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Unit4 boosts BI offering with prevero purchase

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20th Jul 2016
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Dutch ERP vendor Unit4 has expanded its range with the acquisition of market-leading business intelligence (BI) provider prevero for an undisclosed sum.

German firm prevero has 4,000 international clients, primarily across the German-speaking world, including BMW, Konica-Minolta and Swisscom. The firm’s performance management products allow customers to use business data to uncover insight and optimise financial and operational functions.

Prevero’s business intelligence and corporate performance management products match Unit4’s new focus on professional, service and educational organisations, with data-based decision making and analysis becoming an increasingly important aspect of corporate life.

In one of his first briefings since taking over as chief executive, Unit4’s Stephan Sieber stated that the acquisition of prevero will add valuable forecasting capabilities to the company’s offering.

“We had multiple different products that covered parts of what prevero can do, but they were never as strong and complete”, said Sieber. “We can now offer a 360-degree decision-making platform supporting all business areas.”

Previously Unit4 did not have any specific BI products in its portfolio, but its acquisition of prevero will allow users to monitor performance according to KPIs such as revenue, return on investment, overheads, and operational costs.

According to Unit4, key capabilities of the prevero suite include:

  • Predictive analytics and business insights
  • Modeling and simulations
  • Ubiquitous access to information via in-memory technology
  • Corporate-wide collaboration and planning
  • Pre-built content for CxO offices and specific verticals

Budgeting and planning automation

The acquisition is the latest in a series of developments in the roadmap of budgeting and planning automation. These developments are at an early stage and experts have not even agreed a name for the technology. In business circles it is commonly known as corporate performance management (CPM) tools, while financial experts are referring to it as forecasting, planning and analysis (FP&A).

With software giants focusing their industry know-how on creating powerful automated tools fed by big data, it’s likely that sometime in the near future a new generation of software will emerge that will leverage big data, machine learning and predictive capabilities to make accurate, automatic predictions and plans.

Perhaps this will offer the much-vaunted tipping point that will allow firms access to real-time forecasts based on big data, held in the cloud and with unlimited computational power. Only time will tell, but this particular deal offers both parties the opportunity to steal a march on the competition in the budgeting automation race.

Is your company using or looking at CPM/FP&A tools? What advantages are they likely to offer your business?

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