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Modesty: The Art of Encouraging People to Find Out for Themselves How Wonderful You Are

By DAVID Marmer posted Thu May 26, 2022 11:29 AM

  

“It’s not bragging if you can back it up.” – Muhammad Ali
 
I am a parent whose children have joyfully engaged grandparents. Needless to say, I do understand the concept of humble bragging. The teams I am proud to lead however are not braggarts. Therefore, in this blog, I need to take on the role of a proud parent and share one part of the portfolio that deserves some of that attention: Planning Analytics with Watson. 
 
Planning Analytics with Watson (Planning Analytics) quietly advances every month, delighting users, impressing analysts, and transforming our customers towards improved results. Again and again.  
 
Proud parent humblebrag #1: Positive Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is a gift, both in praise and critical feedback. In addition to our own NPS there are 3rd party review sites that collect independent reviews from customers. Last year Gartner Peer Insights named Planning Analytics a “Customer Choice Award winner”!  Companies ranging in size from under $50M to over $10B shared their feedback over the last couple of years which led to many of the improvements in the user experience, AI innovations and deployment options available today.  Most recently, review site G2 named Planning Analytics a “Leader” and TrustRadius awarded Planning Analytics a “Top Rated” designation! Customers on both review sites noted Planning Analytics power, ease of use, advanced AI capabilities, and scale for applications in finance, sales, operations, and beyond. 

 
Proud parent humblebrag #2: Recent Positive Analyst Feedback
Planning Analytics continued to receive positive evaluations from Analysts. For example, Ventana Research ranked Planning Analytics #1 in their recent Business Planning Value Index!  Planning Analytics also placed in the market leader’s segment in the BARC Score for Integrated Planning & Analytics. 
 

Proud parent humblebrag #3: Continued Innovation
Planning Analytics delivered a release nearly every month! Recent innovation highlights include:

AI: 
  • AI Forecasting improvements with outlier identification and correction and migration to the Watson Core Time Series Library to provide a pathway for future planned AI features.
  • New integration to Decision Optimization, enabling improved constraint resource allocation in planning by leveraging the Watson Studio AI capabilities natively, no-code, with Planning Analytics.

User Experience:
  • New mapping functionality, bringing MapBox to Workspace, providing richer geo-spatial visualizations
  • Further adoption of Carbon design, increasing the information density of data in the exploration view and set editor, addressing a commitment to our authors and users of workspace
  • Planning Analytics for Excel added Version control for the Excel capability where the client can decide which versions will work in the PA environment. PA for Excel has moved to WebView technology for authentication.

Self-Service Administration & Resiliency:
  • Planning Analytics on Cloud customers, we have delivered (and continue to innovate) on the self-service framework which gives customers complete control over creating, deleting and renaming databases. 
  • You can also download your welcome kit directly from Planning Analytics Administration and choose whether or not databases should restart automatically or not after maintenance.  
  • And the most recent addition is the status page,  the one stop shop for getting the up to the minute status on the Planning Analytics on Cloud Service. 
  • …and finishing Beta is our new Planning Analytics Engine which expands on the best of TM1 with features for high availability, improved memory management, and data import/export. These new features elevate the resiliency needed for the mission critical applications our customer have created with Planning Analytics.
 
Proud parent humblebrag #4: Our partners are driving new logos and new applications everyday
One hallmark of success is when you see customers expanding into thousands of users and continue to attract hundreds of new logos with partners at the helm. It indicates that customers not only find value in the solution, but also new applications they haven't contemplated before! It also tells us that our capabilities are relevant and differentiating to new buyers.  We continue to see growth ahead of the market for both Planning Analytics on-premise and Planning Analytics on Cloud.  Thank you to our wonderful partners for your trust, your expertise, and your continued partnership! Our customer success with Planning Analytics comes from the advice and deployments our partners deliver to the world's leading organizations. You continue to inspire us with your success!


Proud parent humblebrag #5: It's more than just Planning
Planning Analytics is integrated with Cognos Analytic and IBM's Data Platform, Cloud Pak for Data.  IBM Cloud Pak for Data allows easy deployment of Planning Analytics on any cloud platform.  In doing so it allows customers to supercharge their Planning Analytics applications with the sophisticated power of AI with capabilities such as IBM Watson Studio and IBM Decision Optimization without having to be a data scientist.

As you can probably detect, I am bursting with pride for the team behind Planning Analytics with Watson.  Engineering, Product Management, Marketing, Design, Support, SRE, Sales, Tech Sales, Expert Labs, CSMs and our network of partners continue, albeit sometime too quietly, to elevate how this technology can transform organizations and lead them all to better outcomes.  Keep checking back as I intend to keep adding shameless bragging highlights of this solution - just like my parents do about their grandchildren.


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Ann-Grete Tan
Thu May 26, 2022 03:58 PM

Great post Dave! Planning Analytics (and TM1 before it)  have been a "best-kept secret" for WAAAAAY too many years. But the fact that its die-hard fans persist in supporting it through everything says something about what it can do!
PS: and thank you for the Business Partner shout-out!

Michael McGeein
Thu May 26, 2022 11:54 AM

Like you Dave, I am incredibly proud of all the work from our teams, and our great business partners, and our clients.
Thank you for sharing all of this great news.