The Interview
Deal Maker of the Year Awards 2012
John Herr Chief Executive Office
Adaptive Planning Acquires myDIALS Q
Please introduce yourself, your role, and Adaptive Planning.
Adaptive Planning is the global leader in corporate performance management for the cloud. Similar to what
Salesforce.com did for CRM, we're doing for financial budgeting, forecasting, planning, and reporting. I am helping to accelerate the company’s already impressive growth and leadership position to seize a big market need and opportunity. We fill a really big hole in the market between Excel on the low end – which is manual, error prone, just doesn't scale – and more traditional legacy enterprise software like IBM, SAP, and Oracle for example on the high end – which are expensive, complex and very IT intensive.
As a result of this market opportunity and our leadership in the cloud, the company is growing rapidly, with over 70% annual growth, 1500 customers, #1 ranking in customer satisfaction, and 300 partners in 65 countries, including Armanino McKenna, Intacct, IntuitiveTek, Plex Systems, SAP, and NetSuite, which offers a specialized version of Adaptive Planning as the NetSuite Financial Planning module. Our product is used by organizations worldwide, from midsized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, including AAA, Boston Scientific, Siemens, CORT, Konica Minolta, NetSuite, Philips, and Vail Resorts. We are headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. and are funded by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), ONSET Ventures, Monitor Ventures, and Cardinal Venture Capital. As a bit of background, I came to Adaptive
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www.finance-monthly.com
Planning as a former Executive in Residence (EIR) at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), and I helped usher in Adaptive Planning’s latest round of funding, a $22 million round led by NVP. My background includes positions as Vice President & General Manager at eBay, working across the eBay, PayPal, and international businesses. During this time, revenue grew 15 times, from $400 million to $6 billion, and employees increased from a few hundred to 15,000. Prior to eBay, I was Chief Revenue Officer at
Buy.com where I was responsible for scaling revenues from $35 million to $860 million. I have also held senior roles at Ziff Davis Media, Johnson & Johnson, and Bain & Company, and earned a BA in Economics and an MBA from Harvard.
I am bringing my background and relationships to bear in helping to continue to scale Adaptive Planning’s business, both in terms of market targets and expanding the product portfolio. The most rapidly growing part of our business today is the enterprise, companies over $1 billion in revenue, which accounts for about 25 percent of all of our new bookings. As the business climate becomes more familiar with and attuned to the advantages of the cloud, we are finding that even the largest and most complex organizations are embracing our solution as a better alternative.
And in terms of product roadmap, we are expanding our suite of solutions to go beyond financial planning to include business intelligence and visual discovery. With our recent acquisition of myDIALS, the cloud leader in visual discovery, we are bringing
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operational information into the mix of decision making in an easy and intuitive way.
What unique value does Adaptive Planning bring to the market?
Let’s start with the forces at work that are driving new thinking in corporate performance management. At one extreme of the market there are low-end, personal- productivity tools – like Microsoft Excel. While many swear by Excel as a personal tool, it is manual, inefficient, error-prone, not collaborative, and just doesn’t scale to the demands of growing businesses. The shocking truth is that over 65% of companies still rely upon spreadsheets for planning and reporting. Spreadsheets continue to dominate planning and reporting processes in most companies because they are familiar and readily available. There’s a huge cost to all of this wasted time and error-prone process.
At the other extreme are large, on-premise CPM applications, such as those offered by Oracle, SAP, and IBM that are typically expensive, complex, take a long time to deploy, and require a huge amount of IT involvement. These two traditional, insufficient approaches are creating a gaping hole in the market, particularly for mid-market and enterprise organizations.
Adaptive Planning’s cloud-based CPM has all the key elements that are missing in the market extremes, combining ease of use and fast deployment with a collaborative and scalable environment that requires no IT. Software-as-a-Service solutions are very affordable (with a total cost of ownership
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