Today marks the one-year anniversary since Adaptive Insights joined Workday. Tom Bogan reflects on what we've accomplished together, including customer adoption and momentum, innovation with machine learning, and advancing on the path to the Power of One.
What an amazing year it has been for planning. As each day passes, it is increasingly clear that planning is critical for digital transformation in organizations of all sizes. Everywhere we look—in all industries and geographies—we see evidence of how modern planning is helping businesses become more agile, manage their business better, and make smarter decisions sooner. It’s helping them win.
It’s been a pretty amazing time for us as well. One year ago, Adaptive Insights became part of Workday—a move that accelerated our mission to help companies transform business planning in the cloud. By every measure, this first year with Workday shows we’ve delivered mightily on that mission.
Back then we talked a lot about how uniquely aligned our two cultures were. If you come together with a common set of beliefs and a unified mission, then everyone shares the same focus on the business and you simply accomplish more. That was our experience when we came together with Workday, and it’s made all the difference. This great fit has given us an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate our strategy as we define the future of business planning. In turn, we’re helping to elevate the critical strategic role of planning throughout entire industries, from financial services, software, healthcare, and education to government, retail, and hospitality.
We can see confirmation of this industry momentum across all the dimensions of our business.
Customer adoption. In the past 12 months, we added more than 800 customers. These organizations represent the broadest array of business types and sizes, and span all planning domains. We’re racing toward the 5,000 customer mark, even as our customer mix grows more diverse. Our record attendance at Adaptive Live drove home the incredible engagement we’re seeing from this inspiring community of finance and planning professionals.
Customer momentum and large enterprise adoption. Modern, cloud-based planning among large enterprises and the Fortune 500 is now more established than ever. Industry leaders like Airbus, Bucknell University, Denny’s, and H&R Block are turning to the Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud to help them remain agile and competitive in the face of incessant and accelerating change. We expect enterprise adoption to only grow as we work together with Workday on helping more global organizations put planning first.
Driving innovation with machine learning. Our development team laid the technological groundwork for this success by building a scalable, intelligent, and elastic foundation for true enterprise readiness. And by capitalizing on Workday’s investments in analytics and machine learning, we’ve been able to differentiate our offerings in ways that would have been impossible as an independent company. Now customers can more efficiently and reliably “plan to execute” because all their data is available to our advanced machine learning platform, delivering insights and predictions that improve over time as more data enters the picture. This has allowed us to help organizations like the Seattle Sounders soccer team quickly and predictably assess complex variables, so they can drive more revenue and confidently make critical business decisions. Meanwhile, by collaborating with Workday and informed by an expert advisory board, we are building a compelling and unique offering for workforce planning that the market loves. All of these advances are elevating the role of planning in modern organizations.
Advancing on the path to the Power of One—while remaining open. We achieved the first phase of our integration with the Workday platform, and we continue to integrate with Workday further under our shared commitment to the Power of One. At the same time, we’re tightening our integration with third-party platforms, so we remain the best-in-class business planning solution for every customer, whether they use other Workday solutions or not.
A year ago, we knew becoming a Workday company made sense on paper. We knew the numbers added up, that the business opportunity was vast. And we were extraordinarily lucky to join forces with a company whose culture so closely mirrored ours.
The past 12 months, however, have shown us that the aim of all this—to help more organizations see that planning should be the cornerstone of their digital transformation—was an absolute bullseye to begin with. The market is responding to our vision and our solutions. Most importantly, businesses are awakening to the realization that to win, they must plan.
And as important as this past year has been, just wait. Because we’re just getting started.
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