Anaplan

Anaplan is a cloud-based business modeling and planning platform for sales, operations and finance. The company is a recent entrant to the business planning market, which for decades has been dominated by the “big four” legacy vendors: IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft.[1] Anaplan CTO Michael Gould developed Anaplan as a response to these legacy systems. At the core of his technology is a single hub where the business user, and not IT, can build, deploy, maintain, and share models.

Anaplan is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in England, France,[2] Sweden,[3] Benelux,[4] Australia, [5] Russia, [6] Malaysia, [7] and Singapore.

HistoryAnaplan was founded in 2006 by Guy Haddleton and Michael Gould. Gould noted, “Outdated technologies and disconnected legacy applications have made dynamic interaction across teams nearly impossible, forcing users into static models that can’t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.[9] 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.[10]

By year’s end, Anaplan had gained so much market traction that it was being hailed as a creator of the “new market” in performance management.[11] Anaplan brought on Frederic Laluyaux as CEO in 2012.[12] Under his leadership, the company has attracted new funding, doubled its headcount, opened new offices worldwide, and added some notable household names as customers.[13]

In 2012 alone, Anaplan grew its customer base by 500% and revenues by 800%.[14] Customers include HP,[15] McAfee, Pandora, Diageo,[16] Kimberly-Clark EE,[17] and Aviva.[18]

Anaplan closed its C-Round funding in March 2013 with a $33M investment from Meritech, Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, Salesforce.com, and additional private investors.[19]

Anaplan announced May 13, 2014 at its Hub 2014 conference in San Francisco that it has completed a Series D round of $100 million in financing, bringing total investment in the company to $150 million.[20]

A further round of funding was announced in January 2016, amounting to $90 million, along with confirmation of Anaplan’s status as a tech ‘unicorn’, with a valuation of over $1 billion.

With more than 20 years as a leader in the EPM sector, Fred has built his career focusing on providing solutions that help organizations worldwide achieve financial and business excellence.

Prior to Anaplan, Fred was the SVP and GM for SAP Applications for EPM, GRC, and Finance Line of Business.

Fred started his career in the area of CPM, leading ALG‘s global operations until acquired by Business Objects.