Corporate performance management is not exactly at the top of the enterprise technology wishlist nowadays, but it remains in an inseparable part of operations even as decision-makers devout more and more of their attention to newer trends. The focus, however, is now starting to shift back, heralded by the $75 million bet that investors placed Adaptive Insights Inc. in a new round announced this morning.

The funding will help fuel the development of its cloud-based business intelligence platform, which provides analysts with a centralized environment in which to create the various forecasts and reports that management depends on to assess how the organization performs in different areas. That centralization is one of the main ways in which Adaptive Insights sets itself apart from the competition.

Other performance management options, particularly the on-premise suits from the likes of IBM Corp. and SAP SE that have been honed through decades of use and improvement, also offer the all-in-one package that larger organizations require. But that head start is double-edged sword since the core architecture of those solutions was never designed for today’s massive diversity of data and analytic requirements, a challenge that old guard is struggling to overcome.

Meanwhile, newer players without legacy code bases to maintain are in a much better position to address therealities of modern business intelligence but haven’t had as much time to built out their feature sets. Adaptive Insights has seized the gap between the two camps to leapfrog ahead of the pack and now boasts over three times as many customers as all other cloud-based corporate performance management providers combined.

The new investment is meant to help keep it that way, bringing its total raised to a hefty $176.3 million. Most of the funding came from existing backers Norwest Venture Partners, ONSET Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, Monitor Ventures, and Information Venture Partners, which were joined by new investor JMI Equity. The latter is putting general partner Peter Arrowsmith on the board as part of the transaction.

Photo via Jenni