Vision from the Top 2013: John Herr, Adaptive Planning

What are your top 5 priorities for 2013? How do you plan to achieve those goals?

As the CEO of Adaptive Planning, a company that has achieved phenomenal growth and customer momentum in business analytics in the cloud, I am looking to drive three key fundamentals throughout the organization this year: focus, execution, and acceleration.  We’re coming off a year that saw 90+ percent growth in new software revenues, an 85 percent increase in headcount, and nearly 500 new customers.  We are now asking ourselves, how do we sustain and even accelerate that growth?  How do we maintain focus despite a rapidly expanding product portfolio, global sales force and partner network?  And how do we keep our eye on the ball to continue to execute on delivering a superior product and serve our customers to maintain a high level of passion, retention, and loyalty?

At our recent 2013 global sales kickoff and partner forum, I laid out a set of five priorities that will help us achieve the necessary focus, execution, and acceleration this year.

1. Achieve a balance of high velocity, efficiency, and satisfaction

Last year, we closed a substantial $22 million round of additional funding, led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).  This funding was to help accelerate growth opportunities and expand our product portfolio.  The reality is that we have achieved much of this growth and product depth with an efficient model of low levels of capital spending and better than expected sales that leaves us in a very positive financial position going forward.  But we are also mindful to maintain the kind of customer support, service, and robust product that got us to this position in the first place.  We have an incredibly strong base of loyal and evangelical customers – over 1,500 customers and 45,000 users in 80 countries and around the world.  We also have over 400 global partners that are some of our biggest fans and committed to superlative customer satisfaction and retention.  Our partners include NetSuite, who has chosen to include our application within their offerings as a best in class planning solution.

2. Embrace strong enterprise market forces:  land & expand strategy

Our biggest growth over the last year has been in the larger enterprises, which accounted for 25 percent of our growth in 2012.  In fact, customers with revenues over $500M represent the fastest growing segment we have.  We see ourselves at the center of a perfect storm of market trends and opportunities with strong tail winds at our back.  The biggest of these trends is the market shift to the cloud. We're beyond the tipping point; the cloud is going mainstream, and that's helping us in a very big way.  There's also a trend of data proliferation and big data.  The third I'd highlight is the focus on cost savings and the benefits of speed to value. When we say, “No IT required,” those are magic words to our CFO and line of business customers.  Also, social enterprise and workplace collaboration is what budgeting, forecasting, planning are all about.  Mobile computing and remote computing is another driver along with the consumerization of business software.  All this is fueling our growth, particularly in the enterprise.

We’re finding that the scalability, power and simplicity of our cloud offering is allowing us to land within business units or departments of larger organizations and expand as the enterprise sees the value of the solution.  Knowledge Universe is a good example of this.  What started as a couple dozen seats at the company’s headquarters in Singapore has expanded into thousands of seats and 13 instances around the world for the multi-billion dollar global leader in education centers.  Now they are using our solution to present results and information to their board. In addition, more enterprise customers are upgrading from on-premise legacy systems like Hyperion and SAP to Adaptive Planning because they can get the functionality they need for less than the maintenance contracts on these older solutions, and they no longer require IT support.

3. Expand the portfolio of integrated solutions:  planning, consolidations, and intelligence

Part of our acceleration strategy involves the expansion of our cloud-based product portfolio to enable finance and business to look at the past, see the present, and intelligently plan for the future. We have added visual discovery, which came through the myDIALS acquisition and incorporates stunning dashboards, drill downs, and visualizations of data.  We're also launching financial consolidations, which takes our current capabilities up to a whole new level with a new integrated consolidations module.

4. Go global:  more customers & partners worldwide

A big part of our expansion going forward is to capitalize on global opportunities. In 2012, our international business doubled – largely before we had any physical international presence at all!   We already have customers and partners in 80 countries, due in large part to partner success abroad.  We are expanding our internal staff in the UK and Australia this year to pursue growth in those regions.  We also are investing more resource in the channel, and have just added Carolee Gearhart, a proven leader in channel strategy and success from SAP and PeopleSoft, to our exec staff.   We are seeing very impressive win rates through our partners internationally, and feedback from them is there is substantive untapped opportunity for us together.

5. Growing organization:  +80 employees, focus & execution critical

Finally, we will continue to expand our workforce to address the needs of growing and broadening markets.  We expect high levels of additional hiring again this year, particularly in engineering, sales, and marketing, to continue on the path of acceleration that we started last year.  We’re laser focused on maintaining the customer-centric focus that has created a user base that loves the solution and service we deliver.  With the fundamentals of cloud-based product excellence, strong market drivers, and a highly productive staff and sales force to service a growing customer base, we’re geared up to keep the momentum going.

This interview was published in SIIA's Vision from the Top, a Software Division publication released at All About the Cloud 2013.