Summary
Quantrix has released the 64-bit version of Modeler, its multidimensional spreadsheet application. Multidimensional spreadsheets address several key issues that routinely plague business and financial analysts in preparing analyses and generating reports. They can simplify and speed up the process of building business or financial models, performing analysis and, equally important, changing, improving or maintaining models over time. Compared to standard desktop spreadsheets, the multidimensional versions are far more flexible when it comes to creating and using complex business models and performing analytic tasks. They also make it possible for organizations to share and work with a wider range of data than they realistically could using desktop spreadsheets. The standard business intelligence (BI) tools do not serve these tasks very well and have not advanced to support the analytic modeling of business data. We believe that Modeler fills an important niche between spreadsheets and BI tools because it is more accessible and useful to business analysts rather than IT personnel who do not bear responsibility for performing analytic tasks to support decision-making.
Assessment
One of the little-noticed issues facing business users of desktop spreadsheets is their inability to manage more than a couple of dimensions. When applied to business, “dimensions” are categories of common attributes used to group information about a company. Typically, these include organizational structure (such as geographic location and business divisions), customers, products, currency and time. Desktop spreadsheets are two-dimensional structures that do not handle multiple categories easily. To address their shortcomings, clever users have developed adaptations or have used pivot tables, which are not easily adapted to the dimensional and hierarchal aspects of business. Sometimes these are good enough to accomplish the task at hand. More often, however, even with these adaptations, spreadsheets make it difficult to do complex drill-down analysis, to apply global changes (such as exchange rates) or to restructure elements of the business (such as adding product families or moving products among business units). Many users think desktop spreadsheets are “free” because they come as part of a desktop suite like Microsoft Office, but businesses should measure their true cost by the hours and days of delay they create in providing important analysis or models that in turn delay business decisions or by employees’ failure to do detailed analysis because there isn’t enough time using desktop spreadsheets.
In the past, people had reason to cling to desktop spreadsheets because going multidimensional posed serious challenges in time and resources. Most of the established tools require a serious investment in software, hardware and training. What’s been missing has been a tool that can handle multidimensional tasks but is easy enough for the typical business user to learn without much effort and is affordable within the typical budget constraints. With these yardsticks in mind, we believe that the full range of business analysts across finance, operations and other areas of the organization should investigate Quantrix Modeler.
The latest release of it adds 64-bit processing, which boosts performance and analytic capacity, especially for large-scale enterprise models, and enables organizations to create substantially larger models. Quantrix also has added roles and permissions to control how models are shared, enabling companies to manage a collaborative modeling environment more securely. In addition, it offers integration with enterprise databases as well as Web services, delimited data files and other data sources using JDBC/ODBC, SOAP/XML and direct data transfer mechanisms. The company also offers several optional capabilities. One is the ability to push data from Quantrix models into other systems, including enterprise applications or data warehouses. Another is a vocabulary manager to enable companies operating in different countries to use multiple languages or to automatically manage multiple presentation styles. And there is remote server access for organizations that want to control the desktop but provide access via Citrix or some other remote-access application.
Market Impact
Growing dissatisfaction with desktop spreadsheets is causing companies to evaluate alternatives. Multidimensional spreadsheets are not going to replace the familiar two-dimensional grid kind, but we expect this category to gain in importance as users find that this software suits their requirements. We do not expect Quantrix to replace business intelligence tools like those from Cognos, an IBM company, Oracle Hyperion and Business Objects, an SAP company, and others; it is not an enterprise BI tool. But the current release makes it possible to extend the use of Quantrix Modeler to less technical users in larger enterprises.
Recommendation
We recommend that finance organizations and business analysts responsible for modeling and analytics evaluate Quantrix for managing collaborative and forward-looking tasks to see whether it can enable better analysis and business optimization-related activities. Quantrix offers a free trial of its desktop software, making it possible to test-drive it without risk. We think that making a modest investment in time to learn to use a new tool such as this will reward users with a substantial increase in their productivity and enable them to demonstrate value to their organizations.
About the Author
Rob heads up the Financial Performance Management (FPM) practice, focusing on the intersection of information technology and the finance organization. The FPM research agenda includes the application of IT to financial process optimization and collaborative systems; adaptive control and analytics; and advanced budgeting and planning. Rob has been a technology analyst for over 20 years. Prior to joining Ventana Research he was an equity research analyst specializing in enterprise software at Primary Research Partners , Senior Vice President at First Albany Corporation (an investment banking and institutional brokerage firm with a strategic partnership with META Group), a securities analyst with Drexel Burnham and Morgan Stanley, and a consultant with McKinsey and Company. Rob was an Institutional Investor All-American Team member and on the Wall Street Journal All-Star list. Rob earned his BA in Economics/Finance at Hampshire College, an MBA in Finance/Accounting at Columbia University, and is a CFA charter holder. Rob can be contacted at robert.kugel@ventanaresearch.com.
