Market Perspectives

Ventana Research is sharing insights about Prophix, drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2022 Ventana Research Value Index: Business Planning is a distillation of a year of market and product research efforts.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal and vendor selection process for business planning. We evaluated Prophix and 13 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability) and two related to the vendor (Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment and Vendor Validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our expertise and research.

Prophix provides a suite of applications to aid finance groups in managing performance. The company targets midsize and smaller enterprise customers. One of the first vendors to offer a platform capable of integrating business and financial planning, Prophix is available in the cloud or on premises. The cloud software was evaluated for this Value Index. We note that, regardless of its ranking, compared to using spreadsheets, Prophix enables organizations to simplify and accelerate financial budgeting and operational planning.

Prophix was categorized as a Vendor of Merit, ranking 11th overall in this Value Index evaluation. It ranked 11th in Product Experience, where it performed best, ranked fourth in Usability and ninth in Capability. It ranked 11th in Customer Experience, and performed best in Validation. Prophix’s overall performance was impacted by its lower ranking in Adaptability and TCO/ROI that represent 20% of the weighting in the overall Value Index.

Our assessment finds that Prophix could perform better in Adaptability, where it ranked 13th, by strengthening the area of business and process integration to help with adapting to business applications and tools across enterprise. In TCO/ROI, where it also ranked 13th, Prophix could examine the tools it provides to support potential customers as well as the information for establishing a business case. This assessment was based on the Prophix product available in August of 2021.

As a result of the rapidly changing business landscape since 2020, and the need to quickly – and intelligently – change business plans and budgets to be agile and build resiliency, many organizations have decided to adopt dedicated software to support a planning approach that offers speed and flexibility. Transforming how organizations plan and budget has become a top-of-mind issue for chief financial officers and CEOs. Our Value Index can help organizations make better informed decisions on software that is best suited to business needs.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of business planning software in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here, and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Read the report here.