Founded in 1996, Australian-based CALUMO employs 45 people in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne as well as Dallas, Texas (USA). Most of the employees, including the research and development team, are based at the company headquarters in Sydney. Originally CALUMO started as a reseller of IBM Cognos TM1 (now IBM Planning Analytics). Its product, which is also named CALUMO, was first developed as an application layer to TM1.
CALUMO offers a CPM application that gives organizations a platform to create and deliver business planning and reporting models. The primary report and dashboard authoring environment for CALUMO is Excel. Once the CALUMO add-in is installed, users can create spreadsheets, charts and dashboards and publish them to the web via features appearing on Excel’s ribbon menu.
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 planning, ad hoc reporting, dashboarding and data discovery; and (3) the CALUMO data repository, which runs in SQL Server. Data is stored in relational tables but is exposed to the user multidimensionally.
CALUMO offers its product as on-premises software or via a multi-tenant SaaS solution using Microsoft Azure, licensing named users. Though the majority of customers purchase CALUMO’s SaaS offering on 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 CPM. The primary content authoring environment for CALUMO is Excel, where users can create content and publish it to the web. On the web, authorized users can 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 today for standard/enterprise reporting (93 percent), ad hoc query (86 percent) and budgeting/planning (86 percent). 50 percent of respondents plan to use it for advanced analysis in the future. CALUMO targets mid-sized companies and large corporations across all industries. 72 percent of our sample of CALUMO customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 50 users, but the mean of 501 users indicates there are also some significantly larger implementations. CALUMO is geared to business power users with broad functionality for various CPM and BI tasks. Typical tasks carried out with CALUMO by business power users include viewing, navigating and exploring data along with creating reports, which demonstrates the feature-richness of the product.
Current vs. planned use
N=80
5 products most often evaluated in competition with CALUMO
N=60
Percentage of employees using CALUMO
N=76
Number of users using CALUMO
N=77
Tasks carried out with CALUMO by business users
N=78
Company size (number of employees)
N=79
Summary of CALUMO highlights
With 20 top ranks and 25 leading ranks across five different peer groups, CALUMO once again achieves a great set of results in this year’s BI Survey. Convincing ratings in numerous important KPIs help to consolidate its position as a small but effective CPM and BI vendor. Companies can benefit from using CALUMO in terms of improved data quality, improved operational efficiency and faster and more accurate reporting, analysis or planning. More than 50 percent of CALUMO users say they would definitely recommend the product to other organizations, which is a strong indicator of customer satisfaction.
Cloud BI – Top-ranked
Peer Group: OLAP analysis-focused products
Competitive win rate – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Integrated performance management products
Competitiveness – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Integrated Performance Management Products
Operational BI – Top-ranked
Peer Group: Integrated performance management products
Vendor support – Top-ranked
Peer Group: CALUMO competitive peer group
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BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The BI Survey results based on feedback from CALUMO users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
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