We recently completed The Forrester Wave™: Digital Operations Planning And Analytics, Q4 2023, covering what is also known as enterprise performance management (EPM), financial planning and analytics (FP&A), or extended planning and analytics (xP&A). This is the first time that we’ve updated this Wave since 2016, and a lot has changed!

We see significant interest in this category because there’s an increasing need for sophisticated modeling and planning tools for making critical business decisions with revenue and costs directly in view.

Some of the key themes that we discovered in this research include:

  • Modeling and planning software is moving to the cloud. Many of the vendors we evaluated still have on-premises customers (and some still sell to them actively), but the vast majority of new deployments are now in the cloud, which offers benefits of agility and innovation.
  • AI is center stage. Modeling and planning by definition involve advanced analytics and insights. Thus, this category is making use of AI for more advanced predictions and recommendations.
  • The space still shows a wide variation for complexity and global scale. While the market is full of choices and activity through M&A and private equity investments, we still see a dynamic where only a select few are proven at the most complex of global enterprises.

Want to learn more? Check out the research and how the players stack up here, and please set up a guidance session or inquiry to talk more.