CALUMO offers a BI, analytics and CPM application that gives organizations a platform to create and deliver reporting and business planning models. The primary content authoring environment for CALUMO is Excel. Once the CALUMO add-in is installed, users can create spreadsheets, charts and dashboards in Excel and publish them to the web via features appearing on Excel’s ribbon menu.
Founded in 1996, Australian-based CALUMO employs 40-50 people in its headquarters in Sydney, Oceania and the United States. Most of the employees, including the research and development team, are based in Sydney. Originally, CALUMO started as a reseller of IBM Cognos TM1 (now IBM Planning Analytics powered by TM1). Its product, which is also named CALUMO, was first developed as an application layer to TM1. However, since 2005, Microsoft SQL Server has been used as the engine behind CALUMO.
CALUMO offers a BI, analytics and CPM application that gives organizations a platform to create and deliver reporting and business planning models. Users interact with CALUMO via web pages and Microsoft Office, particularly Excel.
CALUMO’s general architecture revolves around the Microsoft technology stack and consists of three major areas: (1) plug-ins for Excel, Word and PowerPoint; (2) the CALUMO server, which includes browser-based HTML5 interfaces (Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple) for reporting, dashboarding, data discovery and planning; and (3) the CALUMO data repository, which runs in SQL Server. Data is stored in relational tables but is exposed to the user multidimensionally. The desktop plug-ins and CALUMO server support most Windows server and desktop versions. CALUMO provides documentation to configure IIS server and Active Directory settings.
CALUMO offers its product as a multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution leveraging Microsoft Azure or as an on-premises software. Though the majority of customers purchase CALUMO’s SaaS offering in the cloud, prospective on-premises customers will find that even the smallest IT shops typically have existing expertise in the Microsoft technologies making up CALUMO’s back-end stack.
The vendor targets business users in finance and accounting departments in medium to large organizations. It has no specific industry focus. CALUMO is typically deployed as a centralized application and is a flexible development environment for BI, analytics and CPM. The primary content authoring environment for CALUMO is Excel, where users can create content and publish it to the web. On the web, CALUMO enables authorized users to edit and enter data.
For storytelling and publishing, CALUMO uses its add-ins for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. Called “Skylights”, this feature enables users to embed live CALUMO charts or dashboards into a Word document or PowerPoint presentation. As the source report or chart on the CALUMO server changes, the information contained in Word or PowerPoint is updated with one click of the refresh button.
User & Use Cases
Customers mainly use CALUMO for standard/enterprise reporting (93 percent), ad hoc query (93 percent), budgeting/planning (90 percent), financial consolidation (80 percent) and dashboards/scorecards (73 percent). 83 percent of respondents plan to use it for advanced analysis in the future. CALUMO targets mid-sized and large companies across all industries. 67 percent of our sample of CALUMO customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 35 users, but the mean of 311 users indicates there are also several larger implementations. CALUMO is geared to business users with broad functionality for various analytics and CPM tasks.
Typical tasks carried out with CALUMO by business users include viewing/navigating data (100 percent), creating reports (80 percent) and exploring/analyzing data (73 percent), which demonstrates the feature-richness of the product. Customers achieve an average of 23 percent usage penetration among all employees (compared to the survey average of 17 percent).
Current vs. planned use
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5 products most often evaluated in competition with CALUMO
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Percentage of employees using CALUMO
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Number of users using CALUMO
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Tasks carried out with CALUMO by business users
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Company size (number of employees)
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Summary of CALUMO highlights
With 50 top ranks and 52 leading positions in five different peer groups, CALUMO once again achieves an outstanding set of results in this year’s BI & Analytics Survey. Convincing ratings in the majority of its KPIs help to consolidate its position as an effective CPM and analytics vendor that is delivering considerable benefits to its customers. Companies can benefit from using CALUMO in terms of faster and more accurate reporting, analysis or planning, improved data quality and saved headcount. Many customers confirm they would recommend their CPM and analytics product to other organizations. This result is a great indicator of customer satisfaction with the vendor and its product.
Business value – Top-ranked
Peer Group: CALUMO Competitive Peer Group
Planning & budgeting – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Integrated performance management products
Price-to-value – Top-ranked
Peer Group: CALUMO Competitive Peer Group
Product satisfaction – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Integrated performance management products
Project length – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Integrated performance management products
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