Langenfeld (Germany) and Berwyn (Pennsylvania), February 16, 2010 -- arcplan, an independent Business Intelligence (BI) provider, today announced that since December, four Gartner Research reports gave arcplan Enterprise software high marks.

The SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Customer Survey: Using SAP NetWeaver BW With Non-SAP BI Platforms, and Critical Capabilities for Business Intelligence Platform Integration, both published in December, 2009, addressed platform capability and integration.

Two Magic Quadrant reports, published in January, 2010, also highlighted arcplan as a strong front end to SAP, and as a software provider that brings a BI point of view to Corporate Perfor-mance Management (CPM).

In the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Customer Survey, author Kurt Schlegel, a vice president of Gartner Research, found that clients successfully using a third-party front end to SAP BW don’t need to switch to Business Objects. Schlegel cited arcplan’s ability to integrate with SAP and other data sources efficiently, while providing an application designer that offers great flexibility without the need for programming.

“arcplan's 10+ connectors for SAP modules, as well as its other connectors, work directly with those data sources in the same way that they work with SAP NetWeaver BW data, without the need to put data in another database system, or build a separate metadata layer specifically for the BI tool,” Schlegel said. “In addition, many of these references had a requirement to define custom calculation rules that don't exist in SAP NetWeaver BW systems, so they are completed in arcplan.”

In the Critical Capabilities for Business Intelligence Platform Integration report, Gartner analyzed 13 BI platforms using eight criteria and four case studies. Based on the premise that the most integrated platforms provide the lowest integration and ongoing IT costs, arcplan scored among the highest of all BI platforms.

“arcplan receives an above-average overall score,” said report co-authors Rita Sallam and James Richardson, both research directors at Gartner. “Its impressive results are largely be-cause it has a self-contained BI platform for building reports and dashboards, with particularly strong data federation capabilities that include an extensive set of out-of-the-box data source connectors.”

The two Magic Quadrant reports that emphasize arcplan’s strengths are Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms and Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management Platforms.

In the Business Intelligence platform report, arcplan is characterized as strong front end to SAP, able to handle complex requirements, offering rapid time to value, above average benefits, and ease of use. arcplan empowers IT to satisfy a broad range of end user requirements.

“Compared with the overall sample, arcplan survey respondents reported that they realized above-average benefits in making BI available to more users, expanding the types of analysis supported, and reducing non-IT costs, line-of-business costs and IT head count,” the report stated.

In terms of CPM platform capability, arcplan was included due to the strength of arcplan Edge, which is backed by arcplan Enterprise.

“The company's portal integration, process orientation, and federated write-back capabilities support the building of complex analytic applications,” said author Neil Chandler, research direc-tor with Gartner’s Business Applications and Processes team. “For example, to deliver closed-loop planning or to support collaborative, unified operational and financial PM [performance management].”

About arcplan

arcplan is an established independent business intelligence solution provider delivering timely, contextual and actionable information that empowers businesses to improve business perfor-mance while leveraging existing infrastructure. Since 1993, arcplan has enabled more than 2,500 customers worldwide to achieve organizational efficiency through the powerful combina-tion of information and analysis proving beneficial to the bottom line. Get more information at www.arcplan.com.

arcplan’s flagship product arcplan Enterprise® was rated the #1 3rd party tool for SAP BW, Essbase, and TM1 in The BI Survey 8 (2009).