Assessment

Financial organizations are assuming -- or are being forced to assume - responsibility for operating results, not just accounting for them. New pressures from Sarbanes Oxley, which link accountability for financial results with operational processes have raised the importance of automating financial processes to a critical level. These new pressures introduce new opportunities for Financial Performance Management application providers like Geac to provide solutions.

Geac announced their Geac MPC Performance Management suite version 7 on May 9th, 2005. Customers are testing the suite and the vendor plans to make it generally available in July 2005. The application suite contains Geac branded products for Budgeting, Financial Consolidation, Forecasting, Production Reporting, Planning and Strategy Management. Leading the list of major enhancements is the new Geac Planning application. That application fits into a class of solutions that Ventana Research calls Enterprise Spreadsheets; it uses Microsoft Excel as the application environment, but has enterprise application-class manageability. Leveraging Microsoft Office information worker capabilities (SmartPanes) within the spreadsheet environment, users can easily do scenario planning, top-down spreading selectively and direct model integration with Budgeting and Strategy Management. Organizations looking to embrace and extend their spreadsheet assets, directly link planning functions with both strategy and measurement of execution should consider how Geac MPC can address their enterprise planning requirements.

With the MPC 7 release, Geac also will release significant enhancements to their Financial Consolidation application Specifically, the new release functionality includes more sophisticated organizational entities with enhanced journals, inter-company transaction support and performance improvements. Through these enhanced capabilities, Geac is poised to further support multi-national corporations more efficiently by automating the financial consolidation and reporting processes so timeliness and quality can meet new requirements.

Geac has extended Strategy Management for broader utilization through collaboration enhancements called Discussions. Engaging users to collaborate is a critical capability for reaching optimal goals and objectives and provide a feedback loop that provides further support for corporate Performance Management initiatives. Geac has also introduced a automated tool called OpenLink that that improves data integration into financial performance management applications.

Market Impact

Ventana Research believes that Geac's focus on financial processes and supporting applications along with integration of applications to a common business model will have a significant positive impact for Geac. ERP vendors peaked early in providing applications for Financial Performance Management but the majority has not sustained the level of focus and commitment required by global corporations. As the market for applications and technology to enable Performance Management takes off, organizations are demanding more from their application providers and have realized the importance of a dedicated class of vendors for Financial Performance Management such as Geac.

Recommendation

Geac is one of the longest standing application providers in Performance Management. The company has elevated its stature in the market with the upcoming release of Geac MPC 7.0. Ventana Research's research and analysis of the Performance Management marketplace also identified Geac as overall functionality leader. We believe that organizations which are addressing the diverse process needs of finance should evaluate Geac. The combination of an integrated platform and strong focus on Financial Performance Management applications provides Geac an expanded opportunity to help its finance organization stakeholders succeed in today's more challenging business environment.