Anaplan is a cloud-native enterprise software company whose mission is to enable agile, connected decision-making through its AI-driven scenario planning and analysis platform. The company currently employs more than 2,000 people worldwide. Several major investors have funded Anaplan’s growth and global expansion. In 2022, Thoma Bravo, a leading software investment firm, acquired Anaplan for approximately $10.4 billion. In 2024, Anaplan acquired Fluence Technologies, a provider of financial close, consolidation, disclosure management, and reporting solutions.
Launched in 2008, the Anaplan platform is a modern generation of planning, forecasting, modeling, and performance management solutions built on state-of-the-art technology and software architecture. The fully cloud-based platform is available in public cloud (e.g., Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP)) and private cloud environments and is powered by Anaplan’s proprietary, in-memory calculation architecture. In 2017, Anaplan pioneered the concept of connected planning. Its low-code technology connects financial, strategic, and operational plans with data insights and people to align strategic objectives and resources for better decisions and faster results. With the addition of Fluence (now Anaplan Financial Consolidation), Anaplan has strategically expanded its portfolio to provide end-to-end solutions for a more connected finance function, including close and consolidation.
Anaplan targets business leaders, corporate finance, controllers, and operational business departments to connect planning processes on a single platform that supports multiple use cases across finance, sales, supply chain, and workforce in large enterprises and corporations worldwide. Additionally, Anaplan and its partners offer prebuilt solutions and connected applications spanning these areas and specific industries. These applications are based on best practices and common customer use cases. They are built and run on the Anaplan platform and can be customized to meet specific needs.
According to Anaplan, it has more than 2,500 customers. Anaplan implementations include companies of all sizes, from SMBs to complex global businesses with several thousand users per installation. To sell and implement Anaplan, the vendor has a global ecosystem of over 250 partners for implementation, system integration, reselling, technology, strategy, and business consulting. This ecosystem is designed to enhance the platform’s capabilities and deliver tailored solutions across various industries.
Anaplan Financial Consolidation and Reporting (FCR) provides cloud-native (available in Microsoft Azure) support for statutory and management financial consolidation and close with additional capabilities for disclosure management, ad hoc analysis, and reporting. The application offers capabilities for administration of consolidation rules, methods, calculations, eliminations, and validations with auditable workflows. With Anaplan XL Reporting, users can report on Anaplan and non-Anaplan data sources via an Excel-based add-in and display this information in reports or dashboards. Reports can be viewed in Excel, on the web, or on mobile devices.
The Anaplan platform provides flexible functionality for top-down and bottom-up planning, including workflow support and collaboration capabilities. With its “connected scenario planning and analysis” platform, customers can create planning models at different levels of aggregation (strategic, financial, and operational) for an integrated enterprise planning approach. In 2024, Anaplan released its Integrated Financial Planning (IFP) application: a purpose-built, out-of-the-box solution that streamlines planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes. The vendor’s classic Hyperblock and new Polaris calculation engines support scalable, in-memory data processing for detailed planning models. As larger, more granular data sets are required for sound planning and informed decision-making, Anaplan is investing heavily in its new, more memory-efficient Polaris calculation engine, as well as its data management system and intelligence capabilities.
In 2024, Anaplan outlined a $500 million, multi-year product investment with a focus on enhanced platform capabilities, AI innovations, and additional applications, including a flagship Financial Planning and Consolidation solution (seamlessly combining IFP and FCR for the Office of the CFO). Delivering on this strategy, the expanded native platform enhancements and AI capabilities include Anaplan Data Orchestrator (ADO), Anaplan’s conversational AI assistant CoPlanner, and the vendor’s suite of role‑based AI agents. ADO improves data integration and connectivity with third-party applications and data sources, building the foundation for Anaplan’s AI strategy. It helps transform source data into the structure and format needed for Anaplan models. ADO also centrally stores transformed data to simplify monitoring, management, and distribution to planning models. The introduction of agents contributes to Anaplan’s ongoing stream of AI-driven innovations, including the Anaplan Forecaster, the Anaplan CoModeler agent, and four additional intelligent role-based agents (e.g., for finance), as well as the Anaplan Agent Studio, which supports customers in building their own custom AI agents.
