PivotLink, a leading provider of retail performance management solutions delivered via the cloud, recently closed an additional $13 million in funding. PivotLink looks to accelerate its strategy to expand its market-leading SaaS analytics offering with a suite of on-demand retail performance management applications.

PivotLink's funding was led by existing investors Trident Capital, Emergence Capital Partners and Starvest Partners, firms that were early investors in Qualys, SuccessFactors and NetSuite. PivotLink added Pelion Venture Partners as a new investor from the acquisition of privately-held Acteea, Inc., announced separately this week. Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Acteea provides SaaS e-commerce analytics solutions for customer scoring.

The financing, including the Acteea component, was completed in December 2011 and brings PivotLink's total equity raised to $32 million after three previous rounds.

Glik's, an apparel retailer, has selected the Epicor Retail Software as a Service solution to provide its Midwest retail locations with software and hosting infrastructure and services to help drive improved efficiencies and processes throughout its retail operations.

Officials with Epicor said that the Retail SaaS solution, which delivers the company’s acclaimed and integrated store, merchandising, planning, audit & operations management and CRM modules, was selected by Glik's to support the ongoing expansion, which averages four to six new store openings each year.

With many companies, even large ones, still using spreadsheets for budgeting, planning, and financial reporting, the growth potential for vendors of performance-management software is vast. After all, the software promises to handle the same tasks more efficiently than spreadsheets, while allowing greater collaboration among users.

The smaller the vendor, of course, the more room to grow — and the weightier the threats to its long-term viability. In a market dominated by SAP, IBM, and Oracle, one comparatively tiny supplier with large aspirations is Adaptive Planning, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) outfit that has scored $33 million in venture-capital funding but has not yet achieved positive cash flow six years after launching its first product.

That threshold will likely be crossed later this year, says Adaptive Planning CEO Bill Soward, though the company is sacrificing some top-line growth to get there. While its early focus was on gaining market share, now it is choosier in signing up customers, given a business climate where cash is king. "We went from grabbing every dollar we could get to saying, let's be cash-flow positive as quickly as possible so we're less reliant on the vagaries of the financial world," says Soward.