validate Applix’s conviction that in
today’s competitive corporate marketplace, companies can no longer succeed
by solely automating their day-to-day transactions. Companies must also
incorporate analytic processes into their daily operations to monitor and
react to key business performance metrics such as customer retention and
product profitability.
Applix TM1 has over 20 years of success in the BI market. Applix is also
well positioned to deliver Business Performance Management solutions, as
evidenced by the growing number of customers who have selected Applix
software solutions to maximize business performance. In 2003, more than 200
new customers selected Applix BI and Business Performance Management
products, and revenues for those products increased by 22% over 2002.
Competition
The Company believes that it competes principally on the basis of product
features and functionality (including cross-platform availability,
interoperability, integration and extensibility), reliability, ease of use,
ease of support, and total costs of ownership (initial investment and
on-going operating costs of the solution).
The markets for the Company’s products are highly competitive and subject to
rapid change. The companies with which Applix competes most often are
Hyperion and Cognos. The Company also competes with other smaller
competitors, some of whom build their product offerings on Microsoft
technologies. In general, both categories of competitors are marketing and
selling pre-built BI and Business Performance Management applications along
with services to implement and customize the applications. Applix approaches
the market differently by offering configurable BI and Business Performance
Management tools and its partners and customers typically perform the
implementation.
Software vendors are under increasing pressure to provide solutions that are
easy to map to customers’ rapidly evolving business models and that
integrate with other solutions. Customers have become more methodical in
their methods of evaluating vendors’ solutions, and they often require that
vendors substantiate their claims with case studies that demonstrate
compelling return on investment benefits.
Many of the Company’s competitors have significantly greater financial,
engineering, and marketing resources than the Company. No assurance can be
given that the Company will be able to compete successfully against current
and future competition or that the competitive pressures faced by the
Company will not adversely affect its financial performance.
Applix Products
The Applix product family helps customers automate, analyze and optimize
their operational and analytical business processes throughout their
extended enterprises. The Applix product family consists of Applix TM1
platform and Applix Integra. The Applix family of products enable solutions
including:
• interactive planning, budgeting, and forecasting applications,
• sales analysis, product profitability, customer profitability,
• personnel planning applications,
• dashboarding, scorecarding and key performance indicators (KPIs).
In September 2003, Applix introduced TM1 Web, a module that enables users to
quickly and easily create real-time Web-based worksheets or “Websheets”
directly from Excel, allowing the sharing of data to facilitate forecasting,
planning and “what-if” analyses. With solutions based on the TM1 platform,
Applix’s customers have increased their business performance in numerous
ways such as achieving their business goals within 6 months of
implementation on the average, freeing up personnel to concentrate on
strategic planning rather than on data gathering, reducing customer
defections, improving customer satisfaction, shortening the business cycles
from days to minutes, and rapidly managing mergers and acquisitions.
Applix’s global network of partners delivers packaged and custom
applications based on the TM1 platform for specific vertical markets such as
pharmaceuticals and banking, or for specific function such as supply chain
analytics or financial consolidation and reporting.
Applix TM1
Applix’s leading product, Applix TM1, a platform used for planning, helps
customers improve business performance by enabling effective, real-time
decision making at all organization levels. Applix TM1 provides consistent
reporting and analysis of data captured from across the extended enterprise.
Applix TM1 allows business users to access their critical data via Microsoft
Excel, third party products such as SPF Plus, OLAP Objects and, dynaSight or
the World Wide Web. With its powerful client-server database engine and an
elegant, easy-to-use interface, users are able to spend more time analyzing
information and less time maintaining data.
The TM1 platform is easily configurable and deploys rapidly with minimal IT
investment. TM1’s low total cost of ownership enables business users to
quickly achieve their goals, whether they build applications themselves or
work with one of Applix’s many solution partners.
Applix TM1’s real-time approach to consolidating, viewing and even editing
large volumes of multidimensional data is an undisputable differentiator in
the BI and Business Performance Management markets. Applix TM1 has been one
of the leading multi-dimensional analytics tools for highly complex business
and financial analytical applications for over twenty years.
The Applix TM1 platform and modules, including TM1 Web, expand the scope of
business planning processes to support continuously changing customer
demands and operational requirements. The TM1 platform and modules also
enable the quick and effortless integration of information from enterprise
resource planning (ERP), financial systems, CRM, human resources, and other
“legacy” databases.
Applix TM1 is available on Windows and Unix platforms. However, the majority
of customers utilize TM1 on Windows platforms. As a result, Applix is
constantly working with Microsoft to enhance and expand its support on the
Microsoft platform.
Applix TM1 provides the following benefits:
• Familiar spreadsheet interface: Users access Applix TM1 features and
capabilities directly from the familiar environment of Microsoft Excel.
• Instant response times: Because of Applix TM1’s ability to quickly load
vast data sets into memory, it is superior to other products that force the
customer to pre-calculate and re-calculate consolidations and derived values
before anyone can view the data.
• Real-time multi-user read/write and what-if analyses: Because of Applix
TM1’s memory-based approach, users can instantly view the results of any
updates and what-if analyses they perform.
• Rapid deployment: Applix TM1 typically builds complete applications for
customers in a fraction of the time required by competing products.
• Scalability: Applix TM1’s 64-bit capability, combined with its ability to
support multiple servers, multiple cubes, multi-threaded processing and
multi-user data updating, make it a logical choice for large-scale
operations.
• Efficient use of system resources: Because Applix TM1 never resorts to
pre-calculating data, it requires much less hardware and processing power
than other products, which suffer from a common “data explosion”
predicament.
Applix Integra
Applix Integra supplements TM1 with integrated business workflow,
collaboration and alerting functions. Applix Integra enables businesses to
set their key performance indicators, plan and budget, and manage
performance with all the planners in the business function. The flexible
modeling within Applix TM1, which is incorporated in Applix Integra, also
supports organizations’ complex and changing business models, a key demand
in today’s mercurial business environment.
Applix Integra’s benefits include:
• Dynamic business workflow. This enables a business to map its processes
with Applix Integra’s escalation, notification, detection, and workflow
capabilities. Easy-to-use “wizards” conform to complex business rules so
that users can stay ahead of opportunities and issues.
• Complex business modeling. Applix Integra’s unique architecture of
multi-cubes, rules, a real-time engine, and workflow allow a business to
manage its complex business models.
• Actionable alerts. Timely alerts generated from a company’s analyses and
business processes enable it to be proactive with respect to its business
environment.
• Integrated application and deployment platform. Applix Integra combines
the Company’s application development platform and the Applix TM1 platform,
which means a business can easily develop and deploy Applix Integra
solutions.
Performance Management Companies in the Directory
Applix
CorVu
Geac Computer Corp.
Hyperion Solutions
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