Next year will mark twenty years that the 2002 movie “Minority Report” was released.

While many of its futuristic predictions have come true (like hyper-targeted advertising and face recognition), Tom Cruise’s iconic “virtual glass” analytics interface has not, even with the advent of ubiquitous tablets and affordable VR headsets. I guess some things are still better accomplished with a mouse and a keyboard, or people just prefer pressing real buttons versus waving their arms around in the air 🙂 Point is, things are hard to predict… especially about the future!

I don’t know what the official start date of the cloud computing era is (maybe it was in the 1960’s when IBM introduced remote time-sharing options for its mainframes…), but subscribing to Software as a Service is now the preferred deployment method for all greenfield business applications, and increasingly, for creative applications like music production and image processing, that only a few years ago would have been considered “desktop only”.

Of course, nearly 100% of AI processing is done in the cloud. Every digital voice assistant (Alexa, Siri, Cortana, et al) perform their magic via the cloud, and every modern video game console offloads some of its AI processing to the cloud, enabling an exponential increase in the richness of the gaming experience without incurring additional hardware costs or upgrade headaches for consumers.

In a nutshell, it’s very likely a matter of “when”, not “if”, *all* applications will be running in the cloud.

Since its launch, IBM’s Planning Analytics was envisioned as a “cloud first” platform, and although it was subsequently made available for local deployment, installing and maintaining it on-premise largely decouples PA from the larger IBM analytics ecosystem, as well as most of the “future-proofing” advantages that PA customers derive from subscribing to it as a SaaS offering.

Among these are labor-free maintenance upgrades, immediate access to new PA features and fixes, frictionless expansion for additional FP&A users and applications, fast integration to the powerful offerings in IBM’s analytics portfolio, improved technical support, and readiness for TM1 Version 12 (“coming soon” and promising to be a game-changer).

For those still running a legacy TM1 “stack” on-premise (Excel, Citrix, VBA, Perspectives, et al), the future-proofing advantages of PA are even more dramatic, as legacy TM1 access methods: (a) pale in comparison to the richness and usability of Planning Analytics and (b) will eventually be deprecated and unsupported.

Migrating from legacy TM1 on-prem to a PA SaaS environment is a “double leapfrog” toward the future, and the best part is, 100% of the investments you have made in your TM1 models are protected and portable, as the heart of Planning Analytics is still the remarkable one-of-a-kind TM1 OLAP engine.

Perhaps the easiest “no brainer” for IBM customers is that PA SaaS is pre-integrated with IBM’s business analytics portfolio. One immediate and concrete example of this is IBM’s recent decision to offer their Planning Analytics customers a free entitlement to use Cognos Analytics against their TM1 models. Leveraging the advanced analytic capabilities of CA + PA becomes much easier in the Cloud, as there is no software to install and IBM does most of the heavy lifting.

In a similar vein, the challenges of integrating predictive Data Science components within IBM’s software portfolio (SPSS, CPLEX and Watson Studio, for example) into your TM1-based planning solutions are greatly reduced.

Two more related benefits of PA SaaS over TM1 or PA Local is more peace of mind and a lower Total Cost of Ownership. The TM1/PA community experienced recently a “log4j panic” i.e. a security vulnerability had been found in the Apache Foundation’s open-source log4j module, and IT departments around the world were tasked with patching it immediately. While the log4j vulnerability affected both on-prem and Cloud deployments, TM1/PA customers running on-prem were required to assign their own IT resources to research and address the issue (possibly delaying other business priorities in the process), whereas PA SaaS customers were largely unaffected, benefitting from IBM’s behind-the-scenes response to patching the vulnerability on the IBM Cloud platform.

The log4j incident was not an isolated one – we can expect to discover more and more of these types of security vulnerabilities in the future, in an ever-more-complex and connected world that requires highly-trained security experts who are vigilant 24/7 against vulnerabilities and threats. Staffing such a team is prohibitively expensive for all but the largest enterprises, but even the smallest companies gain access to that expertise from IBM when they deploy on PA SaaS.

The final thought is that migrating from on-prem to PA SaaS offers a great opportunity for companies to simplify their licensing with IBM, especially for legacy TM1 customers. The myriad of TM1 licensing models over the years can result in a confusing situation when it comes time to renew software maintenance, and PA SaaS’s simplified licensing model eliminates most of the guesswork and complexity (for example, there is no “PVU license”).

Written by Josepth Pusztai

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