Tidemark's Fall '15 Release Brings Industry-First Benchmarking to Finance

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Sept. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Tidemark, maker of modern cloud business planning and enterprise analytics apps, today introduced Tidemark Compete™, the first benchmarking capabilities for planning, budgeting and forecasting. In addition, Tidemark is also leveraging Apache Spark to scale up its machine-learning services, while unveiling three new packaged processes that eliminate lengthy customization projects for specific industry verticals including retail, hospitality and insurance. These components headline Tidemark's Fall '15 release and provide unprecedented ways for organizations to gain a competitive advantage in today's real-time world.

Empowering Finance to Play a Bigger Role in Digital Strategy
As the volume of data available to an enterprise continues proliferating to petabyte and exabyte levels, CFOs and key stakeholders are working closer together to quantify and prioritize company initiatives that take advantage of digital transformation. As a result, corporate strategy, forecasting and planning has changed, becoming a more collaborative process. Yet in order for CFOs to enable better decision-making and support the other lines of businesses, finance teams need limitless dimensionality in order to supply daily, hourly and even real-time performance analysis instead of historical top-line numbers pulled every month or quarter.

The ascendance of finance into a more strategic role also means having to answer questions that were previously impossible. In order to arrive at these answers, finance teams need a platform with enough processing power to weave together financial, operational, transactional, social, machine-driven and benchmark data into a cohesive whole.

The new Tidemark Fall '15 release includes new innovations that help:

• Quantify and out analyze the competition: with the new Tidemark Compete users gain for the first time the ability to analyze any product, category or company to create benchmarks against their competitors, all within the same performance management environment that holds the company's forecasts, budgets and plans. Brands can now pull in any proprietary or 3rd-party data source, unifying it with financial and operational data to gain market share analysis sliced by state, region and zip code. They can then correlate the data to the company's performance to build more accurate forecasts and what-if scenarios around the competitive insights.
• Start your company's finance transformation journey faster: organizations that want to avoid lengthy customization and service costs can now take advantage of three new packaged processes designed for retail, hospitality and insurance-focused businesses. The new packaged processes significantly reduce configuration of industry-specific metrics so businesses can get live and move to self-reliance even faster. The three new packaged processes add to Tidemark's popular higher education and subscription commerce offerings.
• Experiment and predict the most desired outcomes for today and tomorrow: with operational, sales, financial and competitive data housed in one environment, teams can take advantage of Tidemark's built-in machine learning algorithms. With the fastest processing power in the industry, users can understand paths for several scenarios for the company, determine the risk, and work with key stakeholders in the organization to select the best outcomes that help a company grow.
• Enable the field to think beyond the numbers: with the right set of data in place, teams can visualize forecasts, budgets, competitive analysis and reports as one narrative and roll them out to field workers and store managers on mobile in real-time all within one secure platform. Finance can make planning and reporting a collaborative and actionable exercise by processing and sharing critical information from all facets of the organization.

"In order to play a larger role in digital strategy, CFOs need more speed and actionability out of their CPM platform to process the vast amounts of data available to them; ignoring this is a critical miss in transformational efforts," said Christian Gheorghe, founder and CEO of Tidemark. "By combining benchmarking with operational, financial and transactional data in one environment built on a modern cloud architecture, CFOs gain a window into tomorrow as they seek a competitive edge. That's a very big reason why the analytics agenda is aligned with the digital agenda."

Commentary from Industry Analysts

"Instead of adding a gamut of new work to the finance/IT department's mandate in supporting big data initiatives, Tidemark has used machine learning technologies as a means to higher automation," said Surya Mukherjee, Senior Analyst for Ovum Research. "We find the announcement to be significant, not merely because the vendor is the first to apply these analytic technologies to finance processes, but more so because it is the harbinger of a unified analytic future across departments and an end to the 'data myopic' mentality, a common malaise affecting finance. Tidemark is pushing the analytic envelope in EPM to help finance professionals evolve in lockstep with the rest of the business."

"In pursuing the promise of enterprise analytic nirvana, one of the key hurdles is to align financial modeling and metrics to specific vertical business use cases," states Hyoun Park, Chief Research Officer for Blue Hill Research. "But companies don't simply want a flood of analytic capabilities; they want relevant recommendations and insights. By providing pre-mapped and pre-packaged roadmaps to support data-intensive industries, Blue Hill believes that Tidemark will allow companies to quickly obtain contextualized and predictive insights."

According to the April 2015 Forrester Research, Inc. report, The EPM Market Landscape Responds To The Growth Agenda And Digital Disruption (access requires subscription), "Tidemark offers a technically advanced planning, reporting, and analytics platform using a big data engine, a mobile-first design philosophy, and signature embedded analytics," wrote Paul Hamerman, Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester Research, Inc. "Tidemark takes a prescriptive approach in delivering planning and insight applications, with a differentiated philosophy to bring performance data to the masses in a consumerized fashion."

Along with Tidemark Compete, the new Fall '15 release from Tidemark includes a range of other new self reliance features for the modern modeler, including an improved search-centric user experience (UX) for easy modeling, qualified references, and more language localization capabilities. See these features for the first time on Sept. 29 at 10 am PT via our live webcast.

About Tidemark
Tidemark is a new breed of enterprise performance management (EPM) software with its modern cloud and mobile-first design. Innovative brands like Netflix, Chiquita, BlackBerry, Brown University, and HubSpot rely on the Tidemark platform and advanced analytics cloud to sharpen decision-making, reduce risk and improve business performance. Using Tidemark's unique, intuitive apps, decision-makers across the organization gain access to valuable data, deep analytics capabilities, real-time collaboration, and actionable visualizations from any device. Tidemark has offices throughout North America and Europe and is funded by Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank. To learn more about Tidemark, please visit www.tidemark.com or follow us on Twitter @TidemarkEPM.

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