“The market for corporate performance management (CPM) suites continues to grow rapidly,” declared Gartner in its latest Magic Quadrant for CPM suites. Why? Gartner explains: “because CPM has helped to manage cost optimization efforts and is now increasingly employed in supporting growth-based strategies.”

That certainly was what led the AAA in west/central New York to opt for CPM from Prophix Software. “We’re able to provide our executive team with business information faster than ever before and do analysis on the information so they can see why something is up or down,” said Kristy Chapman, the auto club’s financial planning and reporting manager.

Budgeting, planning, and forecasting (BP&F) remains the primary use for CPM, although Gartner reports a likely shift to CPM for more strategic purposes, including management and profitability modeling. AAA, for example, expects to use it to identify new places where it might open an office. Gartner also notes a significant uptick in interest from midsize organizations. more

In its latest Digital Universe study, International Data Corp. (IDC), Framingham, MA, estimates that the worldwide volume of digital data grew by 62 percent between 2008 and 2009 to nearly 800,000 petabytes (PB). This year, IDC projects what they’re calling the Digital Universe will grow to 1.2 zettabytes (ZB) in 2010 and reach 35 ZB by 2020. A zettabyte equals 1 million PB.

As reported by Tech Target, that data will be stored in 25 quintillion (that’s 25,000,000,000,000,000,000) storage containers (packets, files, images, records, and signals) of various sorts. Today, your data, which probably amounts to hundreds of gigabytes (GB) or even hundreds of terabytes of information, is stored mainly in files and records. If you are a really large organization, you may have one or a few petabytes of information.

There is a cost to storing this information. The industry prides itself on driving down the cost of data storage to pennies per gigabyte (GB) or less. Multiply those pennies per GB by the amount of gigabytes that go into 1 TB (1000x) or 1 PB (1000×1000) of storage, and it starts to add up to real money, enough to impact your balance sheet for sure. Fortunately, there are ways to reduce the cost of storing this data. more

In most organizations, spending and procurement are different disciplines managed by different people. In the end, however, they are about the same thing — spending the organization’s money. So it was only a matter of time before someone would combine the two. That’s what Coupa Software, a cloud-based SaaS spend management player, did.

Actually, a number of vendors focus on e-procurement, and others focus on spend management. Here, Gartner identifies 11 vendors. Coupa is trying to break out of the pack.

One of the side benefits of having spend/procurement management together as a cloud service is that it provides an opportunity to peek at the customer activity in aggregate to spot trends (given that the right security protections are put in place from the start, of course). SaaS vendors, if they are smart, look at what their clients do with the software all the time as they plan enhancements and fixes. What’s less usual is publishing what they see, even in aggregated form. Still, Coupa’s latest numbers are interesting. more

An economic rebound is coming sooner rather than later, according to a survey of CFOs and CEOs at software firms released today by Intacct, the SaaS financial management software provider. You can get a copy of the survey here. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take a survey of software company executives seriously (unless it was about software development, of course).

However, one particular finding suggests that they may be onto something: The survey reported that 90 percent of the companies have already begun to hire and are planning to increase headcount during the upcoming year. Software companies are notorious for being quick to fire, but if they are hiring, something must be going on.

But assuredly this isn’t the last word. A Towers Watson survey conducted in January 2010 found that 85 percent of the businesses surveyed plan modest hiring for new positions in 2010 (92 percent in the U.S.). However, over a third expect to make targeted workforce reductions (down from 58 percent in the U.S. since the financial crisis began). more

Hackett Group research suggests that application portfolio management is the key to a number of good things you want from IT, including improved effectiveness, cost reduction, and better partnering with the business. The trick lies in reducing the number of applications in the portfolio.

Top-performing IT organizations, according to Hackett, operate with nearly half the applications per thousand end-users of typical companies. You can find the study here.

Gartner suggests that IT application portfolio management is particularly useful in the current economic climate. In its 2009 project and portfolio management Magic Quadrant, the researchers noted: “Many companies shifted into a cost-optimization mode, looking for ways to cut costs, refocus priorities, and shift spending in many areas, including IT. These companies also sought to apply more accountability and governance to the definition, selection, and execution of strategic as well as tactical IT investments.” Good things to keep doing even as the economy begins to improve. more