Since IBM first released IBM Cognos Express in September of 2009, Big Blue has shown a strong commitment to compete against smaller vendors in the mid-market.   Via its partner ecosystem, IBM has had good success selling into this market (when I asked how many Cognos Express clients there are IBM declined to answer but stated that they added over 100 new clients in December alone) over the last year.

This week IBM announced its latest version of IBM Cognos Express (v9.5).  It now has a 4th module called Express Planner that extends the planning functionality of the product to include core planning functions that were missing from previous releases such as spreading, driver-based planning, "seeding" plans from actual data, user versioning (or "sandboxes"), audit trail and activity tracking (changing cell color of values that have been updated). The release also improves ease of use for administrators and includes "blueprints" for quickly deploying typical planning processes like expense planning, capital planning, or workforce planning.  New pricing for Express includes all 4 modules (Express Reporter, Express Xcelerator, Express Advisor, and Express Planner) for US$25K plus $1500 per user ($400 for a view-only user) and $2K per administrator.  The pricing is competitive in the market (maybe a bit high for the view user) but don't expect any discounting as IBM says "discounting is not allowed" on Cognos Express.

Many of the planning capabilities in 9.5 could be considered catch-up functionality that level the playing field with other vendors targeting the mid-market.  A level playing field on planning functionality should allow IBM to focus on their analysis capabilities as a differentiator in this market.  But what hit home with me in the analyst pre-briefing,  more than any particular functionality, was IBM's intent to leverage other IBM assets in Cognos Express (although no specific roadmap commitments were made).   The ability of IBM to incorporate cloud, collaboration, consolidation, and financial governance capabilities from their existing assets and bring them to market quickly in IBM Cognos Express could be an advantage over smaller vendors targeting the mid-market who have much more limited R&D budgets.

Almost all of the vendors I've spoken with that target the mid-market reported significant growth in 2010 and strong pipelines going into 2011.  The market is hot and there is a lot of competition which should lead to rapid innovation and competitive pricing, making 2011 a good time to be a buyer of mid-market planning, reporting and analysis products.   There are plenty of options out there that are feature rich, relatively low cost and easy to deploy.  If you are still doing planning and analysis in Excel, set a goal to move to a packaged solution by the end of 2011, you will be glad you did.