Analysis and planning tools have left the building and made their way to cloud. SAP, Adaptive Planning and GoodData all made separate announcements on this week that suggest the cloud has evolved beyond storing data and traditional business intelligence applications. Businesses want specialized reporting, planning, and analysis applications in the cloud, not general-purpose tools.

SAP announced its Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) OnDemand, which currently three applications. The first, Expense Insight, analyzes expense details and identifies potential mistakes that may be getting charged to departmental cost centers. The second, Real-Time Profit And Loss Analysis, offers detailed analysis of cost and how resources are used. The third, Capital Project Planning, helps financial and non-financial decision makers understand investment implications and how to best utilize their capital.

EPM OnDemand’s three apps can’t exactly be called a comprehensive financial performance management suite, but SAP plans to introduce a new app each quarter. By the end of 2013, it will have over a dozen new capabilities. Eventually, SAP plans to offer EPM OnDemand as a stand-alone product.

SAP wasn’t the only vendor with news this week. Cloud-based performance-management vendor Adaptive Planning announced it’s buying MyDials, which is an OEM-partner and cloud-based business intelligence vendor. According to John Herr, Adaptive Planning’s CEO, the plan for MyDials is to “bring focused applications to operational areas outside of finance.” MyDials offers general purpose BI tools, dashboard-style apps, marketing, HR, finance and professional services.

GoodData, a start up which provides a business anlytics platform, also went live this week with its very first sales and marketing push calling itself a “bizdata monetization platform. Huh? In non-PR terms that equates to cloud based integration, modeling and visualization platform. GoodData will also offer three pre-built business mashups called: GoodSales, GoodMarketing and GoodSubscriptions. Currently, GoodData biggest revenue stream is selling its business intelligence tools to other cloud-based businesses like Zendesk.

These companies and investors are betting that many businesses will be more attracted to the ability to buy a solution to specific business problem than they are to purchasing a general purpose tool and building a specific solution. We will be watching to see if their bet pays off.