Adaptive Planning Shines Light On An Emerging SaaS Category: BPM

Recently, OStatic has run a series of posts focused on the cloud-based software stacks that power flexible SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications and platforms. The cloud stacks that we've focused on have consisted of many open source components. Increasingly, some of the most useful cloud-based applications and platforms are focused on business processes and tasks, with SugarCRM and many Business Intelligence platforms gaining in functionality. One area in which the open source business-focused SaaS platforms are lagging proprietary platforms, though, is business performance management. Adaptive Planning is out with a series of announcements today that illustrate the significant opportunities to be found in this corner of the SaaS application market.

Adaptive Planning specializes in business performance management (BPM) applications hosted in the cloud and used by organizations ranging from Philips to the Red Cross.  The company is out today with its Spring 2011 Release, which supports complex, multi-organization planning and reporting requirements, and increases options for integrating with other cloud-based systems, including open source tools. In a separate announcement today, the company also introduced two new solutions, Sales Planning & Analysis and Multi-Entity Planning & Analysis, which make it easy for corporate sales teams and complex corporations to take advantage of the powerful new capabilities delivered in the Spring 2011 Release.

The Sales Planning & Analysis solution includes tools that are not typically found in CRM systems, and Adaptive Planning's overall platform is capable of producing all types of common financial reports, concentrating on allowing users to collaborate with each other as they work on plans and analyses. In a move that could be widely copied by many other SaaS solution providers, Adaptive Planning has introduced new multi-instance deployments that allow disparate users and divisions within an organization to set up and link together multiple independent models.

"The Spring 2011 Release marks a major milestone for the company," said Robert Hull, founder, CFO, and Vice President of Client Services for Adaptive Planning. "The new capabilities provide exciting new options for enterprise customers, extend the value we can provide within the ecosystem of cloud-based solutions, and deliver new go-to-market alternatives for our distribution partners."

Planning, analysis and reporting are areas where many of the open source SaaS-based tools focused on business could improve. If you're increasingly using these tools in business contexts, look into the emerging BPM class of tools. In all likelihood, BPM, CRM and BI tools are going to mature together, and increasingly work together.