ANAPLAN

Founders: Michael Gould
Key people: Frank Calderoni (CEO, Pres.), Anup Singh (EVP, CFO), Michael Gould (Founder, CTO)
Number of employees: ~1,000

Anaplan is a cloud-based planning and performance management platform with documented use cases in finance, sales, supply chain, marketing, IT and HR. The company competes in the business planning market, which for decades has been dominated by the “big four” legacy vendors: IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft. Anaplan CTO Michael Gould developed Anaplan as a response to these legacy systems. At the core of Gould’s technology is a single hub where business users can build, deploy, maintain, and share models without coding or reliance on IT personnel. Founded in the United Kingdom, the company is now headquartered in the United States.

Anaplan is headquartered in San Francisco, (United States of America), with further American offices in Minneapolis, and New York. There are three offices in the United Kingdom including the founding office in York, plus London, and Maidenhead. Additional global offices are located in France, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Russia, Australia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore.

History

Anaplan was founded in 2006 by Guy Haddleton and Michael Gould in Yorkshire, UK. Gould noted, “Outdated technologies and disconnected legacy applications have made dynamic interaction across teams nearly impossible, forcing users into static models that can’t keep pace with daily change” – and set about to change that. He spent two years developing a platform that could utilize new computing abilities, such as in-memory computing, 64-bit multi core processing, database innovation, and SaaS delivery. After four years of platform development, Anaplan was officially launched to the public in October 2010.

By the end of 2010, Anaplan had gained market traction and was being hailed as a creator of the “new market” in performance management. Anaplan brought on Frederic Laluyaux as CEO in 2012. The company attracted new funding, doubled its headcount, opened new offices worldwide, and added some notable customers. Laluyaux left the company in April 2016.

In 2012 alone, Anaplan grew its customer base by 500% and revenues by 800%. Customers includ e HP, McAfee, Pandora, Diageo, Kimberly-Clark EE, and Aviva.

In February 2013 Anaplan acquired its reseller Vue Analytics in U.K. for an undisclosed amount, with the goal to strengthen its market position in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

In November 2014 the company launched the Anaplan App Hub, “a community for all Anaplanners to build, share, and deploy planning apps,” with dozens of planning apps across 10 industries. For its fiscal year ending January 31, 2015, the company reported that bookings grew 230%, representing 2.1 times more bookings than the previous two years combined, and 91% growth in customers.

Anaplan scaled up its cloud platform and launched a “slick new user interface” in 2015. The company updated its App Hub, added platform enhancements, and improved tools for app-builders in 2016.

In January 2017 Anaplan appointed Frank A. Calderoni to be CEO. Calderoni was previously executive vice president and CFO of Red Hat, Inc., and had held leadership positions at Cisco Systems and SanDisk.