I'm not convinced that's a good thing. If they can change the Excel then they can also fuck up the system, and if you fuck up a system like this then it's horrendously difficult to unfuck. I think systems like this look great when they're working, but the second they go tits up you realise why people are horrified by them.
Unfortunately, many businesses then find they have no way to know the extent of the data lost or who did it. And there’s no proper backups. Happens over and over thoughout the world.
Excel’s a great tool and there are lots of terrific uses for it. But what the article describes isn’t one of them. If we’re being honest, this isn’t the first time the issue’s been discussed and the companies likely aren’t actually switching away from excel, but rather supplementing it.
In fact, the article seems to be more a “hit job” / “marketing piece” for Anaplan Inc., Workiva Inc. and Adaptive Insights.
Yes, the performance will generally be better (1 minute to run a report, not 1 hour), but I'm not sure things will generally be better. As you said, the business people can at least modify the Excel. These systems? Not so much, without an usually massive support contract (Yaaaay! for us IT people, I guess).
People sometimes make a false equivalent and imagine that the Excel jungle will be replaced by a Google-developed, 90%+ unit tested, refactored and cleaned periodically bunch of code.