Tidemark tilts at spreadsheet hell with Office app
- Summary:
- Spreadsheet error is an ever present danger. Tidemark is solving that for ad hoc users
Earlier in the week, I caught up with Christian Gheorghe, CEO Tidemark to discuss the company's launch of an Office and Office 365 application for its financial planning tool. What problem is the company solving? Spreadsheet hell!
Tidemark has built a solid reputation in the financial planning market as a provider that manages the workflows and processes needed to build reliable plans. They give planning presentation a modern twist by including the idea of 'story telling' that provides contextual explanations inline with the presentation Tidemark creates. However, it is a fact of life that despite numerous reports of the potential for disaster, the spreadsheet isn't going away.
Only this week, The Telegraph reported that:
Almost one in five large businesses have suffered financial losses as a result of errors in spreadsheets, according to F1F9, which provides financial modelling and business forecasting to blue chips firms. It warns of looming financial disasters as 71pc of large British business always use spreadsheets for key financial decisions...
...In 2012, a spreadsheet error in the rail franchise bid process for the West Coast Mainline cost the taxpayer around £60m. Reports suggest that JP Morgan lost £250m because of a spreadsheet slip up in 2013. Axa Rosenberg, the global equity investment manager, was fined £150m for covering up a spreadsheet error back in 2011.
We see this time and again and yet the spreadsheet manages to hold its place in the pantheon of daily used applications. What about Tidemark customers? Gheorghe said:
We see two situations among customers. First, nobody really likes Excel because of the problems it creates but they like the presentation style. Story telling in Tidemark democratizes information but users still want to do some sort of ad hoc modeling. We recognized that but need to do it in a way that maintains the integrity of the Tidemark models. We needed to create an immersive, unified experience and I think we've succeeded.
How has Tidemark solved this problem? From the blurbs:
- Combine the best of both worlds via a native integration to see the impact of their analyses in real-time in both environments, while enabling collaboration at the edges of their organization in a security-enhanced and scalable manner
- Enhance productivity by allowing FP&A teams to perform ad-hoc calculations in Excel spreadsheets quickly, as well as refine and capture them in repeatable planning processes within their EPM platform seamlessly for the benefit of the entire organization
- Bolster their investments made in Office 2013 and Office 365 by streamlining traditional time-consuming processes like importing information, reconciling data and exporting and uploading files
- Improve scale and performance within an EPM environment with sync and automatic write-back to free the analytical knowledge trapped in several spreadsheets on various desktops
- Maintain data integrity while unlocking restrictions on the amount or kind of data (structured or unstructured) in a single platform
- Add the ability to visualize the model as a business narrative via Storylines™ — consumer-like visual infographics to understand what's really happening in your business
Gheorghe provided me with a quick demo. It's impressive. Users can work where they want and instantly see the outcomes they're working upon but without destroying the model. That's crucial in my view. See the image below I clipped from the demo which shows Tidemark working inside Office 365.
One question on my mind: Tidemark uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) while Office 365 operates in Azure. I have heard varying reports suggesting that Azure is not as slick as AWS. However, in the demo I witnessed, there was no apparent latency between applications. This is because Tidemark isn't uploading or downloading spreadsheets but linking without losing the context of the Tidemark process. If latency is likely to be an issue, Tidemark customers can fall back on their SLA which promises 13-30 millisecond response time.
My take
- I've always liked the Tidemark approach. The notion of storytelling inside financial plans is intuitively correct, cutting out many of the 'What does this mean?' conversations that are an integral part of the planning process.
- Adding in spreadsheet handling was inevitable and the way Tidemark has approached it is elegant. I can be as messy as I want in a spreadsheet but still conform to Tidemark processes and workflows.
- This should mean that Tidemark can reach more users who, while not necessarily familiar with planning processes, have a good grasp of ad hoc spreadsheet use.
- The best news? It comes as part of what Tidemark offers. It's not a costed SKU.