Nigel Pendse Sharply Criticises Traditional BI Providers at the 2009 Palo Open

FREIBURG, Germany -

- OLAP Guru Nigel Pendse Recommends Smaller Software Providers

Finance applications take center stage at the annual Palo meeting. The 2009 Palo Award goes to Talisman Energy.

In his speech, keynote speaker Nigel Pendse, software analyst and publisher of BI Survey, sharply criticised large producers of Business Intelligence software. The annual meeting of users and partners of the open source software Palo was held last Tuesday in Frankfurt, where applications and solutions that use Palo were introduced, and the 2009 Palo Award was conferred.

Based on the feedback from Business Intelligence users, Pendse demonstrated that BI products and services of large providers performed well below average. Pendse explained that Business Intelligence is simply not the core service of large software companies. Large providers’ ongoing acquisition politics reflects the poor quality of their product portfolio. According to Pendse, nothing positive can currently be expected from the large providers in terms of BI, since they are overly concerned with integrating their many new acquisitions. Pendse advised corporate BI users to choose the best products on the market, which generally are offered by smaller providers such as Jedox.

Finance applications were the focus of the presented Palo applications. The auditing and consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers AG introduced its new Palo-based applications in this area under the slogan ‘Treasury Intelligence’. These include solutions for monitoring the currency risks, credit risks and counterparty risks, liquidity planning and creation of IFRS 7-conformant appendix information. Thomas Hampel, a senior consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, identified speed and user-friendliness as the advantages of the Jedox technology, qualities that also make it possible to easily adapt the product to the needs of individual clients. The main advantage identified by Hampel was that Palo ‘brings Excel applications to the Web at the push of a button, so to speak.’

The software company elkomSolutions introduced a Palo application for consolidated financial reporting that provides consolidated financial statements in accordance with HGB, IFRS or US GAAP standards. Insurer Standard Life presented its in-house budget planning and reporting system, which is based on the Palo suite. Ingo Weishaupt, Head of Management Information at Standard Life Group Germany had this to say about the Jedox solution: “A successful software project, implemented on time, it paid for itself in the first year and has been running reliably for three years.”

As its first product of the new Palo Solutions portfolio, Jedox presented a Palo-based, integrated corporate planning product that includes both classic financial planning (profit and loss, balance sheet) and detailed sales and cost planning features. Jedox also provided a short overview of the development of the Palo suite; in particular, the new Palo Integration Server and Palo Performance Server now offer new features. They will be presented at CeBit in the spring of 2010.

The Canadian oil company Talisman Energy received the 2009 Palo Award for best Palo application. The company uses a Palo-based budget performance management system to guide its investment in the renaturalisation of abandoned oil fields. Other finalists included communications provider Arcor, which uses Palo in its sales reporting, and Compass Group Deutschland, the market leader in catering and food services. Compass Group manages around 800 locations using a central reporting platform based on Palo.

Information about Jedox and Palo is available at: www.jedox.com

Jedox AG Axel Langer PR and Communications Manager Tel. +49-761-15147-221 axel.langer@jedox.com

Source: Jedox AG

Jedox AG, Axel Langer, PR and Communications Manager, Tel.+49-761-15147-221, axel.langer at jedox.com.