Anaplan: A new paradigm for analyzing, modeling, budgeting, planning, and reporting in the cloud
The latest product review of Anaplan by Gary Simon of Financial Systems News highlights the groundbreaking technology of the Anaplan BI cloud based platform.
“The marketplace for business intelligence and performance management applications is characterized by traditional suites of software that were designed for a different era. Today’s uncertain business environment means that decision makers require analytical solutions that are instantly accessible and amenable to change. The cloud provides an attractive setting for analytics because of its convenience and the ability to hive off infrastructure to a third party. But not all vendors have been able to turn the cloud to their advantage. Saddled with old architectures, a hotchpotch of loosely integrated applications and a heavy reliance on traditional licence fees their solutions are looking increasingly uncompetitive.
Anaplan’s founders, with a deep heritage in analytical platforms have taken the opportunity of cloud computing to take a fresh approach to the problem, incorporating the latest thinking and technology. Founding principles include a unified platform, in-memory computing and multi-threaded processing to ensure a fast level of performance – something that has eluded earlier generations of web based solutions. As such Anaplan can support very large models and populations of users. At a stroke this allows managers to collaborate across complete processes in a single business model, transcend functional barriers and link operational to financial plans. But they have also made the system very intuitive and easy to use putting the creation, maintenance and use of application within the grasp of anyone with modest Excel skills.
The ‘icing on the cake’ is a pricing model that breaks with convention and allows organizations to pay for what they need and to grow their applications in sympathy with their organization’s development rather than investing tens of thousands of dollars up front.”