hostanalytics

Host Analytics has raised $17 million in a Series D round to expand its enterprise performance management technology. All of the existing investors participated in the round, including Advanced Technology Ventures, Trident Capital, StarVest Partners and Next World Capital. The funding brings Host Analytics total investment to $40.7 million.

Host Analytics gives the finance and accounting person what other parts of a business have come to value in the cloud. It provides financial reporting, planning, budgeting, consolidation, and analytics functions and serves as a standalone application for viewing data to conduct analysis and make decisions in an Excel-style web interface. There is no dependence on IT, no maintenance fee or consulting costs, and no software to install.

Often, companies have multiple spreadsheets, and to consolidate them requires a lot of manual work. Customers can do that but to iterate is difficult. For instance, Wente Vineyards could do top-down planning based upon the volume of the wine sold and the growth of particular individual varietals. Sales people could then conduct a bottom-up analysis. With the help of finance, management could then look at the variations in the top-down and bottom-up analysis and make decisions accordingly.

The challenge for a lot of businesses is trying to accommodate old business tools like Excel to modern practices. Often these tools are meant for individual use, not collaborative. An Excel spreadsheet may be useful for the person who created it, but for others it has little use.

Host Analytics competes with the likes of  Oracle, SAP and IBM, which is formidable. These large companies are getting their acts together and still dominate the market. However, they are also standing targets for disruption.

Still, Host Analytics looks like it a has a loyal following, which will help it succeed in the increasingly competitive business software market.

Here’s Gartner’s look at the CPM market from its latest magic quadrant analysis.

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