Business performance management (BPM) and budgeting software specialist Cartesis yeserday inked a new partnership with business and financial information provider Edgar Online designed to allow firms to automatically track rivals' performance and benchmark their own financial results against that of the competition.

Under the terms of the deal, users of the Cartesis 10 BPM suite will be able to integrate financial data Edgar has gathered from the filings of the 21,000 public companies it tracks in 69 countries worldwide.

James Fisher of Cartesis said the deal would allow firms to benchmark how they are performing compared to companies in their peer group. He added that the information would help inform future investment decisions and could also be used to model potential merger and acquisition scenarios and their effect on the rest of the market.

Fisher said the new functionality had been enabled by Edgar's approach of taking financial filings and converting text or html files into extensible business reporting language (XBRL), a derivative of XML that allows data published in financial reports to be assigned a "tag" designating what type of data it is.

He explained that this approach meant Cartesis 10 could automatically compare and analyse like-for-like financial performance from different companies' reports.

"Firms have wanted to be able to automatically benchmark against their competition for years, but the technology hasn't been there and BPM has become internal looking," he said. "This [partnership] allows firms to import that competitive data into their BPM system and better judge where they are in the market."