Products Anaplan Platform Headquarters San Francisco | Founded 2006 Type Privately held company | |
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Industry Enterprise Performance Management, Software Company Key people Michael Gould, Founder and CTO
Frank Calderoni, Chief Executive Officer
Paul Melchiorre, Chief Revenue Officer
Doug Smith, Executive VP Strategic Accounts
Simon Tucker, Chief Customer Officer
Grant Halloran, Chief Marketing Officer
Mark Fuller, Interim CFO and Corporate Controller
Laurent Lefouet, Managing Director, EMEA
Dennis Dresser, Managing Director, Americas
Samir Neji, Managing Director, Asia PAC
Jack Whyte, Global Head of Engineering
Christine Maxwell, VP Human Resources Profiles | ||
Anaplan is a cloud-based planning and performance management platform with documented use cases in finance, sales, supply chain, marketing, IT and HR. The company competes in the business planning market, which for decades has been dominated by the “big four” legacy vendors: IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft. Anaplan CTO Michael Gould developed Anaplan as a response to these legacy systems. At the core of Gould's technology is a single hub where business users can build, deploy, maintain, and share models without coding or reliance on IT personnel.
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Anaplan is headquartered in San Francisco (United States of America), with offices in Minneapolis (United States of America), New York, England, France, Sweden, Benelux, Austria, Australia, Russia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
History
Anaplan was founded in 2006 by Guy Haddleton and Michael Gould in Yorkshire, UK. Gould noted, “Outdated technologies and disconnected legacy applications have made dynamic interaction across teams nearly impossible, forcing users into static models that can’t keep pace with daily change” – and set about to change that. He spent two years developing a platform that could utilize new computing abilities, such as in-memory computing, 64-bit multi core processing, database innovation, and SaaS delivery. After four years of platform development, Anaplan was officially launched to the public in October 2010.
By the end of 2010, Anaplan had gained market traction and was being hailed as a creator of the “new market” in performance management. Anaplan brought on Frederic Laluyaux as CEO in 2012. The company attracted new funding, doubled its headcount, opened new offices worldwide, and added some notable customers. Laluyaux left the company in April 2016.
In 2012 alone, Anaplan grew its customer base by 500% and revenues by 800%. Customers include HP, McAfee, Pandora, Diageo, Kimberly-Clark EE, and Aviva.
In February 2013 Anaplan acquired its reseller Vue Analytics in U.K. for an undisclosed amount, with the goal to strengthen its market position in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
In November 2014 the company launched the Anaplan App Hub, “a community for all Anaplanners to build, share, and deploy planning apps,” with dozens of planning apps across 10 industries. For its fiscal year ending January 31, 2015, the company reported that bookings grew 230%, representing 2.1 times more bookings than the previous two years combined, and 91% growth in customers.
Anaplan scaled up its cloud platform and launched a “slick new user interface” in 2015. The company updated its App Hub, added platform enhancements, and improved tools for app-builders in 2016.
In January 2017 Anaplan appointed Frank A. Calderoni to be CEO. Calderoni was previously executive vice president and CFO of Red Hat, Inc., and had held leadership positions at Cisco Systems and SanDisk.
Financing & Investors
The company closed a Series B funding in January 2012 with a $11.4M investment coming from Granite Ventures and Shasta Ventures as the lead of investors of this round.
Anaplan closed its Series C funding in March 2013 with a $33M investment from Meritech, Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, Salesforce.com, and additional private investors.
Anaplan announced May 13, 2014 at its Hub 2014 conference in San Francisco that it has completed a Series D round of $100 million in financing, bringing total investment in the company to $150 million. Lead investor of this round was DFJ Growth.
A further round of funding was announced in January 2016, amounting to $90 million, along with confirmation of Anaplan's status as a tech "unicorn," with a valuation of over $1 billion. Lead investor of this Series E investment was PremjiInvest.
Technology
Anaplan's product is a cloud computing, multi-tenant data architecture SaaS platform with an in-memory calculation engine (the HyperBlock).
Anaplan's Hyperblock™ architecture is a hybrid of relational, vertical, and OLAP databases with an in-memory data store multi-threaded calculation engine.. The HyperBlock™ automatically records updates at a granular level by amending only the affected cells. As volumes scale, users can instantaneously update or change models. A patent application for the technology was filed on November 19, 2009, and US Patent 8151056B2 was awarded on April 3, 2012.
The “Living Blueprint” is the brain behind Anaplan’s in-memory platform. This master repository of business rules is where all the intelligence behind a model is generated and maintained. This allows adjustments to the model to be made in seconds, thus allowing the model to grow and adapt with a constantly changing business. Anaplan is delivered in a Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) model and is completely cloud-based. This eliminates the need for dedicated hardware or maintenance teams to make the platform work. It also enables “Zero Deployment” – users can log onto the platform on almost any device, from anywhere.
In November 2014 Anaplan announced the launch of the Anaplan App Hub, a community for Anaplan users to build, share, and deploy planning apps. The App Hub launched with dozens of planning apps across 10 industries including Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting, Sales Forecasting, Trade and Promotion Planning, Territory and Quota Planning, Financial Consolidation, Incentive Compensation Planning, Strategic Financial Planning, Insurance Premium Planning, and Human Asset and Labor Optimization (HALO), amongst others.
In 2015 Gartner labeled Anaplan a “Visionary” in their Magic Quadrant reports for both corporate performance management (CPM) and sales performance management (SPM).
User Conference
Anaplan has an annual global user conference: Anaplan Hub. The Anaplan community, including customers, prospects, partners, and Anaplan employees, come together for training, breakout sessions, keynotes, product announcements, and technical education.
In May 2013, the inaugural Hub took place in San Francisco. Customer speakers included Diageo, Pandora, McAfee, HealthTrust, Serena Software, Wind River, 2degrees, and AirAsia Expedia. In October 2013, it hosted Hub Europe in London. Customer speakers included Aviva, Hewlett-Packard, and Kimberly-Clark Eastern Europe.
In 2014 Anaplan expanded the Hub conference beyond its flagship event in San Francisco to include a world tour. The tour included conferences in Eindhoven, Stockholm, Paris and London. In 2015, Anaplan reported hosted more than 3,000 planning professionals at its Hub15 global tour, held in seven cities worldwide.
At its flagship Hub conference in San Francisco in 2016, the company hosted more than 1,500 technology innovators, analysts, and business executives, including representatives from Deloitte, Kellogg Company, DocuSign, and Splunk. Combined with regional Hub conferences in Singapore, Stockholm, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, Moscow, and London, the company reported hosting more than 3,500 planning professionals worldwide in 2016.
On March 27–29, 2017 Anaplan will hold Hub17, its global user conference, in San Francisco. More than 1,5000 customers, prospects, and partners are expected, and more than 115 breakout sessions will be offered. Hub17 will be followed in 2017 by regional events, known as “Hub Comes to You,” in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Moscow, Paris, Stockholm, and Zurich.