QlikView recently scored exceptionally well in the newly released BI Survey 8 – the world’s largest independent survey of Business Intelligence and Performance Management users conducted by the Business Application Research Center. QlikView ranked first in ease of use and customer loyalty, outperforming industry leaders SAP, Oracle, and IBM.

The survey showed that, overall, QlikTech customers were the most loyal. Customer loyalty is one of the most coveted categories among vendors, according to Nigel Pendse, author of the survey, “Because maintenance revenue and sales of additional licenses to existing customers are much more profitable than winning business from new customers. Consequently, most vendors work hard to achieve it.” With a tremendous track record of 100% client reference-ability, the Isidore and QlikTech solution provides a win-win combination for the client.

For more information on how Isidore can help your enterprise visit http://www.isidore.com/.

“The survey asked customers to rate their vendor in twelve areas including, amongst others, product functionality and quality, ease of use, support, training and customer communications,” said Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO. “I’m pleased to report that Alight ranked either #1 or #2 in ten of the areas measured. This substantiates the tremendous progress we’ve made in developing the Alight Planning software package and responding to our customers’ true requirements.”

In the 2008 Vendor Landscape Matrix, BPM Partners honored Alight as “Best New Vendor of 2008” citing Alight’s unique driver-based planning architecture and deep-seated modeling capabilities. In the 2009 Vendor Landscape Matrix, Alight was rated #2 overall in customer satisfaction. “Alight is a notable player in the BPM space, especially with their focus on rolling forecasts and scenario analysis which are so critical in today’s economic climate.” said Craig Schiff, CEO of BPM Partners. “From more than one hundred performance management vendors we track on a regular basis, we’ve chosen to include Alight on the US Vendor Landscape Matrix which identifies companies successfully delivering BPM Solutions in the US.”

“I participated in the BPM Partners survey and gave Alight high ratings because they’ve earned them,” said Gary Kinman, Vice-President, Finance of SoftLayer Technologies, an Alight customer. “I’m especially impressed by Alight’s attention to after sale customer matters such as product documentation, support, and implementation. In terms of functionality of the Alight software, the proof is in the performance. I can now do analyses in a couple of hours that would literally take days with my former budgeting software package.”

For information about the Vendor Landscape Matrix published by BPM Partners, see research details. For more information about Alight Planning including product demos and trial software, go to the Alight Planning website.

“Reflecting the continuation of difficult economic times, recent surveys by analyst firms confirm that a top priority of best-of-class firms is to implement processes for re-forecasting, especially incorporating ‘what if’ scenarios and business drivers,” observes Heer.

“Budgeting software is designed to save time and reduce errors, which are worthy goals, but the action and excitement right now is in the forecasting and planning space,” says Lamorte. “Building off a successful IE Group event in San Diego, Alight is pleased to be a global sponsor for the Boston event.”

Heer and Lamorte will employ their experience with customers along with current forecasting theory and best practices to highlight three critical requirements for continuous planning and rolling forecasts:

• Scenario analysis for establishing “what if” scenarios and exploring alternative decisions or actions in real time to understand possible outcomes.
• Driver-based planning where financial forecasts are driven by operational assumptions about the business and analyzed as metrics rather than simple dollar amounts.
• Integrated actuals where imported actuals data are modeled to provide visibility into operational metrics and financial trends for forecasting purposes.

To request a free pass for the workshop (limited availability) or to learn more about Alight Enterprise 6, please contact Ben Lamorte, BLamorte@AlightPlanning.com, or visit www.alightplanning.com.

For more information about the I.E. Group’s conference series including the upcoming Financial Planning Summit in Boston, visit www.theiegroup.com

“Reflecting the continuation of difficult economic times, recent surveys by analyst firms confirm that a top priority of best-of-class firms is to implement processes for re-forecasting, especially incorporating “what if” scenarios and business drivers,” Heer said. “In the session, we will examine the critical processes involved in generating rolling forecasts, including scenario analysis and driver-based planning, and how better forecasting can improve decision making and profitability.”

This will be Alight’s first presentation at an AICPA Workshop and the Controllers Workshop looks to be an excellent venue. “Budgeting software is designed to save time and reduce errors, but the action and excitement right now is in the forecasting and planning piece,” Lamorte said. “This presentation will be a highly educational session focusing on core processes involved in generating rolling forecasts, including:

• Scenario analysis for establishing “what if” scenarios and exploring alternative decisions or actions in real time to understand possible outcomes.
• Driver-based planning where financial forecasts are driven by operational assumptions about the business.
• Integrated actuals where imported actuals data are modeled to provide visibility into operational and financial trends for forecasting purposes.

For a live demo of Alight Enterprise 6, or for more information about Alight’s budgeting, reporting, and forecasting solutions, visit www.alightplanning.com.

For more information about the AICPA including the upcoming Controllers Workshop West, visit AICPA Controllers Workshop West.

“Customers have asked for and have been involved in bringing about these step-change improvements to the industry’s leading solution for budgeting, planning, forecasting, consolidations, scorecards, analysis, modeling and reporting,” said Mark Nashman, President & CTO, Clarity Systems. “We’re confident that this announcement will continue to fuel the rapid growth of the firm, enabling us to maintain our lead as the fastest-growing CPM vendor in the world ,” he added.

Powerful New Consolidations Solution
With a brand new financial consolidations engine, CLARITY 7 Consolidations now avoids duplication of data through optimized data storage, dramatically improving processing speeds. Not only does CLARITY 7 Consolidations deliver multi-GAAP/IFRS functionality, multi-currency capabilities, inter-company eliminations, and all of the other capabilities an Office of Finance user would expect in a comprehensive consolidations solution, but it also delivers sophisticated functionality to perform simulations on the consolidation models.

“Users can quickly view the financial impact of changes in ownership structure, hierarchical structure or other changes to the model, without impacting the base scenario. And all of this is delivered in a fully parameter-driven configuration platform, making it very easy to set up to meet the most complex global consolidations requirements,” said Nashman.

Template and Report Design Made Even Easier with CLARITY 7 Studio
An innovative new tool is also being unveiled: CLARITY 7 Studio. Studio makes it even easier for finance department users to take control of the creation and on-going management of sophisticated data entry templates and reports, without having to engage IT support.

Additionally, CLARITY 7 includes extensive capabilities to perform Profitability Modeling and Optimization, including tools to perform what-if modeling and goal seeking. As well, a comprehensive Strategy Management solution complete with strategic planning and initiative/goal management capabilities are included in CLARITY 7, all within this single, unified CPM application.

“Budgeting software is designed to save time and reduce errors, but the action and excitement right now is in the forecasting and planning piece,” Lamorte said. “This presentation will be a highly educational session focusing on core processes involved in generating rolling forecasts, including scenario analysis and driver-based planning. Most importantly, we will distinguish between budgeting and forecasting and how better forecasting can improve decision making and profitability.”

“Building off a very successful ASMI event in San Diego, we are pleased to be the lead sponsor for the Boston event”, says Lamorte, who has previously co-presented at an ASMI event with Larry Van Kuran of Kaiser Permanente on the topic of driver-based planning. Lamorte will employ his experience with customers and prospects along with current forecasting theory and best practices, to highlight two critical requirements for effective rolling forecasts:

• Scenario analysis for establishing “what if” scenarios and exploring alternative decisions or actions in real time to understand possible outcomes.
• Driver-based planning where financial forecasts are driven by operational assumptions about the business.

For a live demo of Alight Enterprise, or for more information about Alight’s budgeting, reporting and forecasting solutions, visit www.alightplanning.com.

For more information about the ASMI conference visit www.ASMIweb.com/Forecast or contact Paul Rogers at (858) 737-4122.

“While many companies were shrinking at the height of the economic downturn, PROPHIX Software was growing,” said Paul Barber, President. “PROPHIX saw an opportunity to provide cost-effective CPM software to the many organizations that were trying to find a way to nimbly navigate the economy. Based on that success, we are seizing the opportunity to expand our market share further with the launch of PROPHIX 10.”

Corporate performance management used to mean one headache after another, and running reports and analyzing data meant getting help from IT. PROPHIX 10 was created to expedite financial processes and empower the finance department to drive performance management.

PROPHIX 10 enables business users to analyze data, run reports from their desks, contribute to the planning process, and share critical information across the organization. It combines high-level functionality with standard technology at a competitive price. With PROPHIX 10, customers gain a forward-looking view of their financial position, enabling smarter and faster business decisions.

“PROPHIX 10 has increased collaboration and ownership across our business — and strengthened the connection between finance and strategic initiatives,” said Kristy Chapman, Financial Planning & Reporting Manager, AAA Western & Central New York. “Our finance department is playing a leading role in business planning by giving other departments easy access to critical data that influences every business decision.”

PROPHIX 10 features two pre-packaged solutions – PROPHIX G/L Reporter and PROPHIX Express. Affordable and quick to implement, both solutions help smaller organizations automate budgeting and reporting with the option of expanding to a full corporate performance management solution as their needs change. Both solutions include pre-built financial reports and fixed service, enabling organizations to analyze, report and react quickly to changing market conditions.

In announcing the release, Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO, said: “The focus of this release is twofold: first, to enhance the planning administrator’s control over the end user’s experience by streamlining file check-out and check-in procedures and allowing customization of the user’s budgeting and forecasting interface; and second, by providing power users improved tools for developing and replicating large scale driver models which are the foundation of flexible rolling forecasts.”

Commenting on the release of Alight Enterprise 6, Michael Kerr, CFO of Wimba, a collaborative learning solutions and services company, said: “I’ve tracked Alight Planning through two companies and three major releases. There’s no question the Alight team knows what’s it’s doing in the planning space. Version 6 with custom end user interfaces and auto-replication is another big step forward in the continuing evolution of a great product.”

Focus on End Users

The Alight Enterprise 6 release further enhances the tools available to plan administrators for customizing the end user experience and workflow processes. The toolkit now includes:

• Customization of report interfaces allowing user control over show/hide functionality for unit/rate/amount activity driver columns, intelligent operator columns and other analytics.
• Customization of report interfaces for manipulation of dimension filters and showing/hiding of
  dimension tags.
• Setting user security at the dimension member level as well as traditional rollup structures such
  as product and department.
• Specifying the level of interaction each user can have with data sets—for example: read only,
  change values, add line items, and create models.

“With the latest feature additions, we believe Alight Planning now has the most comprehensive set administrator tools for managing the overall end user environment for budgets and forecasting,” said Heer. “Alight Planning’s controls let the administrator manage every aspect of the planning process with a special focus on making the end user’s job of inputting and analyzing data easy and training free.”

Focus on Modeler Developers

Alight’s reputation as the most flexible and intuitive software for building driver-based models for budgets and rolling forecasts is further enhanced in the Alight Enterprise 6 release by improved formula building interfaces and automated model replication methodologies. The software’s feature set for building complex driver models includes:

• Built in unit/rate/amount architecture for integrating operational metrics into driver models.
• Point and click interfaces with object based linking for fast model building and maintenance.
• Auto-replication for exploding driver models across multiple dimensions and rollup structures.
• Automated system notes for tracking relationships between modeled elements.
• Key Measures interface for presenting sub-set driver models and testing input assumptions.

For a live demo of Alight Enterprise 6 or to order trial software, visit www.AlightPlanning.com.

Enhancements in PlanGuru Version 12 include:

* Supporting schedules flexibility enhanced – PlanGuru Version 12 adds new flexibility to the supporting schedule feature. Supporting schedules can now also be used to create a schedule to support the computation of budget amounts using multiple variables.
* Enhanced QuickBooks import utility – PlanGuru features seamless integration with QuickBooks accounting software. PlanGuru Version 12 adds the flexibility to import information into PlanGuru using a class number. This new enhancement will facilitate budgeting by department or division.
* New security features added – Users will now have the ability to add user name and password protection to PlanGuru analyses.
* Support for different currency symbols – Version 12 adds the ability to designate a currency symbol other than “$” or suppress the currency symbol on reports. In addition the ability to designate the separators for thousands and decimal character has also been added.

For more information or to download a free trial version of PlanGuru please visit http://www.planguru.com

New Horizon Technologies, Inc. founded in 1998 is a privately held company specializing in the development of business management tools for small and medium sized businesses.

“Applied Analytix is a very sharp group of consultants with extensive experience in performance management software ,” said Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO. “Their special focus on budgeting and planning, financial forecasting and advanced analytics makes them a valuable partner for us because these are the very strengths of the Alight Planning software package, especially for mid-market companies and divisions of the Fortune 500 who can’t afford or support higher-end packages.”

“The Alight solution leverages Rand’s deep experience and success with planning applications. Alight Planning provides companies with a solid platform that goes well beyond just the basic planning and budgeting capabilities,” said Dan Mannisto, CEO and founder of Applied Analytix. “Our decision to partner with Alight compliments Applied’s focus on mid-market firms that need advanced forecasting and modeling at an affordable price. We are very excited at the prospect of working with Rand and the Alight team.”

Alight LLC’s Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 1,000 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 175 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Down East Enterprises, Pittsburgh Mercy and the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World. For more information about Alight Planning, visit www.AlightPlanning.com.