Host Analytics Powers the Evolution of Finance With New Capabilities for Improved Productivity, Insight and Speed

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 10, 2016) - Host Analytics, the leader in cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM), today announced new capabilities in the Spring16 release of Host Analytics Performance Platform. In addition to major new functionality, the Beta release of a new analytics module, and major performance enhancements, the Spring16 release delivers new integration and certifications with partners, including NetSuite, Xactly, Slack and Google.

The Spring16 release was inspired by the challenges finance departments face in a dynamic, big data-driven business environment and was developed in close collaboration with Host Analytics customers. The Spring16 release delivers significant improvements in scale, function and flexibility. Highlights include:

• New Dynamic User Experience: A reimagined, dynamic user interface now includes custom branding options, streamlined navigation features and a more integrated platform experience. These enhancements are designed to work in concert to accelerate adoption by users of all skill levels and to shorten the time to value for customers. In addition, the Spring16 release is browser-agnostic, allowing users a choice of virtually any browser and the flexibility to easily deploy to Windows or Mac OS environments.
  
  
• Broader Productivity and Collaboration: Embedded social collaboration with the optional ability to integrate with popular third-party collaboration tools, such as Slack, enables stronger internal partnerships across functions, better alignment of finance and operations, and faster, more efficient planning and reporting cycles. Plus, integration with Google for Work makes it even easier for workgroups to collaborate around planning and reporting tasks using Google Sheets and Google Drive.
  
  
• Improved Reporting & Analysis: New Dynamic Reporting functionality for workforce analytics extends users' ability to analyze and understand workforce-related data, and to create ad-hoc reports against this data. Additionally, with the Beta release of new Qlik-Sense-based analytics functionality, customers will be able to more effectively analyze and understand data. This integration allows Host Analytics users to create a wide variety of visualizations and then use those visualizations to create high-impact dashboards and initiate visual discovery scenarios to better understand their business.
  
  
• Increased Performance: Extended in-memory processing now provides customers with unprecedented improvements in performance, with many benchmarks delivering increases of up to 50 percent to 90 percent across various planning and reporting scenarios. Additionally, the ability to load, process and interrogate larger, more complex data sets is also now available through the implementation of incremental updates and loading. This has cut data load times by up to 80 percent in many scenarios and has simplified the data management process.
  
  
• Enhanced Functionality: This release also includes a number of customer-requested feature enhancements, including simplified planning templates, 13-period support for consolidations, and the ability to support multiple sets of books for USGAAP and IFRS reporting. The modeling module has been further enhanced with a scheduler for data integration, Excel 2016 support and detailed audit logs.
  
  
• Seamless Data Integration: In order to enable tighter integration of EPM and ERP applications, the Spring16 release also introduces real-time Dell Boomi Connectors, as well as certified NetSuite ERP integration.
  
  

Customer Commentary
New User Interface
"The improved user interface for the Spring16 release will make it easier for new users to learn and navigate the system," said DeeAnne McClenahan, Senior Director, Property Budgeting at Greystar. "We are also excited about the ability to incorporate our company logo and branding into the system to make it more familiar to our users."

Improved Reporting & Analysis
"A company's workforce is almost always its largest expense and biggest asset. Workforce planning is critical to managing this significant expense, and the new dynamic reporting functionality for workforce analytics makes this even more valuable by providing better insights into our workforce data," said Rick Odom, Senior Manager -- Financial Planning & Analysis, Welch Allyn, Inc. "Because it is now much more user-friendly, we can roll it out to more users and broaden its use as a solid tool to manage our workforce. We appreciate the renewed emphasis in this area and look forward to additional future improvements."

Analyst Commentary
"With the Spring16 release, Host Analytics has done a lot of work to make financial analysis easier and more agile. The biggest practical benefit of the in-memory performance, data integration and incremental cube updates is being able to make same-time and real-time decisions based on all relevant financial and business data instead of seeing artificial lags based solely on technical barriers," said Hyoun Park, Chief Research Officer at Blue Hill Research. "The user interface, modeling, Excel and collaboration improvements make Host Analytics more mobile, social, ubiquitous and contextual. Put together, Host Analytics has laid down the gauntlet for the cloud EPM market in terms of performance and usability."

"Nucleus Research found that cloud solutions, on average, deliver 2.1 times more ROI than on-premises solutions. Host Analytics leverages this to provide customers with a CPM solution that can be owned completely by the business user," said Anne Moxie, Senior Analyst at Nucleus Research. "In its new release, Host Analytics accelerates the time to value for customers by augmenting pre-existing capabilities with additional functionality and a new user interface that drives increased productivity."

"One of the most important trends in business software today is crafting a user interface that will enhance efficiency and improve the mental ergonomics for users, making them more productive," said Robert Kugel, Senior Vice President and Research Director at Ventana Research. "Another is enabling collaboration in context within the application, which can save time and provide an easily accessed record of conversations for future reference. Host Analytics' Spring16 release offers substantial improvements in these areas."

Executive Commentary
"Host Analytics is shaping what the new, modern finance organization looks like now and in the future. As big data gets ever-more prevalent, companies have more information to contend with, and expectations are high," said Dave Kellogg, CEO for Host Analytics. "Finance teams who embrace what's possible, partner with operations, and put systems and technologies in place over time will lead through any economic climate."

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About Host Analytics
Host Analytics is the leader in cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM), offering a suite of financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics. World-class companies like NEC, Burlington Coat Factory and Jazz Pharmaceuticals trust Host Analytics to power their strategic financial processes. Host Analytics is a fast-growing, private company backed by leading venture capitalists and is headquartered in Silicon Valley with customers in over 90 countries.

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