Business Intelligence Companies & Consultants in Durham, NC

Grandview is a consultancy based in Durham, North Carolina, that brings together financial planning, executive reporting and the data foundations behind both. Its clients are mostly finance, IT and data leaders in larger organizations, where forecasts and management reports rely on complex systems that have been running for years. Founded on the idea that boardroom questions should be tied to systems capable of answering them, the firm has operated since 2017, pairing FP&A experience with data integration and software engineering.

Planning and reporting

The core of the business is the IBM planning and analytics stack. For organizations running Planning Analytics (TM1), Grandview carries out assessments that look at three layers: people and process, model logic, and data and platform.

The purpose is to work out whether a slow or fragile planning cycle stems from the models, the data feeds or the underlying infrastructure before anyone commits to a fix. Upgrades are planned around the forecasting cycles that cannot slip, and existing rules and business knowledge are protected along the way.

A separate offering helps companies move off Anaplan. The firm translates existing logic into IBM Planning Analytics, merges scattered workspaces, supports two-way Excel modeling and uses automated side-by-side testing to compare results before go-live. On the reporting side, Grandview upgrades aging Cognos installations to version 12, untangles legacy data models and uses usage telemetry to identify dormant reports that can be retired. It also automates the monthly board pack so leadership receives consistent figures on a regular schedule.

• Planning Analytics assessments, tuning and modernization
• Anaplan migration with automated verification of calculations
• Cognos upgrades, report cleanup and board pack automation
• Health checks covering both Planning Analytics and Cognos
• Data quality and cataloging through IBM Cloud Pak for Data
• Workflow automation using Cloud Pak for Integration and Business Automation

Data, AI and infrastructure

Beyond business intelligence, Grandview links information held in ERP, CRM and billing platforms without requiring databases to be moved. Watson Query reaches data where it sits, while IBM Knowledge Catalog profiles records, flags duplicates and traces where figures originate.

The firm's AI services include governance with audit tracking and safety controls, secure assistants grounded in internal files, agents built on watsonx Orchestrate, IBM Bob for work on Java, IBM i and IBM Z applications, and added agentic capability for existing BAW processes.

For infrastructure, it helps clients run workloads on Red Hat OpenShift, on their own servers or in a public cloud. Its position is that AI-supported decisions need trusted inputs, agreed definitions and clear ownership first.

Working method

Projects usually begin with a diagnostic sprint, in which the team decides what an environment should keep, extend, modernize or replace before recommending any platform change. Grandview has also built its own Documenter tool for Cognos and Planning Analytics, which makes model logic and dependencies visible and lowers the risk that only one employee understands a critical model.

Through its partnership with Motio, it adds automated regression testing, audit trails and change control to Cognos releases, so report owners can review differences before approving them.

Partnerships and sectors

Grandview is an IBM Gold Business Partner and also works with Red Hat, Motio, Microsoft Fabric and AWS. It publishes sector pages for insurance, covering claims and document review, and for life sciences and biotech. Steve Johnson serves as COO and partner. What sets the firm apart is its concentrated depth in IBM planning and analytics, backed by engineering capacity across data, automation and hybrid cloud.