Adaptive Planning Introduces Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 Releases

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 31, 2011) - Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in on-demand Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes, today announced its Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 Releases. Featuring extensive new reporting capabilities and delivering numerous cloud computing and corporate collaboration advantages, these releases enable Adaptive Planning to extend its lead in providing a solution optimized to address the enormous market demand for next-generation CPM applications.

According to an independent survey of 1,000 senior financial executives conducted by Merrill Research, the usage of CPM solutions is expected to skyrocket over the next two years, increasing by up to 77 percent. In the survey, finance executives also ranked the product and vendor attributes that are most important in evaluating CPM solutions. The single most important product feature is strong reporting capabilities, while the most important product and vendor attributes include ease of use, rapid implementations, excellent customer service, ease of working with the vendor, and affordable pricing that provides great value. And in another recent survey conducted by the BPI Network and Adaptive Planning, the ability to incorporate collaboration capabilities into FP&A processes also ranked high in priority.

With its Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 releases, Adaptive Planning further strengthens its position as the optimal solution for today's CPM market needs. The new releases introduce a wealth of new features that broaden and deepen its functionality in the preeminent CPM product category, financial reporting. Collaboration capabilities have been enhanced, with the ability for users to share annotations and discussions within reports, and to provide product feedback from within the application. And by leveraging the revolutionary software as a service (SaaS) model, Adaptive Planning delivers the ease of use, quick implementations, and affordable pricing that are being demanded by finance teams today.

"The Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 releases continue to build upon the significant investments we have been making over the last several years in the financial reporting and analysis capabilities of our CPM platform, resulting in the industry's most sophisticated -- and intuitive -- on-demand financial reporting solution," said Robert S. Hull, Founder and President of Adaptive Planning. "What's more, these releases illustrate the fact that our customers can automatically access new features on a quarterly basis, underscoring the tremendous value that the SaaS model delivers to companies of all sizes. It's one more example of how Adaptive Planning is aligned with our customers' ongoing success, resulting in true partnerships with clients and an unparalleled focus on customer satisfaction."

"We appreciate that Adaptive Planning listens to their customers and includes the product features and enhancements they request in subsequent product releases," said Lisa Van Huystee, Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, SEMI, an Adaptive Planning customer. "The new reporting capabilities in this release, particularly the Report Books and dashboard enhancements, will enable us to easily create financial presentations such as board packages and month-end management reports, and ensure that we always have an up-to-date view of our business performance."

New features in the Adaptive Planning Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 releases include:

Reporting Enhancements

Transaction Reporting & Analysis provides a way for companies to improve their corporate performance management with tight integration of transaction-level detail from other enterprise applications, located both on-premise and in the cloud. Users can drill down into underlying transaction detail from summary values in plans and reports, making business managers more autonomous and efficient in understanding their variances, and freeing finance and accounting for higher value-added activities. Companies can make better-informed decisions more quickly, and can reduce budgeting, forecasting, and reporting cycle times.

Other reporting enhancements include:

• Report Annotations provide opportunities for collaborative explanations, comments and questions on reports. Report notes can include an ongoing thread with input from more than one user, or can be single comments, such as variance explanations. Notes can refer to specific data values or to the overall report, and can be viewed either within the report or as footnotes.
• Report Books enable reports to be grouped and stored together, and generated, printed, and distributed with a single request. Report Books can be distributed via email and easily downloaded for financial presentations such as board packages and month-end management reporting.
• Conditional Formatting allows users to define rules that determine formatting, such as color-coding values that exceed certain thresholds, which is particularly useful in scorecards.
• Dashboard enhancements include expanded layout possibilities with more choices of numbers and types of reports to be included.
• Snapshot Reports provide a way to save and store "point-in-time" reports, complete with annotations, for archiving and shared reference.
• In-Report Calculations provide greater power and flexibility to report authors of all types, allowing users to create more calculations "on the fly" within reports, such as adding different business metrics or derived financial calculations.

Other Product Enhancements
The Fall 2011 and Winter 2012 releases also deliver numerous other enhancements that make Adaptive Planning more powerful and easier to use for administrators and end users.

• Product Feedback gives users a mechanism within the Adaptive Planning application to share their ideas for product enhancements with both the company and other Adaptive Planning users worldwide, to vote for product capabilities, and to stay informed about the status of their suggestions.
• Document Repository provides new collaboration options by establishing a centralized location for storing and sharing documents (e.g., PowerPoint, Excel, Word, or PDF files) related to budgeting, forecasting, and other corporate performance management activities.
• Status Board enables users to see who else is logged into the application, and how recently a user has performed an action.
• Numerous other enhancements include expanded formula-writing capabilities and improved security with more password management options.

"Adaptive Planning is known for being one of the most innovative performance management vendors, but it's also clear that they listen to their customers," said Craig Schiff, CEO of BPM Partners, an independent analyst and advisory services firm. "With these releases, they not only continue to deepen their functionality in the area of core financial reporting, but also introduce some exciting new enterprise collaboration capabilities. What's most notable is that Adaptive Planning has woven the collaborative capabilities into existing business processes, like management reporting, which can significantly increase the effectiveness and value of these processes for both finance and management teams."

Availability & Pricing
New features will be delivered across two releases -- Fall 2011 and Winter 2012. The Fall 2011 features are available now, and the Winter 2012 features will be available in Q1 2012. All SaaS clients will be automatically upgraded and have access to the new features and capabilities, other than Transaction Reporting, as part of their existing subscriptions. Transaction Reporting & Analysis is priced and sold separately. For additional pricing details, visit http://www.adaptiveplanning.com/products/pricing/.

About Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is the worldwide leader in on-demand corporate performance management (CPM) solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes. Adaptive Planning's solutions allow finance and management teams to obtain real-time visibility into performance metrics, streamline financial planning and reporting, and drive better business decisions. By offering affordable annual subscriptions and rapid implementations, and by eliminating the need for new hardware and IT support, Adaptive Planning makes it easy to move beyond spreadsheet-based processes without the cost and complexity associated with traditional on-premise CPM applications. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and can be reached at 650-528-7500 or www.adaptiveplanning.com.