Delivering on the Promise of Transformational Analytics for Enterprises, Tidemark Unveils Revolutionary Playbooks as Part of Spring '14 Release; Raises $32 Million In New Funding

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Tidemark, maker of next generation cloud-first business planning and enterprise analytics solutions, today announced groundbreaking new innovations with its Spring '14 release. Building on Tidemark's cloud-first, mobile-first architecture, Tidemark Playbooks™ are a new way to manage enterprise performance and make data-driven decisions with industry-changing functionality proven to pinpoint new revenue creation "plays." Today's announcement demonstrates Tidemark's continued momentum in disrupting legacy Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and business analytics through highly intuitive, context-driven applications that empower all employees, including non-finance users, to perform business planning in the digital era.

Concurrent with today's launch, Tidemark announced it has added New Relic to its growing list of partnerships as part of the company's Cloud-to-Cloud™ integration program. Adding New Relic's application performance management data to the Tidemark platform provides richer context to the real-time planning process and makes application data simpler to correlate, understand and act upon by business users for operational and business analytics.

"Modern businesses are looking to CFOs for new ways to drive growth in an era of increasing velocity, mercurial challenges and intensifying margin pressures," said Christian Gheorghe, founder and CEO of Tidemark. "We are continuing our strategy to bring innovation that helps our customers reap success and transform their organizations. With this latest financing we are able to accelerate our sales and marketing efforts and continue to further innovate so customers can move beyond managing costs to aggressively pursuing profit-driving endeavors."

What's New In Spring '14
The Board Book for the 21^st Century – Introducing Tidemark Playbooks
Traditional financial and operational reporting, dashboards and portals were designed for the era of green-bar reporting and static, infrequent usage. They are cumbersome, often inaccurate and outdated, and do not reflect the consumer-driven user experience expectations in today's mobile-first world.  

Tidemark Playbooks are a revolutionary way to create a highlight reel of information for business-users to understand the complete narrative of their company's performance and act on potential problems as well as model new solutions.  Playbooks provide a valuable tool for identifying and acting on revenue-driving activities by aiding enterprises in understanding context-driven "plays" that were previously held hostage by cumbersome financial planning processes.

Any content within Tidemark can be added to a Playbook and shared throughout an organization. Representing a different and fresh approach over the limitations of existing reporting and dashboards—with their complex formatting challenges and multiple tabs or board books that are outdated by the time they are compiled—Playbooks allows employees to add content directly within Tidemark with just a few clicks and share real-time company performance information with stakeholders across the entire enterprise, collaborate and model future outcomes in real-time.

"Tidemark Playbooks are extremely innovative and we see a lot of opportunity to leverage them quickly," said Kristi Duncan, senior vice president of Finance, Ernest Health. "We envision using Playbooks to replace our Budget Binder and many of the other reporting books we currently use."

More Innovations for Modern Business Planning and Analytics
In addition to Playbooks, the Spring '14 release includes more than 40 new innovations to extend the Tidemark platform so more people throughout the enterprise can participate in financial and operational planning, as well as data-driven analysis, with unprecedented levels of flexibility for business users. Highlights include:

• Advanced In-context Analysis. Users can now expand their analytic context beyond their current process, using natural language to gather more relevant information, model outcomes and inform their data-driven analysis.  
• Self-service Configuration. A new configuration preview mode allows process owners to preview what configuration changes will look like before they are made available in the application. This new approach eliminates the need for separate development, test and production environments and migrations between these environments.
• Business Method Framework. Using a library of configurable business methods, such as allocations, eliminations, currency translation and payroll tax calculations, business users and analysts can quickly and easily configure new calculations or modifying existing ones. 
• Business Initiatives Planning. A new flexible modeling capability allows users to freely plan without being tied to a rigid dimensional model. 

These new capabilities enhance Tidemark's industry leading applications spanning Financial Consolidation, Financial Planning, Operational Planning, Metrics Management, Labor & Expense Planning, and Profitability Management.

"The Spring '14 Release is a great illustration of the strength of the cloud-first model with a provider that specializes in a specific area," said Lars Crotwell, vice president and CIO, Laredo Petroleum. "This release has really potent and powerful innovations, like Business Initiative Planning, that will further our ability to forecast more accurately."

Ernest Health's Duncan continued, "We also see tremendous value in Business Initiative Planning to streamline and support our expense and workforce planning processes."

Extending Tidemark's Cloud-to-Cloud Program
Tidemark announced it has added New Relic to its growing list of partnerships as part of the company's Cloud-to-Cloud integration program. Adding New Relic's application performance management data to the Tidemark platform provides richer context to the real-time planning process and makes application data simpler to correlate, understand and act upon by business users for operational and business analytics. Business users can now easily inject application performance-related data, such as query response times, into the planning process to gain a more context-driven overview of performance and what to do about it in real-time.

"We're delighted to bring the best of New Relic to Tidemark customers through this integration," said Bill Lapcevic, vice president of business development, New Relic. "Tidemark's powerful cloud-based planning and analytics application is architected to leverage our ability to make sense of billions of metrics. Now Tidemark customers have access to even more data in the context of their analytical processes, and in doing so they can protect their essential culture of data-driven decisions."

Tidemark's Growing Momentum
Today's news follows recent announcements from Tidemark on the company's European expansion and 300 percent revenue growth in fiscal year 2014.  To continue to fuel the momentum, Tidemark secured another round of funding from Silicon Valley Bank and existing investors Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Tenaya Capital, totaling $32 million. This latest investment brings Tidemark's total funding to $80 million. These funds will accelerate Tidemark's global sales and marketing efforts to enable CEOs and CFOs to uncover additional avenues for growth and profit within their organizations.

About Tidemark
Tidemark is a new breed of enterprise performance management (EPM), bringing modern, cloud-first financial and operational business planning and analytics to the enterprise through unique, intuitive apps, enabling organizations to significantly improve decision-making, reduce risk and improve business performance. Tidemark arms every decision maker with access to valuable data, deep analytics capabilities, real-time collaboration, and actionable visualizations on any device, enabling a culture of performance. Leading companies transforming their businesses with Tidemark include Netflix, Chiquita, Hostess Brands, Chuck E. Cheese's, HubSpot, ServiceSource and Brown University. Tidemark is funded by Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Tenaya Capital, Silicon Valley Bank and Dave Duffield. To learn more about Tidemark, visit www.tidemark.com or follow us on twitter @TidemarkEPM.

Additional Resources
Tidemark Video: What We Do – http://www.tidemark.com/resources/videos/tidemark-what-we-do 
Spring '14 Highlights:  http://www.tidemark.com/our-latest-innovations 
Tidemark Storylines – http://www.tidemark.com/financial-performance-storylines
Our blog – http://tidemark.com/blog/

SOURCE Tidemark