According to a recent survey by Host Analytics, cloud-based EPM’s are becoming very popular with people who work in finance. What users are most concerned about here is security and performance.

Survey

Finance professionals stay optimistic about the performance of their companies and consider themselves strategic partners for each business. But, they also know about the barriers to this success and understand just how enterprise performance management solutions, as well as various other technologies, can help them.

The findings published in the survey are based on the questions asked to more than two hundred and fifty high level accounting and finance professionals who have been commissioned. The surveys were conducted by Radius Global Market Research.

The survey showed that interest and the adoption of cloud-based EPM’s continues growing with 41 percent of the respondents saying that they were currently using cloud-based EPM solutions.

Almost three out of 10 (29 percent) said that they were considering an EPM solution, while 23 percent said that they were planning on moving to the cloud over the next few years. 5 percent said that they would have moved to the cloud over the next 2-3 years, while only 2 percent said that they were not considering moving to the cloud at all.

As per the survey, two of the biggest concerns when it comes to moving to cloud-based EPM’s were security and performance as mentioned above.

This being said, businesses are now getting used to using cloud-based EPMs with 88 percent of them saying they would feel more comfortable using it today as compared to a few years ago.

Moving Data

Apart from going for the cloud, finance professionals have also started turning to big non-financial data from marketing, sales, and the supply chain for some help with planning.

When asked about the time frame which their company is looking at for using big data or any non-financial data as part of the reporting or planning process, 28 percent of them said that they were using it currently while 71 percent are planning on using it in the next 1-3 years.

Despite this move to the cloud-based EPM systems, the survey has indicated that using Microsoft’s Excel platform is not going to end anytime in the near future. 46 percent of the respondents said that it was going to continue to play a pivotal role in their process over the next 3-5 years.

Excel is also going to be used as an imperative part of the strategic financial processes of theirs. 57 percent of them said that they are using it for meeting EPM requirements as far as budgeting, planning, financial reporting; disclosure, analytics, etc. are concerned on either a standalone basis or along with other tools.

40 percent of the executives who were a part of this survey were C-level, 35 percent were directors, and 26 percent were controllers or vice presidents.

Participants for the survey came from a number of industries including manufacturing, services, software developers, retail, health care, etc. 19 percent of the participants were working in companies that had a revenue of at least $1 billion.