A fast, flexible and AI-powered planning, analysis and reporting solution accessible for everyone, everywhere — now available on AWS.

IBM Planning Analytics as a Service is available today. This offering is a fully managed, collaborative, enterprise-scalable budgeting, planning, analytics, profitability, modeling and reporting solution.

In May 2022, IBM officially announced its strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver IBM SaaS products on AWS. The IBM/AWS partnership gives customers the opportunity to quickly get started with IBM SaaS products on AWS infrastructure while enjoying the native AWS experience and integration of AWS services, out of the box.

As part of the IBM strategy, we are committed to giving customers the ability to run their planning, reporting and analytics solutions in their cloud of choice. That means becoming more agnostic in supporting cloud providers in addition to our own IBM Cloud.  

What is Planning Analytics as a Service?

With IBM Planning Analytics as a Service, organizations can achieve fast performance, scalability, high availability and flexibility—all on a single platform—to better streamline and integrate planning, budgeting and forecasting across the enterprise. This helps to boost forecast accuracy and consistency (while eliminating manual, error-prone spreadsheets) to gain business agility and real-time insights. Further, with access to Planning Analytics as a Service, organizations can utilize the same, easy-to-use user interfaces they are familiar with—Excel, Workspace, Spreadsheet Services and more.

Why Planning Analytics as a Service?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers across the globe. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster.

Planning Analytics as a Service enables you to host and manage all your workloads on a single platform, available to your users wherever they reside. The collaboration equips you with an industry-leading asset management platform from IBM, backed by the scale, agility and cost-efficiency of AWS.

Using Planning Analytics, organizations can go beyond financial planning to help departments like supply chain and operations manage projects to achieve the highest ROI. With a cell-oriented database that is tightly integrated with the Excel interface, you get the functionality that you need from Excel while gaining powerful capabilities like multidimensional analysis and planning. Get more than just a planning tool with a suite of easily accessible and understood solutions designed to support every phase of the analytics lifecycle, creating a one-stop-shop for all your planning and analysis needs.

What are the benefits?

• Fast performance, scalability and flexibility: Instantly provision an enterprise-planning solution with zero-downtime upgrades and industry-standard SLAs that can scale with your business as you increase data volume, number of users or planning models, without impacting performance. Planning Analytics allows users to build and change plans based on business processes, illustrating a flexible and intuitive user experience that is built for you with real-world context in mind.
• Data visualization: Uncover deep insights through robust dashboards. Create scorecards and metrics—including ad-hoc reports and compelling visualizations—to share financial metrics effectively and compare actual results to performance targets for improved financial reporting. Identify trends and drill down into data with built-in reporting and analysis capabilities.
• What-if scenario testing: Fueled by AI, with Planning Analytics you can forecast outcomes based on evolving trends or predictive insights and perform in-depth, what-if scenario analysis to test alternative assumptions. Create personal sandboxes to compare different scenarios. See the impact of your decisions before making them.
• Constraint-based planning: Improve operational performance. Make better, more optimal business decisions with direct integration of decision optimization. Amid ever-changing business challenges, Planning Analytics helps you make better decisions that consider how to optimally deploy your resources. Optimize scenarios with complex variables and constraints to create the decision model that can be parameterized and reused over time.
• Predictive forecasting: Improve the accuracy and speed of your forecasts. With built-in predictive capabilities, you can identify and assess trends and seasonality patterns in historic values and use the power of algorithmic forecasting—even without data science skills—for more accurate, consistent, and timely forecasts.
• Workflow automation: Easily manage and govern workflows to ensure a smooth and streamlined planning process. Create customized applications to manage, facilitate and increase participation and collaboration in your company’s budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes.
• Real-time data access and in-memory database: Gain visibility into your data. All users have access to the same data and can trust in a single source of truth. The Planning Analytics OLAP in-memory database (the Planning Analytics Engine) connects directly to source data and refreshes in real-time.

How to get started with IBM Planning Analytics as a Service

Experience ease of use, scalability and fast performance with a state-of-the art, AI-infused planning, analysis and reporting solution. 

Check out our documentation to get started with IBM Planning Analytics as a Service today. You can also talk to your local IBM representative or Business Partner to find out more.

To learn more about Planning Analytics as a Service and how to get started, join us on February 16, 2023, for a virtual “Ask Me Anything” session, designed to answer all your questions related to this new offering. Register here.

For additional information, you can also visit our IBM Planning Analytics as a Service site.