"With all the economic uncertainly if there was ever a time to do planning, it's now," said Adaptive Planning CEO Bill Soward recently.
Having created Adaptive Planning from the start as a software as a service (SaaS) solution, the company has based its marketing around being agile and low risk.
"We've already got a very extensive test drive strategy where you can use the basic budgeting and planning tools. The Enterprise version has a lot more capabilities, but we're pretty used to customers coming in to work at low and zero price levels to try it and see value before buying," Soward said.
To reinforce its message, Adaptive Planning has put together a 10-seat, £5,000 Recession Survival Kit to help businesses revise forecasts and planning scenarios in response to the economic downturn. The payment covers implementation, training and a six-month subscription fee for Adaptive's full Enterprise system, which includes budgeting, forecasting and analysis modules, modelling and workflow tools, specialised sales, capital and personnel planning worksheets and a drag-and-drop Report Builder.
The software will not be stripped down, but the fixed price implementation will limit its scope to keep users focused on immediate issues, Adaptive Planning CEO Bill Soward explained.
"It focuses on where people need to go with emergency planning exercises to figure out how they should play next few months and 2009. This will give them an organised way to do that and let plan around different sales volumes, expense models and spending assumptions to see how they will affect cashflow," he said.
The company's rapid response to the recent financial meltdown is a clever way to emphasise the flexibility and speed of development that is possible with software as a service systems. It also gives Adaptive an opportunity to flag up the shortcomings of Excel and other "do-nothing" approaches to corporate planning, Soward said.
While other software companies have struggled, Adaptive Planning has continued to expand rapidly into Europe and the UK. It tripled its UK installed base and carried off the Newcome of the Year prize in the 2008 Software Satisfaction Awards.
At the beginning of the year when the company set out to expand internationally, Soward admitted the system was still "pretty lame" at reporting.
"With all the other rival systems out there, CFOs are pretty savvy about what they need and there were certain features we needed to get into the game. Once we added drag-and-drop reporting, our international business started accelerating," he said.
So far, social networking features promised earlier this year have not materialised. The priority instead is to respond to customer and demands for international reporting formats, language transations facilities and multi-dimensional reporting.
"We don't use OLAP technology. We're working on a multi-dimensional import process so that users can bring in data ranges for planned versus actual comparisons in an audited way. If they want to do multi-dimensional analysis, we to give them a way so that non-trained people can compare things like products by class and region in a very straightforward, drag-and-drop way," Soward said.
These new facilities are due to appear in the company's December update. "We have a target of new releases with significant enhancements every 4-6 months. That lets us make steady progress and meshes well with customers' ability to digest the new features," he added.
"Our short development cycle means we can innovate rapidly, which is why we're winning."
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