Gartner Magic Quadrant Ranks Jedox As Leader

Overview

Gartner defines financial planning software as the key tool that enables better decision making and resource allocation by supporting planning, budgeting and forecasting processes. It connects relevant operational and driver data to profit and loss, balance sheet and cash-flow financial statements.

The software provides advanced decision support and analysis that can be customized to meet unique planning requirements through data integration, data modeling, workflow and reporting capabilities. All of these capabilities enhance the user's ability to effectively manage the planning process and financial performance.

Mandatory features

Financial planning budgeting and forecasting: Enables financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting through user-driven models, customizable planning dimensions and enterprise-wide aggregation.

Administration functionality: Facilitates the management of planning activities through functionalities like prepopulated planning cycles, modifiable business rules, dimension maintenance and user-role-based security profiles.

Data integration: Integrates with enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), human capital management (HCM) and other data sources to ensure accurate and unified enterprise-wide planning.

Financial planning and analysis reporting: Generates and allows users to create financial reports in standardized and customized formats providing insights for informed decision making.

Common features

Scenario modeling: Offers features for creating and simulating various financial and operational scenarios by adjusting key variables helping organizations analyze the impact of these changes on their organization’s financial performance.

AI-powered planning: Leverages machine learning to forecast future financial performance, detect hidden patterns and anomalies in data, streamline analysis and data cleansing processes, and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Approval workflows: Streamlines budget and expenditure approvals with designated approvers in user-predefined workflows, ensuring proper oversight and minimizing unauthorized spending. It also supports online forms and electronic signatures for streamlined approval processes and provides the capability to track the approval history of documents.

Built-in audit trails and versioning: Offers features for tracking system activities, such as data entries and changes and aiding in the continuous monitoring of data and model evolution throughout the planning cycle.

Dashboarding: Offers customizable dashboards for a comprehensive view of financial health, as well as key metrics and key performance indicators to help drive operational insights.

Criteria

Inclusion criteria

To be considered for inclusion, a vendor must meet the specified market presence criteria, performance criteria and product capabilities. Furthermore, they must offer the solution on the cloud, adhering to the definition provided in the exclusion criteria.

Market presence

Actively market and sell products to organizations with at least 50% of customers having annual revenue above $50 million over the last year. The definition of a customer is a single legal entity paying for stand-alone financial planning software.

Have at least 250 customers “live” by 31 March 2024 and market to “live” customers in at least two regions across America, EMEA, Asia/Pacific or Latin America. (“Live” is defined as the customers that are on the current SaaS version of the product.)

The vendor must rank among the top 16 for the Customer Interest Indicator (CII) as defined by Gartner for this Magic Quadrant. The CII was calculated using a weighted mix of internal and external inputs that reflect Gartner client interest, vendor customer engagement and vendor customer sentiment from March 2023 to February 2024.

Performance criteria

Have booked cloud recurring subscription and support revenue of at least US$30 million (or foreign currency equivalent) between 31 March 2023 and 31 March 2024.

Revenue must come from stand-alone technology sales to financial planning software customers only, and not from other products, other indirect sales channels like resellers, distributors or other applications who then sell the product to their own customers or embed the vendor’s product within their offering.

Revenue from services, implementation fees or any adjacent modules beyond the market definition specified above should not be included, or revenue generated from financial planning software should meet a minimum compounded annual growth rate of 20% between the years 2021 and 2023.

Product capabilities

Support the mandatory financial planning software features.

Deploy financial planning software as a cloud-based solution via software as a service (SaaS) on a provider-managed public or private cloud.

Must have released its financial planning software for general availability before 31 December 2022, and be actively sold on a stand-alone basis, independent of other offerings or services.

Evaluation criteria

Ability to execute: Gartner evaluates vendors by assessing their product’s services, sales and marketing execution, and overall operations. Analysts evaluate how these criteria enable the vendors to be competitive and effective in the market, support their ability to satisfy customers, assist in creating positive perception and help them adequately respond to market changes.

Product or service: Encompasses the vendors’ ability to deliver current capabilities, high quality, comprehensive feature sets and expertise, with a strong emphasis on functionality that enhances financial planning and decision-making processes for end users.

Customer experience: Evaluates the vendor’s capacity to deliver a journey that enables clients to succeed with the product or service.

Market responsiveness: Ensures vendors can rapidly adjust their software to address the evolving needs of FP&A leaders, enabling them to offer innovative solutions that enhance decision making, strategic planning, performance management and resource allocation.

Completeness of vision

Gartner assesses vendors by evaluating their ability to articulate their perspectives on the market’s current and future direction, to anticipate customers’ needs and technology trends, and to address competitive forces. Analysts also evaluate this by vendors’ understanding and articulation of how they exploit market forces to create new opportunities for themselves and their clients.

Market understanding: Focuses on the vendor’s ability to understand and anticipate future buyers’ requirements and needs.

Offering strategy: Involves using the information gathered about future buyers’ requirements and needs to shape or enhance the products and services offered.

Innovation: Enables vendors to develop cutting-edge solutions that not only meet current demands but also anticipate future trends, providing FP&A leaders with tools that enhance efficiency, accuracy and strategic foresight.

Results

Gartner evaluates vendors by assessing their product’s services, sales and marketing execution, and overall operations. Analysts evaluate how these criteria enable the vendors to be competitive and effective in the market, support their ability to satisfy customers, assist in creating positive perception and help them adequately respond to market changes.

Jedox among Leaders

Leaders demonstrate a market-defining vision of how financial planning software can help financial planning and analysis (FP&A) leaders achieve their objectives of enhancing planning, budgeting and forecasting while integrating advanced analytics and AI capabilities. They are in the strongest position to influence the market’s direction and provide mature offerings that meet market demand.

Strengths of Jedox

Master data management: Jedox offers mobile device management (MDM) capabilities through Jedox Integrator, a free tool for transforming and validating data against customer-defined governance rules. Changes are tracked, enabling an automated and auditable data validation process. Clients aiming to enhance data governance and operational efficiency will find these capabilities can streamline data management and increase accuracy.

Pricing: Jedox offers a thorough and transparent pricing model. It starts with a platform foundation and number and type of users, while allowing a la carte add-ons for best practice accelerations and connectors. Clients benefit from the ability to accurately assess costs and select relevant add-ons for their planning needs

Geographic expansion: Jedox has established new strategic partnerships across various regions, including the U.S., Canada, South America, APAC and the Middle East, to expand market reach, with initiatives like the Jedox Elevate Roadshows and targeted event sponsorships enhancing customer engagement. Customers should leverage these events and partnerships to gain insights into Jedox’s product vision.

In addition, based on the results of the evaluation process, Jedox could be improved with out-of-the-box capital planning capabilities, instead requiring configuration or coding, and while it provides customer success managers as standard support, more proactive success monitoring is available for a fee.

Summary

Jedox is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its product, Jedox enterprise performance management (EPM) software, is a planning and performance management platform for budgeting, forecasting and reporting with AI, an in-memory database and customizable prebuilt models. A key innovation is its AI-powered automated report generation from natural language input. These capabilities are beneficial for clients seeking to accelerate insights and empower FP&A professionals to focus on strategic tasks.

Jedox’s ability to support strategic and operational planning through best practice accelerators and adaptable templates specifically for IBP use cases is evident in its significant manufacturing client base; however, it also has representation across a broad spectrum of verticals.

If you have any questions about how Jedox can help you and your business become more efficient, contact us and we will be happy to discuss your needs.

(Source: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software, November 2024)