Founded in 1996, Australian-based CALUMO employs 40-50 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 BI and CPM application that gives organizations a platform to create and deliver business planning and reporting models. Users interact with CALUMO via web pages and Microsoft 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 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.
CALUMO 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 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, 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
The majority of CALUMO’s customers use the product for ad hoc query, budgeting/planning and standard/enterprise reporting. Besides its main use cases, CALUMO is also frequently used in the context of financial consolidation and for dashboards/scorecards. 55 percent of respondents plan to use it for advanced analysis in the future.
CALUMO targets mid-sized companies and large corporations across all industries. 73 percent of our sample of CALUMO customers come from mid-sized companies (100-2,500 employees) with a median of 130 users. However, the mean of 311 users indicates there are also some significantly larger implementations.
CALUMO is geared to business power users with broad functionality for various BI and CPM tasks. Typical tasks carried out with CALUMO by business power users include viewing, navigating and exploring data, demonstrating the feature-richness of the product.
Current vs. planned use
N=67
5 products most often evaluated in competition with Product
N=54
Percentage of employees using Product
N=66
Number of users using Product
N=66
Tasks carried out with Product by business users
N=66
Company size (number of employees)
N=66
Summary of CALUMO highlights
With 33 top ranks and 17 leading ranks across its two BI Survey peer groups and two custom peer groups, CALUMO once again achieves an impressive set of results in BARC’s BI Survey. Excellent ratings in numerous important KPIs help to consolidate its position as a vendor that can deliver a high level of benefits to its customers.
Companies can benefit from using CALUMO in terms of improved data quality and faster and more accurate reporting, analysis or planning, which lead in turn to improved operational efficiency. Consequently, many respondents feel they can recommend CALUMO to other companies, which is a sure sign of great customer satisfaction and customer experience.
Business value – Top-ranked
Peer group: CALUMO vs. Large enterprise BI platforms
Cloud BI – Top-ranked
Peer group: OLAP analysis-focused products
Project length – Top-ranked
Peer group: Integrated performance management products
Project success – Top-ranked
Peer group: CALUMO vs. Large enterprise BI platforms
Visual analysis – Top-ranked
Peer group: Integrated performance management products
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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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