deFacto... a new alternative to PerformancePoint Planning?

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending a few days in Las Vegas for Microsoft's SharePoint Conference.  I have to admit, I came away drinking the Microsoft 'kool aid' after seeing great attention being paid to the new Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities within SharePoint and Excel.  After all, in his keynote speech Ballmer included a demo of PerformancePoint Services within SharePoint and the new PowerPivot capabilities within Excel... over 7,000 attendees were exposed to some very cool BI right there...

BUT, perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the session was discovering deFacto Global, who had a vendor booth and used the SharePoint Conference as an opportunity to "launch" their brand new product, defacto Performance Management.

Here is more information sent to me by the principals at deFacto, including mention of PerformancePoint Planning Migration that is worth checking out if your organization currently uses PerformancePoint Planning and is considering alternatives that align with your current infrastructure...


deFacto Performance Management fulfills the original mission of Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning: a Microsoft-centric budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, reporting and analysis tool that is powerful, scalable, easy to use and implement, and affordable. Built from the ground up by experts behind world-class products from Hyperion Solutions, OutlookSoft, and SAP®, deFacto delivers best-of-the-best performance management capabilities in a single, fully unified product.


deFacto is a highly scalable solution that supports the full range of planning and analysis applications from sophisticated enterprise wide to much more straightforward department level . Built using the vast features of Microsoft’s Excel, and the Relational and Multi-dimensional capabilities of SQL Server, deFacto represents a critical component of any organization’s Microsoft-centric Business Intelligence or Performance Management strategy. It goes far beyond the usual slicing-and-dicing of data to allow instant reporting of user-specific financial and operational data such as finance, marketing, human resources, supply chain, capital planning, profitability, sales, and many others.


deFacto is a completely unified, OLAP-based, analysis and planning product that offers the full range of capabilities users need, including modeling, forecasting, drill-down, drill-through, what-if analysis, reporting, and more. It empowers business users who drive planning processes throughout an organization with the ability to perform real-time analysis by enabling Excel and even SharePoint with data submission capability to its centralized data store. deFacto also complements Microsoft SharePoint Monitoring and Analytics components with powerful capabilities such as cube building, user security, advanced logic, data entry and what-if – all of which can be managed by the business user through the deFacto Modeler.


Migrating to deFacto is Easy….


deFacto offers PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning customers a straightforward and cost-effective way to realize dramatic improvements in the usability, performance, scalability and support of their investment. Planning customers find moving to deFacto is the best and easiest way to transition to a tool that offers critical, must-have functionality and performance, as well as an exciting future. Since deFacto’s core technology is Microsoft-centric, much like PPS Planning, it offers the added benefit of capitalizing on your’ investment in organization-specific assets such as models, dimensions, business rules, data structures, reports, templates, ETL, security, and others.


Whether they are setting-up a new performance management environment from scratch or migrating from another tool, our customers are up and running quickly and efficiently. deFacto provides all of the functionality user’s need while setting a new standard for performance management.


For more information about deFacto Performance Management please visit http://www.defactoglobal.com/.