Adaptive Insights’ Impressive Product

According to a report from MarketandMarkets, the cloud analytics market is projected to grow 26% annually over the five year period from 2013 through 2018. The researcher expects the market to be worth $16.52 billion by 2018 from $5.25 billion in 2013.

Adaptive Insights’ Offerings
Mountain View-based Adaptive Insights, formerly known as Adaptive Planning, is a leading provider of cloud-based analytics solutions. It was founded in 2003 by Robert Hull who was looking for an easy-to-use cloud-based offering for financial management. The company came into being when Rob Hull realized, through his experience of putting together financial models, that he wanted to create a solution that helped the management become more involved in the drivers behind financial modeling and Excel fared poorly in achieving this goal. He was impressed with the ease of deployment and understanding that was offered by Salesforce.com and thus wanted to leverage these features in a financial management model. The proposed tool would be able to put finance back into doing financial management instead of getting drawn into the technical aspects of implementing available offerings like Hyperion.

The planned product was released in 2004 to a positive feedback. Since its release, Adaptive Insights was able to acquire more than 2,000 customers across 80 countries. They target their offerings to Small and Medium sized businesses and offer access to their tool on a subscription-based model. Their customer list includes names like AAA, Boston Scientific, CORT, Konica Minolta, NetSuite, Philips, and Vail Resorts and they have been rated as the fastest growing cloud business analytics and CPM software company on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list and the leader in customer satisfaction in independent industry surveys.

Adaptive Insights believes that their solution is able to offer at least 50% more efficiency compared with Excel-based models, thus letting financial teams focus more on strategic matters. The tool claims to have helped improve forecasting effectiveness as they are able to provide monthly, weekly as well as quarterly forecasts.

Since then though, they have expanded their capabilities by building connections into other cloud-based tools such as Salesforce, Workday, and Eloqua and is now more than a financial management tool. They are now known to be among the leading providers of cloud-based Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions in a market estimated to be worth $33 billion as per IDC. They are able to cover planning, consolidation, analytics, and reporting aspects with insights into ERP, CRM. and HR applications to provide management with almost real-time access to critical dashboards for more effective business planning.

Adaptive Insights’ Financials
Adaptive Insights does not disclose their financials. In my discussion with Rob Hull, he mentioned that they have been able to raise the capital they needed to reinvest in growth. Overall, they have reported growth of more than 50% growth annually and claim that during the first quarter of this year, they witnessed a 96% growth in new bookings.

They have been venture funded with more than $100 million in funding received from investors including Salesforce, RBC Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, ONSET Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cardinal Venture Capital, Monitor Ventures, and Relay Ventures. In their last round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners and held in May 2013, they raised $45 million at an undisclosed valuation.