Adaptive Planning Advances Financial Consolidation With Innovative Collaboration, and Adds Unified Financial and Operational Analytics

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 9, 2013) -   Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in cloud-based business analytics solutions for organizations of all sizes, today announced its Fall 2013 release, including the new Process Tracker that brings the power of advanced collaboration to the financial consolidation process. New innovations in Adaptive Discovery integrate operational insights with financial plan analytics -- enabling financial professionals to get a broader view of the overall state and key metrics of their business. Further innovations bring the ability for business users to create freeform dashboards, and turn them into presentation-quality reports simply and easily. These new innovations add to the momentum of Adaptive Planning's latest products, including more than 200 customers on Adaptive Discovery in its first year and more than 20 customers choosing Adaptive Consolidation in its first four months.

Making Financial Consolidation a Team Sport
With Adaptive's new functionality, accounting teams can now be more engaged and effective in collaborating on the complex distributed processes of financial consolidation through the use of an intuitive, graphical, social Process Tracker. 

The Process Tracker for Adaptive Consolidation is a robust, flexible, and visually intuitive workflow solution, optimized for both desktop and tablet form factors, which provides easy ways to define and monitor one-time and repeating processes. Users can define specific deliverables, assign them to users, monitor their status, and track their closure. It features social media-like visual display including avatars of individuals assigned to each process, rich functionality, simple usability, and ease of management to allow much more collaborative, streamlined, and accountable consolidation processes.

"We're looking forward to Adaptive's new innovations to further drive collaboration in our consolidation process," said Paul Crawley, CFO at DayMen, a leading manufacturer and distributor of Lowepro, Joby, and a dozen other consumer brands that uses Adaptive to consolidate across 11 countries, 22 subsidiaries, and eight currencies. "We needed a cloud system that is accessible 24/7 and provides consistent financial and operational reporting around the world. Choosing Adaptive has accelerated our financial consolidation close, and eliminated days of work, which has freed up our finance team to focus on more strategic initiatives to further our growth."

Adaptive Consolidation was announced in April of 2013, and introduced powerful new capabilities, coupled with an intuitive user interface, that make incredibly complex and time-consuming processes easy. Businesses can close their books accurately, quickly, and painlessly, with intuitive definition of rules that are automatically applied to the consolidation process each period. They can automate the import of data that needs to be consolidated, as well as calculations for intercompany eliminations, minority interest, allocations, currency exchange and cumulative translation adjustment.

Financial and Operational Analytics. Unified.
The new release also brings powerful new analytic capabilities to Adaptive Discovery, the company's visual analytics and business intelligence solution, and now enables business users to further benefit from its unification of Adaptive's cloud suite with financial and operational analytics.

Adaptive Discovery has always enabled visualization of customers' planning and consolidation data straight 'out of the box' with no setup required. Now customers can add to that the visualization of virtually any operational data and metrics from around the organization, including large volumes of data. Customers can thereby get a holistic view of the overall company performance, finance and operational data together. 

All of this data can be reflected on the same dashboard, providing decision makers with a 360-degree view to turn insight into action, with just a few clicks. With operational insights -- from sales performance, to marketing performance, to billing and project performance, and more -- decision makers can now quickly compare what's happening in the broader business with existing financial plan, actuals, forecasts and assumptions, and take immediate corrective action. The result is truly agile decision making -- without having to log into multiple systems or rely on IT.

Adaptive Discovery elevates self-service with a completely new freeform look and feel to dashboards for customized resizing, moving, and display of analytics and other dashboard elements to the exact business needs -- all in the hands of the business user, with no coding required. And new snapshot capabilities provide the ability to take dashboards and convert them into presentation-quality reports, quickly and easily.

"NorthStar Financial Services manages over $170 billion in assets, across 9 subsidiaries, so business intelligence is key to driving our business. With Adaptive Discovery we've already reduced our time to see key metrics by over 70 percent, and more timely insightful data visualization is enabling us to drive more agile planning," said Andrew Rosenberg, Financial Analyst at NorthStar Financial Services. "The new enhancements in Adaptive Discovery will enable us to incorporate an even broader range of operational data into our dashboards and thereby enable us to further drive business performance."

The new release by Adaptive Planning continues the company's innovation in terms of intuitive ease of use, collaboration, and a social cloud environment that is transforming the way organizations plan and analyze. And unlike expensive to run and maintain legacy CPM systems such as Oracle Hyperion, Adaptive's new functionality is delivered automatically and seamlessly to customers -- without them having to struggle with costly, risky and onerous IT-intensive upgrades.

Bringing Innovation to Corporate Performance Management
"New innovation in consolidation and analytics capabilities allows us to continue our exceptional customer momentum, as companies across the globe harness the power of our integrated, cloud CPM and BI suite to transform their business performance," said John Herr, CEO of Adaptive Planning. "The traction we are seeing for the latest Adaptive Consolidation and Adaptive Discovery is a testament to the tremendous demand for better visibility and transparency with the unparalleled ease of delivery that only the cloud can provide."

"Adaptive Discovery has quickly provided value to users and gives Adaptive Planning a unique value proposition as a cloud based solution for providing BI and CPM in a single platform," according to Hyoun Park, Principal Analyst at Nucleus Research.

The Fall Release builds upon strong product and market momentum for Adaptive Planning. With more than 1700 customers and 50,000 active users in 82 countries, Adaptive is the clear leader in cloud business analytics. With new software bookings growth of 90 percent in 2012, Adaptive ranked as the fifth fastest growing software company in Silicon Valley on the Deloitte Fast 500 and appeared on the JMP Hot 100 list. The company consistently ranks #1 in customer experience and usability in third party industry surveys, including BPM Partners and Nucleus Research. 

"Let's put Adaptive Planning's recent product evolution on a timeline. In the last year or so, the company has added a material analytics/BI capability to its core financial planning toolset. It added a very robust consolidation tool that compares favorably to products that on-premises vendors took years to build," said Brian Sommer, founder of TechVentive. "Now, the company has added expanded analytics, collaboration capabilities, new reporting tools and more to the product suite. For a space that some on-premises vendors have let languish, Adaptive has put energy, products and speed into the performance management arena."

The Fall Release is available on September 13.

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About Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is the worldwide leader in cloud-based business analytics solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes. The company's software as a service (SaaS) platform allows finance and management teams to work together to plan, monitor, report on, and analyze financial and operational performance. With capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and business intelligence, Adaptive Planning enables finance, sales, and other business leaders to make better, faster, more collaborative decisions that drive a true competitive advantage.

Adaptive Planning is used by over 1,700 organizations worldwide, from midsized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, including AAA, Boston Scientific, CORT, Konica Minolta, NetSuite, Philips, and Vail Resorts. The company is the 5th fastest growing software company in Silicon Valley on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ list; has the #1 brand in midmarket CPM; and ranks #1 in customer satisfaction and usability in independent industry surveys. With customers and partners in 82 countries worldwide, the company has the strongest channel ecosystem in the cloud CPM space, with worldwide partners including Armanino, Intacct, IntuitiveTek, Plex Systems, SAP, and NetSuite, which offers a specialized version of Adaptive Planning as the NetSuite Financial Planning module. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and is funded by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), ONSET Ventures, Monitor Ventures, and Cardinal Venture Capital.