Host Analytics Releases Next Generation Decision Hub for Finance Professionals

REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwire - Jul 28, 2011) - Host Analytics, the industry's leading provider of SaaS-based corporate performance management (CPM), today announced the next generation of Decision Hub, a central resource for finance and operations leaders for external financial drivers. Decision Hub is a product within the Host Analytics CPM Suite. Today's release adds indicators and benchmarking Data as a Service (DaaS) to the Decision Hub, which presently includes currency exchange rates and spread codes. It provides for better decision making, faster financial analysis and increased business process consistency.

Supporting Customer Quotes

• "The Decision Hub takes that vision of having your finance team stop being Excel jockeys by giving them the tools to not just analyze data, but also take it to the next level," said Bill Rausch, director at Baker Tilly, the country's 16th largest accounting firm. "Host Analytics Decision Hub combines industry data sources representing thousands of financial data points and indicators, and incorporates them automatically. I don't know anyone else out there that's created a product, like Decision Hub, that has everything automated, making it extremely convenient for our customers and delivers the insight to enable our customers to make better, smarter decisions."

• "I am excited about the next generation of Host Analytics Decision Hub, another way Host Analytics helps our company with financial reporting," said Reggie Newsome, financial analyst, National Public Radio. "For example, the Benchmarking Data Service will help us to create more accurate long term plans. Also, with reporters in many other countries, the Currency Data Service will help us consolidate and process many currencies faster. NPR is always looking for ways to improve financial reporting, business planning and forecasting. Host Analytics Decision Hub gives us an edge and allows us to move faster."

• "With over 50 percent of our revenues outside of the United States, foreign currency exchange rate movements can have a material impact on our results," said Diana Lowell, global controller at Mirion Technologies, a world leader in radiation detection, measuring and monitoring. "Host Analytics Decision Hub provides updated exchange rates that can be seamlessly integrated into our CPM application, making it possible for us to easily monitor the impact of rate changes on both our future forecasts and our current consolidated results."

• "There is a multitude of attributes integrated in Decision Hub that will inevitably add value to and help streamline our analysis and reporting capabilities. This product will eliminate existing manual processes and put additional external data in a centralized, easy to access forum. We are excited about the modeling and comparability opportunities this tool will provide our organization," said an executive from IPG Photonics' corporate finance team.

Integrating external financial data into Host Analytics' CPM Suite, the only SaaS solution to offer full CPM functionality, Decision Hub now adds the following data services:

Benchmarking Data Service
Finance executives can easily compare financial performance against relevant peers and quickly incorporate insights into executive reports, eliminating searching one-by-one through the SEC's Edgar database. Users have unlimited access to information on more than 12,000 public companies.

Indicators Data Service
Users can quickly add in any of the 1,300+ leading indicators to ground their planning and analysis in reality. This data service includes economic statistics such as Consumer Price Index, Producers Price Index, and more.

Currency Data Service
This data service eliminates copying and pasting exchange rates from the web. This reduces time and data inconsistencies, leading to increased accuracy of recurring processes that require currency exchange rate translation.

"The beauty of the Decision Hub is its simplicity," explained Kelly Battles, CFO at Host Analytics. "For a finance executive, getting a new source of external data for business analysis is now as simple as downloading an application for their mobile phone."

The Decision Hub combines a variety of industry data sources representing thousands of financial data points and indicators and automatically incorporates the external data into Host Analytics' CPM Suite. This reduces the amount of time finance executives spend manually finding and importing data, ultimately allowing them to quickly re-forecast profits with combined internal and external information for a more accurate picture.

"Making effective business decisions in today's dynamic work environment requires a combination of real-time internal and external data," according to Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies, Inc. and founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace. "SaaS-based solutions, such as Host Analytics' Decision Hub, can give corporate executives the essential information they need to make better business decisions quickly and easily."

"Decision Hub gives our own company a seamless integration of external data services into our planning and reporting processes," continued Battles. "For example, comparing our performance, actual as well as planned, to peer and industry benchmarks gives us the context we need to assess our performance goals and enable better decision making throughout the organization."

Relevant Links
Decision Hub Overview
Host Analytics Blog
Host Analytics Facebook
Host Analytics Twitter

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About Host Analytics
The Host Analytics Decision Platform™ reveals the full implications of decisions -- both risk and reward. As the industry's first cloud-based corporate performance management (CPM) suite, Host Analytics improves budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidations, dashboarding, scorecarding, reporting and analysis to drive fact-based decisions for finance executives. Host Analytics serves midsize to large customer organizations including AT&T, National Public Radio, NexTag, Crocs, Thule, Otis Spunkmeyer, Schumacher and Red Roof Inn. Founded in 2000, Host Analytics has received industry recognition including JMP Securities' Hot 100: The Best Privately Held Software Companies, AlwaysOn OnDemand 100, AlwaysOn Global 250, the Ventana Research Leadership Award, the Editors' Choice Award From TechWeb's Intelligent Enterprise and the Red Herring Top 100 North America Tech Startup Award.

For additional information, visit http://www.hostanalytics.com or join the conversation at www.twitter.com/host_analytics.