Press Releases

Mountain View, CA – April 4, 2011 -- Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in on-demand business performance management (BPM) solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes, today announced two major new solutions in its applications portfolio, Sales Planning & Analysis and Multi-Entity Planning & Analysis.  Built on top of the powerful new capabilities available in the Adaptive Planning Spring 2011 Release (see separate announcement today), the two new solutions make it even easier for new types of users – corporate sales teams and complex corporations with multiple entities – to completely transform the way they plan and manage their businesses.

Both solutions leverage the powerful new Multiple Instance feature in Adaptive Planning’s Spring 2011 Release. An Adaptive Planning instance is a self-contained financial model that includes all elements necessary to plan, report on, and analyze a business. The Multiple Instance feature enables companies to set up, link together, and manage multiple Adaptive Planning instances to coordinate planning and reporting among multiple autonomous organizations. And the two new Adaptive Planning solutions address the greatest multi-organization planning and reporting challenges faced by companies today.

Sales Planning & Analysis

The Sales Planning & Analysis Solution allows sales and management teams to streamline and enhance revenue forecasting and sales expense planning, dramatically improve pipeline and sales analysis, and seamlessly integrate sales and financial plans. As a result, the solution helps companies of all sizes drive more accurate forecasts with more predictable revenues, increase overall revenues, improve sales and marketing productivity, and strengthen organizational alignment around top-line performance.

In addition to leveraging the Multiple Instances feature, this solution can also utilize the Spring 2011 Release’s new Hosted Connector capability for integration with Salesforce.com, NetSuite, or other cloud-based solutions. Designed for both sales management and finance teams, the Sales Planning & Analysis solution allows companies to:

• Streamline and Enhance Revenue Forecasting. Companies can import key data, such as leads, opportunities, and customer wins, from their CRM system, as well as other data, such as revenues and backlog, from their GL and other systems – or can input data directly.  Sales management can then apply historical close rates for each stage of the pipeline to drive more accurate forecasts, and leverage prior experience to better anticipate “bluebird” deals.  Sales and finance teams can also create forecasts that extend beyond the time horizon within the CRM data – for example, forecasting sales several quarters out based on number of reps and quotas.
• Plan Sales Expenses and Compensation. In addition to revenues, all aspects of a sales team’s expenses, including headcount, base salary, commissions, bonuses, incentives, and more can be planned and managed.
• Analyze Sales Performance. The solution provides a holistic view of a company’s top-line performance by incorporating data from a variety of systems – not just CRM systems, but also GL and others -- so that all relevant information, including sales quotas, revenues, backlog, and more can be used in analyses. Unlike CRM systems, the solution stores “snapshots” of data, enabling management teams to analyze historical trends, such as comparing changes in pipeline stages from period to period via waterfall charts.  Analysts can drill down into underlying data to identify root causes of variances, and can benchmark sales reps’ conversion rates by stage, percent quota attainment, percent pipeline coverage, and more. And executives can perform “what-ifs” to assess the potential impact of different hiring decisions, ramp times, and productivity rates.
• Integrate Sales and Financial Plans. Top-line sales information can be automatically linked into an Adaptive Planning financial planning instance, so that the financial plan always reflects the most up-to-date information from sales.  Because the sales and financial plans are independent models, they can be managed with different cyclicality; for example, sales teams can create weekly sales forecasts, which can be integrated into monthly financial forecasts.  And, the solution can be configured with varying levels of privacy and permissions, so that the sales team can share their entire model with finance, or keep elements of the model private and only report up top-line sales numbers. The solution can also be used on a standalone basis, without integration to an Adaptive Planning financial planning instance.

With the Sales Planning & Analysis solution, companies can:

• Create more accurate forecasts and more predictable revenue. The solution dramatically improves visibility into the overall sales cycle, and allows teams to use more accurate assumptions in their planning.  It allows for finance and sales teams to align around a standard forecasting methodology and to run what-if scenarios to understand the impact of changes to key assumptions.
• Increase revenues. By understanding key changes in the pipeline between periods and identifying deals likely to slip, sales executives can increase focus on the most important deals, resulting in improved execution and increased revenues.
• Increase marketing and sales productivity. By importing and closely tracking lead, opportunity, and customer win data over time, executive teams can understand and improve the overall productivity of the marketing and sales organizations. And, by benchmarking sales representatives against each other, sales management can elevate the performance of the entire team.
• Improve finance, sales and marketing alignment. Establishing a fact-based, transparent process ensures that finance, sales, and marketing executives are aligned around the critical success factors for driving top-line performance.

“It’s great to see Adaptive Planning extend their on-demand financial planning and reporting application into the realm of sales planning and analysis,” said James Jones, VP of Finance at KANA, an Adaptive Planning customer. “The new solution will provide a great opportunity for companies like KANA to enhance collaboration among marketing, sales, and finance executives, and to drive improvements in sales forecasting and execution.”

Because the Sales Planning & Analysis solution provides features that are not available in CRM systems – including snapshots of data, top-down forecasting, management adjustments, and automatic integration of sales and financial plans – it is a valuable complement to CRM systems. Additionally, it provides greater capabilities than other sales analytics solutions, since it enables both backward-looking analysis and forward-looking sales planning, and integrates sales forecasts with financial plans.

The Sales Planning & Analysis Solution is available in 2 packages.  A single-instance package, designed for standalone operation within a sales organization, includes 1 Adaptive Planning instance, 1 administrator seat, 10 standard seats, one CRM connector (hosted or on-premise), and a framework of pre-defined accounts, formulas, sheets, reports, and dashboards. It is available for an annual subscription of $9,750 through September 30, 2011 ($12,000 thereafter).

A 2-instance package, designed to support integrated sales and financial planning and reporting, includes 2 Adaptive Planning instances, 2 multi-instance administrator seats, 4 multi-instance standard seats, 10 single-instance standard seats, one CRM connector (hosted or on-premise), and a framework of pre-defined accounts, formulas, sheets, reports, and dashboards. It is available for an annual subscription of $15,000 through September 30, 2011 ($17,500 thereafter).

Additional instances and seats can be added as required.

Multi-Entity Planning & Analysis

The Multi-Entity Planning & Analysis Solution is ideal for larger companies that need to coordinate planning, reporting, and analysis among a complex set of organizational entities. Common examples include companies that have different geographic divisions, autonomous business units, or divisions with different systems infrastructures, as well as holding companies that manage multiple operating companies.

The centralized headquarters organizations of these companies can provide each entity with an individual Adaptive Planning instance, which allows the entity to set up an independent model complete with separate administration, users, permissions, chart of accounts, organizational hierarchy, dimensions, data entry templates, assumptions, permissions, time periods, and data integration.  Instances can be linked together, such that shared data automatically consolidates from sub-instances to higher-level instances, while other data remains private to the instance.

With Multi-Entity Planning & Analysis, complex organizations can fundamentally transform their financial planning, reporting, and analysis. Key benefits include the ability to:

• Dramatically decrease planning and reporting cycle times throughout an entire organization – at the headquarters level, and within each organization
• Simplify headquarters administration, by eliminating the need to coordinate and consolidate dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of spreadsheets
• Support individual organizations’ planning and reporting requirements, eliminating the need for both “one size fits all” approaches and unnecessarily complex models
• Allow autonomous organizations to determine how much information to share with others
• Enable different lines of business to re-plan, re-forecast, and create what-if scenarios on separate timelines
• Deploy the solution in phases, decreasing risk by rolling out to different business units over time
• Make better decisions, based on more accurate and timely information.

“Adaptive Planning continues to leverage the SaaS model to deliver innovative solutions in the BPM space,” said Craig Schiff, CEO of BPM Partners, an industry analyst firm. “These solutions are attractive alternatives to improve planning, reporting, and analysis within corporate sales teams and large, complex, multi-division organizations.”

Both the Sales Planning & Analysis and Multi-Entity Planning & Analysis solutions will be generally available on April 8, 2011.

About Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning is the worldwide leader in on-demand corporate performance management (CPM) solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes. Adaptive Planning’s solutions allow finance and management teams to obtain real-time visibility into performance metrics, streamline financial planning and reporting, and drive better business decisions. By offering affordable annual subscriptions and rapid implementations, and by eliminating the need for new hardware and IT support, Adaptive Planning makes it easy to move beyond spreadsheet-based processes without the cost and complexity associated with traditional on-premise CPM applications. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and is funded by ONSET Ventures, Monitor Ventures, Cardinal Venture Capital and Clairmont Capital.

Media Contacts:

Christina Farr
GlobalFluency
650-433-4150
cfarr@globalfluency.com

Aimee Caton
Adaptive Planning
650-810-0531
acaton@adaptiveplanning.com

Adaptive Planning
650-528-7500
www.adaptiveplanning.com