Anaplan Upgrades In-Memory Business Planning SaaS Application

IT Spending Expected to Rise in 2014

One of the more interesting aspects of any software-as-a-service (SaaS) application is that sometimes it allows organizations to cut directly to the chase. Case in point is Anaplan, a provider of a business planning and modeling application that runs in memory.

Rather than waiting for IT organizations to provide similar capabilities on an in-memory computing platform tomorrow, Anaplan CEO Fred Laluyaux says that it’s more efficient to rely on providers of SaaS applications that today can provide the benefits of next-generation in-memory computing to end users via a cloud application.

Today, Anaplan released the Winter 2014 upgrade to its namesake service, which adds a revamped user interface that makes it easier to navigate across different models, enhanced integration with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and additional charting capabilities.

Laluyaux says in-memory computing applications are required now more than ever because the whole notion of latency in business is going away. Business executives want to be able to model scenarios that allow them to make decisions in the moment versus waiting on a business intelligence application that is limited by the processing capabilities of a legacy data warehouse platform.

There’s obviously a lot of focus these days on the subject of IT agility, which usually gets translated into relying on one cloud service or another to deliver one capability or another faster. But as significant as that may be to IT people, it’s only a means toward making the business as a whole more agile. In that context, most businesses would rather not wait a few more years before being able to take advantage of in-memory computing capabilities that enable them to make critical business decisions in near or real time.