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December 8, 2006
Chicago Office is an Investment, not an Expense.
During the last three years my company (Plexus) has spent millions of dollars to develop a performance management software - Visual Performance Suite (VPS). It offers features such as scorecard, dashboard, OLAP analysis, strategy map, reporting, etc. We mainly focus on the federal sector, selling and implementing VPS to major federal agencies such as US Army, Education, NIH, IRS, DHS, etc. Unfortunately, our VPS business was quite sluggish this year and created a heavy financial burden for our company.
As an initiative to recover from the financial struggle, our management is seriously considering to close down our Chicago office where all VPS development is handled (Please Don't; this will be big blow to VPS). For some reason, VPS is not well received in our company and failed to gain strong management support. In the worst case, Plexus will abandon VPS and pull out from the performance management market.
However, I personally believe that performance management is the right market to be in and we should continue to support our Chicago office and VPS.
Recent industry trend further emphasizes the importance of Performance Management:
=== [Excerpts from Industry News] ===
- Actuate: On January 2006, Actuate paid $16.5 million to acquire privately-held performancesoft Inc., of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, a leading provider of Performance Management Solutions software and services. This acquisition clearly shows Actuate's strong commitment to increase its presence in the performance management market.
- Business Objects: On July 2005, Business Objects paid $100M to purchase SRC Software, a leading performance management software. With the $100 million acquisition of SRC, Business Objects is talking more explicitly about its ambitions in the performance management arena
- COGNOS - Performance management has been central to Cognos' attempt to reach beyond IT departments, and it was the primary driver behind the acquisitions of Adaytum (which produced planning and budgeting software) and Frango (financial consolidation).
===
Major BI firms are betting their money on the performance management market. Plexus should go along with, not against, the current market flow.
My manager (CTO & Director, VPS Development) and VPS consultants including myself will have to convince our upper management to keep our Chicago office alive and continue to support Visual Performance Suite.
Chicago office is an investment, not an expense because Performance Management is coming strong.
Posted by William Cho at December 8, 2006 7:15 AM
