Member Article

Global Demand for Anaplan Fuels Hyper-growth in the First Half of 2014

Anaplan sees record increases in bookings, customers, and employees

Market adoption of Anaplan continued to accelerate in the first half of 2014, as the company doubled both headcount and its customer roster – driving further global expansion.

Anaplan’s continued hyper-growth was fueled by global demand for its in-memory platform that gives Anaplanners the ability to collaboratively build and manage business planning applications that span key use cases across Sales, Finance, and Operations.

“We booked 20 percent more in the first half of 2014 than in all of 2013, because Anaplan addresses core business problems that nearly every company has, creating a massive market opportunity,” said Fred Laluyaux, Anaplan CEO. “We built from scratch a patented technology platform that is capable of solving the planning and execution challenges faced by the largest, most complex companies in the world. To execute on this big vision, we challenge ourselves to think disruptively about nearly everything to build an organization ready to support these customers.”

Anaplan booked some of the world’s fastest-growing and industry-leading companies in the first-half of 2014, including:

• US: Anaplan booked contracts with AdRoll, AppDynamics, Auction.com, Birst, and Toyota Financial Services, among others.
• EMEA: Anaplan booked contracts with Britvic, Brussels Airlines, CSM, Opus Bilprovning, Orkla Confectionary and Snacks, Prudential plc, Reckitt Benckiser Group, RSA Insurance Group, and StepStone, among others.
• Asia-Pacific and ANZ: Anaplan booked contracts with NMG, Sky Network TV, and Target Australia, among others.

In the first half of 2014, Anaplan customers including Aaron’s, Air Asia Expedia, British Land, HP, Kimberly-Clark, McAfee, Pandora, and Redwood Trust expanded Anaplan to more users and use cases across their enterprises.

Key first half 2014 highlights:

• New Offices: Anaplan expanded operations in Australia, Eastern Europe, Malaysia, and the UK. Part of this global expansion included the opening of its new R&D center in the North of England (Yorkshire), where more than 45 engineers handle the Company’s worldwide product development and engineering. The Company plans to double its staff in Yorkshire by the end of 2014.
• Team Growth: Anaplan made over 100 new hires and plans to hire at least 100 more employees by the end of 2014. To accommodate for the employee growth, Anaplan moved its San Francisco headquarters from its Union Square office into a new, larger space in the city’s SoMa neighborhood. The company also expanded its operations in the Twin Cities, moving into a larger office in Minneapolis’ North Loop District.
• Funding: During the company’s customer conference, Hub 2014, Anaplan announced a $100 million series D financing round led by DFJ Growth. The company also announced that it would take its conference on the road in the second half of the year with four Hub 2014 World Tour events in Eindhoven, Stockholm, London and Paris.
• Partner Expansion: Anaplan launched four new sales applications on Salesforce1 AppExchange to fundamentally change how companies build and execute sales plans using a single platform that leverages Salesforce data for data-driven, collaborative sales planning. Anaplan also joined Workday’s partner program.

With the second half of the year well underway, the company continues its hyper-growth trajectory, capturing additional market share as it expands its application offerings, attracts new customers, and further grows its employee base to deliver on the promise of offering world class service and user experiences.

“Over the last two years, while the legacy business planning vendors continued to lose relevance in the enterprise, Anaplan gained considerable interest and momentum,” said Thomas Laffont, Senior Managing Director at Coatue Management. “Anaplan is the power of enterprise performance management combined with the ease of use of Excel. Anaplan significantly reduces setup and development times, and is simply a better way to do analytics. It is quickly becoming the Force.com for financial and analytical applications.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ian Stone .