Anaplan is a cloud-native enterprise software vendor headquartered in Miami, Florida, USA. The company currently employs more than 2,000 people worldwide. Several major investors have financed Anaplan’s growth and global expansion. In 2022, Anaplan was acquired by Thoma Bravo, a leading software investment firm, for approximately $10.4 billion.
The company’s name is a combination of analytics and planning. The Anaplan platform was officially released in 2008 and represents a new generation of planning, modeling, and forecasting and performance management solutions developed with state-of-the-art technologies on a modern software architecture. Anaplan is a purely cloud-based platform powered by a proprietary in-memory data processing engine (patented Hyperblock technology). The company pioneered the concept of enterprise-wide connected planning, and its low-code technology connects people, plans, systems and data to provide collaboration and visibility into the business to improve decision-making.
Anaplan targets business leaders, as well as corporate finance and operational business departments to connect strategic, financial and operational plans on a single platform and unified codebase to support multiple use cases across finance, sales and marketing, supply chain, HR and workforce in large enterprises and groups worldwide. In addition to horizontal use cases, Anaplan and its global partner ecosystem offer industry-specific prebuilt solutions across a number of verticals such as consumer and retail, financial and business services, manufacturing and life sciences, technology, media and telecommunications. These applications are built and running on the Anaplan platform and can be adapted to customer-specific requirements. In 2022, Anaplan acquired the application division of its partner Vuealta, extending its focus on supply chain planning with purpose-built applications for demand, supply, inventory, and sales and operations planning / integrated business planning (S&OP/IBP). Adding to its suite of out-of-the box applications, the company also released its first sales planning application late last year: Anaplan for Territory and Quota Planning.
According to Anaplan, it has more than 2,200 customers worldwide. Implementations range from double-digit to several thousand users per installation. To sell and particularly to implement Anaplan, the vendor has an expansive global partner ecosystem of more than 200 consulting and implementation partners including technology partners with supplementary technical capabilities. The company and its partners adhere to a common agile implementation method known as the Anaplan Way, which emphasizes transparency throughout each implementation phase to foster effective deployment and adoption.
Anaplan provides flexible functionality for centralized top-down as well as decentralized bottom-up planning, including workflow support and collaboration capabilities. With its ‘connected planning’ platform, customers can create various planning models on different aggregation levels (strategic, financial and operational planning) for an integrated enterprise planning approach. The vendor’s classic Hyperblock and new Polaris calculation engines support scalable, in-memory data processing for detailed planning models. As larger and more granular data sets are required for sound planning and informed decision-making, Anaplan is investing heavily in its new, more memory-efficient calculation engine Polaris as well as in its data management system and intelligent capabilities.
