Planview propels innovation in portfolio management with Planview Enterprise 10

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Planview today introduced the latest version of its industry-leading portfolio management solution, Planview Enterprise 10. Building on a 20-year history of success and innovation, Planview Enterprise 10 empowers business leaders to achieve their goals – to drive revenue, cut costs, and mitigate risk – by maintaining a continual balance between strategic objectives and execution in the face of change drivers such as economic shifts, competitive challenges, budget cuts, and manpower fluctuations.

“The initial marketplace reception – from customers, prospects, and industry analysts – has been tremendous, and supports our strong belief that portfolio management as an enterprise-wide solution has never been more important or relevant.”

Planview Enterprise 10 represents the next level of portfolio management, with important advances in the areas of:

• Financial management with a comprehensive, integrated system for performing the planning and execution functions necessary to budget, forecast, and track costs and benefits
• Product portfolio management with a purpose-built solution for product-focused organizations to maximize the performance of their product portfolios
• User experience with a completely redesigned interface and significant usability advances that optimize performance, productivity, and value
• Analytics and reporting with upgrades to Planview Enterprise Insight Analytics that improve the quality and speed of business-critical decisions

Portfolio Management is being embraced by company leadership because of its applicability across the enterprise. Forrester defines corporate portfolio management as “the methodology and supporting application technology for determining the optimal mix, sequencing, resource allocation, and investment levels of strategic discretionary initiatives, using established financial portfolio optimization techniques and measures, to best achieve an organization's business goals,” according to the August 2008 report Road Map: Corporate Portfolio Management — A New Market For Project Portfolio Management by Tim Harmon, senior analyst, Forrester Research.

By improving the solution’s reach, and the way users and management input, access, and use its data, Planview enables its customers to use Planview Enterprise 10 to drive strategic growth even in economically challenging times.

“The breadth and depth of advances in Planview Enterprise 10 make it one of the most significant releases in our company’s history, and we have never been better positioned to empower our customers to reach their goals,” said Patrick Tickle, executive vice president of products, Planview. “The initial marketplace reception – from customers, prospects, and industry analysts – has been tremendous, and supports our strong belief that portfolio management as an enterprise-wide solution has never been more important or relevant.”

Comprehensive Financial Management for Portfolio Management

The financial management and planning tools embedded in the Planview Enterprise 10 platform enable and support portfolio management as applied to project and resource management, strategic planning, product development, and IT services, by integrating key finance functions and presenting them in a familiar interface. Planview Enterprise 10 provides a complete picture of the resources, value, and cost associated with effort with:

• One integrated financial system built on a single data model fully integrated with both relational reporting and OLAP for robust and consistent financial reporting
• A powerful finance-driven user experience that allows financial stakeholders to work where they are comfortable, either in a rich spreadsheet user experience or in Excel through a powerful bi-directional interface
• Comprehensive financial planning that allows organizations to support corporate financial processes within the context of portfolio management

“Planview has developed an ideal approach that eliminates a key challenge so many organizations face – that the tools with which they manage their work are unconnected to the tools that measure and plan cost. This means that they cannot connect spend with the deliverable produced without considerable effort in translating between their execution plans and financial report requirements,” said Rich Murphy, Planview Executive in Residence and former chief financial officer of IT, Deutsche Bank. “Now, from the line manager responsible for the deliverable, to the chief financial officer responsible for an enterprise’s entire budget, there is complete and easy transparency into who is doing the work, the value it creates, and who is paying for it.”

Product Development Solution

Planview Enterprise Product Portfolio Management brings the discipline of portfolio management to the product development process to enable more predictable execution through centralized product planning and financial transparency into product lifecycles. Announced earlier this year, Product Portfolio Management allows product development leaders to maximize the value of their product portfolios to overcome the challenges of an increasingly competitive marketplace by:

• Establishing a product management system of record to improve management of the product catalog and increase collaboration for more successful launches
• Applying idea, work, resource, and financial management capabilities directly to the product catalog
• Leveraging embedded product analytics that drive better decision making throughout the product lifecycle
• Demonstrating transparency into total cost of product development with integrated product financials

New User Experience

Planview Enterprise 10 features a completely redesigned user experience that optimizes productivity and value for every Planview Enterprise user. User experience development was a direct result of the Planview customer-driven application development approach, actively involving a dedicated customer Inner Circle group for more than a year. The streamlined new experience improves users’ performance and productivity, to drive adoption and shorten time to value.

“We are looking forward to making the move to Planview Enterprise 10. By taking customer input into account, Planview has really upgraded the interface and added great new functionality that our users will appreciate,” said Dawn Acosta, IT/Project Management Office, Hallmark Cards Inc.

Analytics and Reporting

Building on the momentum of the 2008 release of Planview Enterprise Insight Analytics, Planview Enterprise 10 delivers powerful enhancements to this market-leading analytics application that leverages the rich portfolio management data across the Planview Enterprise platform to accelerate and improve the quality of business-critical decisions across and beyond the enterprise. The enhancements, including Key Performance Indicator (KPI) gauges, product development-specific analytics, and advanced integration with Microsoft Outlook, increase customers’ ability to visualize, share, and collaborate on key performance data, to enable fast, informed action based on consistent and relevant data.

Planview Enterprise 10 delivers the market’s most comprehensive capability for balancing strategy with the precious resources of people and money in real time, to help organizations across the enterprise drive cost and work efficiencies in the delivery of high-value projects and products, mitigate risk in delivery, and reach revenue targets. Available in Q1 2009, it is the latest release of the market-leading Planview Enterprise portfolio management application suite, which includes:

• Planview Enterprise – Enterprise Portfolio Management to align programs to strategies and objectives
• Planview Enterprise Insight Analytics for interactive analytics, shared with every desktop
• Planview Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to control projects and resources
• Planview Enterprise Product Portfolio Management to maximize market impact of products
• Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management to manage the total cost of services
• Planview Enterprise Business Process Manager for process modeling and management
• Planview PRISMS for maturing processes with a library of more than 200 best practices

For more information on Planview solutions, visit www.planview.com/10.

Concurrently with the Planview Enterprise 10 release, Planview is launching a new Planview OpenSuite offering, an integration with IBM Rational ClearQuest, representing the only off-the-shelf portfolio management integration into the market’s leading Application Lifecycle Management solution. Planview OpenSuite is a suite of offerings that provides interoperability between Planview portfolio management and the key management systems on which customers rely every day. For more information about Planview OpenSuite, visit www.planview.com/opensuite.

About Planview

For 20 years, Planview has been advancing the discipline of portfolio management, helping our customers change the way they manage people and money to make better business decisions. With a singular focus on portfolio management, Planview is the only company that combines customer-driven software, unmatched domain expertise, and proven best practices to solve each customer’s unique business problems.

Planview Enterprise^®, a market-leading portfolio management application suite, with Planview PRISMS^®, the knowledge base for accelerating organizational change, delivers measurable business results for IT management, product development organizations and throughout the enterprise. As an independent, trusted partner, Planview is committed to interoperability with key management systems through the Planview OpenSuite integration product line. Industry leaders such as Citi, BP, and EDF, rely on Planview to drive revenue, mitigate risk, cut costs, create efficiencies, and ultimately give their businesses a competitive advantage. Privately held and consistently profitable, Planview is headquartered in Austin, Texas. With offices across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, the company supports customers in virtually every industry around the world. For more information, visit www.Planview.com.