Published : 6 years ago, on 20/07/2018

New architectural innovations scale next-generation Business Planning Cloud

Adaptive Insights, powering a new generation of business planning, advances its Business Planning Cloud with architectural innovations delivering unprecedented performance and scale.

New patent-pending Elastic Hypercube Technology is the next-generation planning, reporting, and analytics engine that enables the Business Planning Cloud to automatically scale with the dynamic needs of businesses. This sophisticated, proprietary innovation represents a step-function advance in planning system architectures, enabling plans with virtually no limits—unlimited dimensions, dimension values, and numbers of scenarios to be created easily and calculated rapidly.

“Planning system architectures have long had challenges dealing with large and complex models, forcing businesses to compromise on user experience and comprehensive modelling,” said Bhaskar Himatsingka, chief product officer at Adaptive Insights. “We want to deliver a platform that scales from 100-person nonprofits up to enterprises with hundreds of thousands of employees, while giving our customers the ability to model virtually anything for any function. Today, we’ve started delivering that scale and performance and done so without compromising all the features and ease of use our customers expect from us. As important, Elastic Hypercube Technology provides the technology foundation for ongoing innovation.”

A new era for modern planning

Planning systems have always had limitations. Yet, with business data nearly doubling every year and organisations wanting to involve more business users and functions in their planning, the gap between what planning systems offer and what businesses need continues to widen. As a result, a new generation of planning platform is required.

According to Nick Ferrara, corporate controller, Steve Madden, “We’ve seen the value of deploying a single planning platform to business users and functional/business groups across Steven Madden Ltd. and it’s been a game changer. With complex models and users spread across our organization, we need to be able to run and compare multiple scenarios with real-time data. The Business Planning Cloud scales to keep pace with our business, and the continuous planning and reporting processes help us drive faster decision making across our organisation.”

“The pace of change in business is accelerating, and at the same time we’re seeing increasingly sophisticated planning requirements,” said Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Organisations want to do what-if analysis across multiple business scenarios and get in-depth insight into outcomes and dependencies across business functions. There’s a clear need for a platform that can support rapid planning even as model complexity mounts and the numbers of dimensions, versions, and users multiply.”

Elastic Hypercube Technology delivers intelligent, scalable performance

Elastic Hypercube Technology brings new intelligence and scalability to the Business Planning Cloud with critical, patent-pending capabilities:

Optimised calculations. With the intelligence to understand fine-grained model dependencies, Elastic Hypercube Technology speeds results for even the largest and most complex models by recalculating only the dependent changes, unlike existing solutions that recalculate most or all of the whole model again.

Dynamic caching. Memory and calculation cycles are only used when needed because of an intelligent understanding of the relevance of the data to the user/model and potential time needed for (re)calculations.

Parallel computation. Elastic Hypercube Technology is scalable and has the intelligence to elastically add compute power and memory when needed to calculate model elements in parallel.

Elastic Hypercube Technology delivers this increased scale and performance while maintaining flexibility.  Users can still model what they want and analyse freely, building upon the Business Planning Cloud’s unique ability to model (and view) multi-dimensional data in tabular or cube format. Reporting and analysis don’t require cumbersome setup or additional reporting cubes, regardless of complexity.