Open Source Solutions

I met with Bill Soward, President & CEO, and Greg Schneider, Vice President Marketing of Adaptive Planning. Adaptive Planning provides packaged solutions for business performance management (BPM), but I think that the best description of Adaptive Planning is that they provide focused BI tools, both on-demand as SaaS and on-premise as open source software, which is licensed under GPLv2.

Since its founding in 2003, Adaptive Planning has tripled its customer base year over year, and has grown to over 220 customers, with 90% of these being customers of the on-demand SaaS. However, approximately half of the largest customers use the open source on-premise version. Most of these customers are companies with 100 to 2500 employees. In toto, they've taken US$29 million in VC funding.

The open source version is available from SourceForge and SugarForge, and has been downloaded over 65,000 times in 85 countries. They have data that suggests that a significant percentage of these downloads have been by finance folk, not IT. These fits well with our experience that end-users are starving for simple BI tools that simply aren't being provided by IT in many cases. I told the "lake of data" story, and I'll repeat it again. Several years ago, we were giving our benefits of BI pitch to a VP of Marketing at a business unit of a Fortune 100 company. She stopped us and brought in one of her marketeers. This very non-technical fellow had recreated data warehousing using over 100 linked MS Access database applications that he called the "Lake of Data". It was amazing. It worked, and it filled their needs. This story pre-dates any significant open source options for BI, but it is exactly this type of person who might download Adaptive Planning Express.

Their community model is a bit different and I believe that it is very worthwhile. They build their community around partners with specific domain expertise. This expertise may be within a vertical niche such as health or the public sector, or specific geography. One example of this is the Adaptive Planning partner in Japan worked with their customer AKTIO to implement localized version of Adaptive Planning's open source budgeting, planning and reporting tools for 800 seats, on-premise at AKTIO. There are currently 65 partners working on extending Adaptive Planning in different ways.

Adaptive Planning is also looking to partner with other open source companies, particularly in the area of data integration. When Adaptive Planning added reporting tools, they originally looked at using one of the open source tools. At the time however, the existing open source reporting tools were very much for developers, and not for end users. Adaptive Planning is very much about ease of use for the end users, so they decided to build their own dashboarding and reporting set. However, with the maturation of open source offerings over the past two years, Adaptive Planning will likely not build their own data integration tools, but will partner with an existing open source solution.

In many ways, the chief competitor for Adaptive Planning is MS Excel. That is, the end users choose the status quo of slogging their way through Excel workbooks and pivot tables. Bill emphasized that the Adaptive Planning strength is allowing user collaboration on modeling, assumptions and background information in a secure, controlled way.