Adaptive Planning is the leader in on-demand budgeting, forecasting, and reporting solutions. We make it easy for companies worldwide to improve financial agility, strengthen collaboration, and drive better-informed and more strategic business decisions. Best of all, unlike traditional enterprise software alternatives, our innovative solution is affordable, deploys in just days, and does not require new hardware, software, or IT support. Powerful planning and reporting have never been easier.
+ Software as a service advantage
On-Demand / Software as a Service Advantages
Software as a Service (SaaS) is the most powerful and exciting development in enterprise software in over a decade. Why is that? SaaS solutions solve many of the problems that have long plagued traditional enterprise software offerings, such as large upfront license fees, long implementations, complicated upgrades, and poor support. Fundamentally, the SaaS model simply provides better value to customers.
Adaptive Planning's software as a service solutions can be accessed on-demand or deployed on-premises, in a company's datacenter, in order to meet a wide range of customer needs. In both cases, Adaptive Planning presents significant advantages over traditional enterprise BI and BPM solutions, including:
- Lower Costs Adaptive Planning's annual subscriptions are based on per-seat pricing, with discounts for multiple seats and multi-year contracts. The total cost of software and services is typically a fraction of the cost of enterprise software alternatives.
- Faster Deployments Adaptive Planning implementation projects average less than 10 days of consulting time, compared with 6 months or more for enterprise alternatives.
- Greater Ease of Use From the beginning, Adaptive Planning has been designed for business users, not technical IT users. With intuitive, drag-and-drop modeling and reporting, power users require only four hours of training and business users need less than 30 minutes.
- More Transparency Unlike traditional software companies, Adaptive Planning provides complete transparency around its operations, making pricing, uptime information, and customer support interactions available online-and even giving access to the underlying source code.
- Lower Risk The SaaS approach significantly reduces risk. “Test drive” programs allow companies to evaluate whether the software fits their specific needs, and subscriptions can be cancelled at any time if a company is not receiving value. Enterprise alternatives require large upfront capital outlays without a real understanding of the software.
- Higher Customer Satisfaction SaaS is truly a “service” business model, which means that Adaptive Planning is keenly focused on providing exceptional value to attract and retain satisfied customers. There is a profound difference in the relationship compared to what's typical with enterprise software companies, and our customers agree-Adaptive Planning has received the highest customer satisfaction marks among all leading BPM vendors in independent industry surveys.
Adaptive Planning's SaaS approach is ideally suited for any company that has limited personnel, time, or capital resources
| Traditional Enterprise BI / BPM Software | Adaptive Planning SaaS Solution |
| Large upfront license fees – high risk | Low annual subscription fees – minimal risk |
| Long, costly implementations – 6 months | Rapid, affordable implementations – 10 days |
| Must buy software before you can use it | 30-day trials and free software available |
| New releases once per year | New releases 3 times per year |
| New features require an IT upgrade | New features delivered automatically |
| New hardware and software required | No new hardware or software required |
| Requires IT support and maintenance | No IT support or maintenance required |
| Security dependent upon in-house | IT World-class, 3rd-party security |
| Poor customer satisfaction | Superior customer satisfaction |
+ Security
Adaptive Planning partners with Savvis, a leading IT infrastructure services provider, to deliver an advanced on-demand security infrastructure that ensures customer data is never compromised.
World-Class Hosting Partner
Adaptive Planning has partnered with Savvis (www.savvis.net), an award winning and leading provider of IT Infrastructure services. Adaptive Planning manages the computer hardware, backups, releases, upgrades and database management, and Savvis provides the environment, secure cages, redundant power lines and high bandwidth solution access through the internet.
Savvis is an $800 million company with hosting locations across 46 countries. Adaptive Planning leverages their experience, best practices and support services to ensure the optimum experience for our customers. A recognized industry leader in the provision of hosting services (leading in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant”), Savvis has over 6,000 other customers including Reuters, London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, the U.S. Federal Government, Google, Yahoo!, and Sony. Savvis has been SAS70 certified since 2005 and undergoes annual re-audits to ensure ongoing compliance. In addition to ongoing SAS70 compliance, Savvis completed their ISO27001 certification in 2007.
Data Security
Adaptive Planning and Savvis collaborate on all aspects of security. Both companies devote significant resources to the ongoing evaluation of emerging threats, and continuously deploy new technologies to ensure the most secure, scalable and private system for our customers. There are four primary considerations for data security:
- Security of the data as it is transmitted across the web from the hosting site to the customer.
- Preventing one customer from being able to view another customer’s information and preventing any other third party access.
- Ensuring every authorized user within a company’s user population has access to only the information and capabilities that have been specified by the budget manager, or the application administrator of the company.
- Physical security of the server location.
Secure Transmission of Customer Data
Adaptive Planning uses the strongest encryption products to protect customer data and communications, including 128-bit encryption over HTTPS with 1024-bit public keys. The web interface to the Adaptive Planning solution incorporates the Managed Desktop Service (MDS)/Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocols.
The purpose of the protocols is to provide security for the data by encrypting it as it is transmitted between the Adaptive Planning Application Server and the browser hosted on users’ workstations. During use, the lock icon in the browser indicates that data is fully shielded from access while in transit.
SSL is the World Wide Web standard for protecting critical data and is used by banks, brokerages and others to protect their clients’ data. It is almost certainly used for our customers’ other communications security.
Prevention of Access of Customer Data by Another Customer or Third Party
Adaptive Planning engineers have developed the system such that it is not possible for one customer to see the data that belongs to another customer. The data that is stored within the Adaptive Planning application is highly proprietary and confidential information for each of our customers. As such, Adaptive Planning treats this information with great care and respect and provides the most secure environment possible by incorporating the following technologies and techniques.
- Perimeter Security - Adaptive Planning protects both the production and corporate network perimeter with Cisco advanced firewall technology and an intrusion detective device which are continuously monitored and managed by our in-house technical staff.
- Application Security and Database Tables - Adaptive Planning is designed to make it impossible for one customer to access another customer’s data. Adaptive Planning is a true multi-tenant system with one instance of the application and one instance of the database. However, unlike many other on-demand applications we do not co-mingle customer data. Therefore, each customer’s Adaptive Planning application utilizes a unique and separate set of tables within the database. It is not possible for one customer’s data to be accessed by anyone other than that customer’s authorized users. Even Adaptive Planning support staff cannot view your data without receiving explicit permission (via an ID login).
- Database Security - Adaptive Planning secures its production database by restricting the operating system and database connection levels, permitting a minimal number of access points (Port 443 – avoiding FTP, Telnet, external site access, etc.; Port 80 – sending help content to the browser) and by not sharing a master password database.
User Security
User ID and Password
Users access Adaptive Planning only with a valid username and password combination, which is encrypted via SSL for Internet transmission. An encrypted session ID cookie is used to uniquely identify each user and after 60 minutes of inactivity, the session will time out and a new session must be established in order to access data. At the time of implementation, each user is assigned a system wide unique User ID and password by the administrator. Upon login, each user may then change his/her password. The password is then encrypted using MD5 Hash and stored in the database. This ID is used to map each user to their specific company data.
User Access Control
Adaptive Planning gives the system administrator the ability to grant permission to users to access, view and interact with templates and reports. Each template can secured further at the “row” level (e.g. fields made “view only” or “hidden”). Each report will only render data relevant to the user’s security rights. Only authorized administrators have access to all of the information in the system, and the full range of administrative functions.
Adaptive Planning has incorporated the concept of role based access control (RBAC) which allows the customer administrator to grant permissions to roles and assign roles to users. The list of permissions includes: add users, edit budgets, view plans, view templates, access reports, etc.
Each user is assigned one or more roles. Only those capabilities that have been granted to the specific roles are made available to the users. Users that have not been assigned specific roles are not aware that the other capabilities even exist in the system.
Physical Security
The Savvis Data Center is physically secure to avoid tampering and unauthorized access
+ Performance
Uptime
Adaptive Planning is committed to delivering world-class customer service. This includes not only delivering top-notch uptime, but also publicizing our actual performance.
Adaptive Planning measures uptime as a percentage of time the hosted service is available excluding scheduled maintenance.
Backup and Recovery Services
To ensure ongoing uptime, Adaptive Planning and our hosting provider, Savvis, provide continuous and automated back-ups and full disaster recovery services. Data on the servers is stored on RAID drives to provide for real-time data protection. Hot backup servers are maintained on site to facilitate failover in the event of a hardware failure.
Data on the servers is backed up daily in several ways. First, data is backed up to a separate server both in aggregate and on a company specific basis. This allows for both a complete database restore as well as selective restoration of data, such as restoration of just selected client company data. By backing up to local servers, we are able to quickly restore data in the event of a hardware failure or when a client needs to roll-back to a prior version of data for some reason. Additionally, offsite storage occurs via tape backup on a daily basis. Offsite stored backup is used primary for disaster recovery purposes.
Note: We retain backup files for 14 to 90 days depending on the type of backup performed.
Speed of Response
Adaptive Planning monitors and measures server response times of our hosted service using a third-party tool, and also runs continuous automated 24- and 48-hour performance tests.
We also actively encourage clients to contact us if they are experiencing any kind of abnormal delay in response time. All such events are immediately and thoroughly investigated and diagnosed back to the customer. If a performance issue is identified we will adjust our development roadmap to incorporate any potential improvement area.
System Scalability
Adaptive Planning is designed to be scalable. As we continue to rapidly grow our customer and user base, we are able to add additional application servers, enabling the management of increased volumes of activity while maintaining optimum response times.
+ Deployment
On-Premise Software as a Service Model
At Adaptive Planning, we believe that clients should have flexibility in choosing how they deploy and access their software. As a result, we make all editions of Adaptive Planning available both on-demand and on-premise. What’s more, we strive to make the on-demand and on-premise versions completely equivalent from a customer perspective. For example, end-user functionality, pricing, and support are all identical for both on-demand and on-premise offerings.
Adaptive Planning clients who deploy on-premise obtain the same benefits as on-demand customers:
- Low annual subscription fees
- Rapid implementations – only 2 – 6 weeks
- Ongoing application support
- Access to new software releases
On-Premise Requirements:
Client
The client is the desktop machine from which an individual user runs their browser. It connects to the server machine which is running the Adaptive Planning software.
Minimum Hardware Requirements:
- Processor: Intel (x86), 1GHz
- Memory: 512MB
Software Requirements:
- Windows operating system
- Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater
Server
The server is the machine on which the Adaptive Planning software is installed.
Minimum Hardware Requirements:
- Processor: Intel (x86), 2GHz
- Memory: 2GB
- Disk space: 4GB
Operating System/Database – Windows XP:
- Windows XP Professional: Service Pack 2 or higher
- Windows 2003
- Oracle (Express, Standard, or Enterprise) 10gR2**
Operating System/Database – Linux:
- Novell SuSE Linux: 9.3 or later ***
- Oracle (Express, Standard, or Enterprise) 10gR2**
Notes:
* Larger on-premise customers often use multiple servers — one for the application and one for the database. They also typically use a full Oracle 10g license for the database.
** If using Oracle Express, data must be kept within the 4GB limit imposed by Oracle Express Edition.
*** Other Linux systems (with Kernel of 2.6.11 or higher) may also work; however, they are not officially supported by Adaptive Planning.
In order to meet the diverse needs of clients, all editions of Adaptive Planning are available both on-demand and on-premise.
