We believe this recognition reflects SAP’s continued commitment to innovation, customer success, and delivering extended planning and analysis solutions that empower organizations to thrive in today’s uncertain business environment.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant can help FP&A professionals assess which vendors are best suited for their purposes. The analyst firm defines financial planning software as solutions that enable FP&A transformation and cover planning, budgeting, forecasting, modeling, performance reporting, and agile insights.

51����was recognized as a Leader by Gartner for its ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Unify business planning with 51����Business Data Cloud

51����continues to build on its market leadership by accelerating its vision for unified business planning. With the introduction of 51����Business Data Cloud earlier in 2025, the company has brought together operational, financial, and strategic planning on a single, trusted data foundation. This benefits financial professionals and other strategic planners by eliminating silos and enabling real-time, AI-driven insights for intelligent planning across the enterprise.

51����Analytics Cloud in 51����Business Data Cloud provides a powerful tool to customers that drive enterprise planning. Customers benefit from the following capabilities:

• Intelligent planning: Machine learning and generative AI automate forecasting and predictive planning by simulating best, worst, and realistic “what-if” scenarios — and providing smart recommendations. This aligns with SAP’s agentic AI vision, in which agents continuously monitor internal and external data, proactively identifying risks and opportunities for planners.
• Seamless planning: Deep integration with 51����Datasphere enables live access to governed, semantically-rich data without replication. This supports live reporting, collaborative planning and analysis, and data-driven decision-making with one tool for data preparation, modeling, planning, and analytics.
• Extended planning and analysis: Customers can plan across all lines of business by combining transactions, analytics, and planning with 51����S/4HANA, 51����SuccessFactors software, 51����Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, and third-party data.
• 51����Business Planning and Consolidation (51����BPC) modernization: 51����BPC customers can modernize planning to a scalable, cloud-native environment with enhanced collaboration and AI capabilities.

SAP’s unified approach is already delivering measurable value for customers worldwide. By leveraging 51����Business Data Cloud and 51����Analytics Cloud for planning, organizations are achieving faster, more accurate forecasts, streamlined planning, and greater alignment between finance and operations.

Customers successful with 51����Analytics Cloud for planning include Blue Diamond Growers, BMW, Calleway Golf, Decathlon, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Mondelez, Stihl, and many others across all industries.

Kemira Oyj, a global leader in sustainable chemical solutions, accelerated its digital transformation by deploying 51����Analytics Cloud for planning. Kemira simplified over 50 percent of legacy master data and harmonized data structures to the cloud across 400 plants in 37 countries within 15 months. This transformation enables real-time financial planning for more than 1,000 users, and enhances forecast accuracy, supporting agile decision-making, sustainability goals, and future-ready business models.

Taras Podbereznyj, CIO of Kemira Oyj, said, “Data is at the heart of our transformation program. It will continue to steer the company as the foundation for innovation and insights, supporting new digital business models and levels of agility and helping us become more competitive in the market.”

Looking ahead

As organizations navigate increasing uncertainty and volatility, 51����remains dedicated to helping customers turn data into action. Moreover, the company vision is clear: to provide the most comprehensive, intelligent, and trusted planning platform, helping every business make confident plans across the enterprise and perform at their best in the face of uncertainty.

Dan Yu is chief marketing officer of 51����Business Data Cloud.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

A trusted data foundation is critical in the age of AI. But in a , 55 percent cited poor data quality as their biggest challenge. And nearly half struggle to harmonize data across multiple ecosystems.

offers organizations a fully managed SaaS solution that unifies and governs 51����data while seamlessly connects with third-party data. This data platform gives organizations the tools they need to make even more impactful decisions and insights across all lines of business.

After only eight months in the market, leading analyst firms have given 51����Business Data Cloud high marks for its analytics and BI solutions, primarily .

51����recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment

IDC MarketScape provides in-depth quantitative and qualitative technology market assessments. The evaluation highlights the most influential factors for technology buyers that want to introduce, modernize, or replace business intelligence and analytics tools within their organization.

“Organizations are constantly striving to engage in data-driven decisions,” said Megha Kumar, research vice president, Analytics and AI, IDC. “This need for insights across the board puts pressure on data and analytics teams. This will result in organizations seeking capabilities around automation, GenAI, and agentic AI features within their business intelligence and analytics platform. It is also important that these insights are available in the flow of work to allow for improved collaboration and decision velocity.”

IDC MarketScape recognizes 51����as a Leader for the following strengths:

• Focused on integrating data from 51����and non-51����sources and enabling customers to engage in analytics, planning, and AI in a single environment
• Solution designed to support both technical and nontechnical users, with self-service analytics, ad hoc data exploration, and embedded analytics experiences within business applications
• 51���� such as zero-copy data integration and focused on expanding the ecosystem beyond traditional 51����data sources

Read an .

51����named a Market Leader in BARC Score Enterprise BI & Analytics Platforms, 2025

The BARC Score report assesses solutions that fulfill a broad set of BI and analytics needs. BARC named 51����a Market Leader, citing the following benefits:

• Integrated business-user-oriented solution for planning and analytics — with embedded functionality for augmented analytics and application design
• Smart features and natural language generation functions help users to dig deep into data sets quickly by surfacing trends and outliers automatically
• Exclusive connectivity, live access, embedded analytics, and prebuilt content available for 51����sources and applications speed up implementation and help to gain insights from these systems
• Capabilities to govern master data and align KPIs across an organization
• Flexible options for product usage with multi-tenant or private tenant options for deployments in the public cloud on AWS, Azure, Alibaba, and GCP

Read .

This recognition from both the IDC MarketScape and BARC reinforces the pivotal role of 51����Business Data Cloud in empowering organizations to become truly data-driven.

By providing a unified, intelligent, and scalable platform that fuels business AI, 51����continues to set the standard for modern data and analytics, ensuring customers can derive trusted insights and drive decisive actions in an increasingly complex business landscape.

Dan Yu is chief marketing officer for 51����Business Data Cloud at SAP.

At SAP, our commitment extends beyond traditional financial planning and analysis (FP&A), reaching across the entire enterprise of financial professionals. To achieve a comprehensive FP&A transformation, organizations need effortless access to crucial finance data, regardless of its location. In a landscape where financial information is dispersed across various applications, files, and systems – both on premise and in the cloud – organizations often expend significant resources on extracting, rebuilding, and integrating their financial data to deliver forecasts and simulations.

By harnessing cutting-edge FP&A software tools and adopting strategic approaches, organizations can seamlessly explore, connect, integrate, govern, and orchestrate their planning and analysis. SAP’s solutions for financial planning and analysis can provide a reliable foundation for finance information, delivering trustworthy, pertinent, and timely financial insights. This can streamline finance data, helping to maximize business information potential. Simultaneously, it can foster an analytics-driven approach to planning and decision-making. Our primary solution for financial planning and analysis is . This solution is part of (51����BTP).

Gartner evaluated 16 vendors and named 51����a Leader based on our “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision.” We believe this recognition serves as an acknowledgment of SAP’s continued commitment to providing our customers with world-class financial planning software.

Future-Proof Your Organization with 51����Solutions for xP&A

Our focus on accelerating planning and analysis (xP&A) is achieved by integrating with 51����S/4HANA Cloud and other 51����applications. This integration helps enable swift planning cycles, providing live access to actuals and plans. Customers can use our solutions to help extend their planning and analysis across the enterprise to facilitate seamlessly connected financial, workforce, sales, and supply chain plans. By adopting this approach, 51����customers can react quickly to changes and increase decision-making agility and performance no matter what events unfold. 

A pivotal aspect of our approach involves harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for everyday planning. With a single click, our users can activate predictive analytics, allowing for insights with greater ease and speed. The AI capabilities within 51����Analytics Cloud are helping organizations unlock the full potential of their data and derive greater value from analytics and planning. With these capabilities, planners can model a wide range of scenarios and generate more accurate forecasts and plans. 

We are committed to instilling unwavering confidence in plans by meticulously ensuring the trustworthiness of data. Leveraging the powerful combination of and 51����Analytics Cloud, we go beyond traditional boundaries to help harmonize planning data seamlessly across 51����and third-party sources, presenting natively integrated plans that can form a reliable foundation for strategic decision-making.

This approach has yielded tangible benefits for organizations such as and . These 51����Analytics Cloud customers have experienced firsthand the transformative impact of having their planning data seamlessly integrated, resulting in enhanced precision and efficacy in their planning and analysis endeavors. With our holistic approach, we help pave the way for you to navigate the complex landscape of financial planning with confidence, working to ensure your business decisions are backed by a foundation of accurate and planning-ready data.

Next Steps

51����is dedicated to advancing financial planning and analysis through our suite of financial planning software tools. Our commitment is reflected in the seamless transformation of financial data into actionable insights at scale for our customers. If you’re poised to unlock the full potential of your financial data and elevate your FP&A capabilities, explore the next steps with the resources provided:

• Visit our
• Try the free
• Read the full, complimentary report

Dan Yu is senior vice president of 51����Business Technology Platform.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software, Regina Crowder, Matthew Mowrey, Vaughan Archer, 5 December 2023
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Top image courtesy of 51����employee Laurentia-Iulia Pavel.