Anaplan completes acquisition of Fluence Technologies to accelerate next-level finance planning transformation

Today’s finance world demands rapid digital transformation, and Anaplan is here to meet that challenge head-on. We have heard from our customers and partners about the added value that can be created by combining our existing planning capabilities with financial consolidation and disclosure management.

This is why we are excited to announce the completion of our acquisition of Fluence Technologies. By seamlessly integrating Fluence’s out-of-the-box consolidation, close, and disclosure management capabilities into our market-leading Connected Planning platform, we will deliver exceptional business value by unifying financial data and plans with operational processes.   

“The combination of these two leading CPM vendors will create a new dynamic in the top-tier of large enterprise focused performance management vendors.” – BPM Partners

What is Fluence Technologies?

Fluence Technologies’ offering is a cloud-based, no-code financial close and consolidation platform for mid-market and large enterprises with rapid provisioning and features including prebuilt advanced consolidations that can be tailored to specific business purposes. Fluence’s primary solutions are:

• Financial consolidation – Quick to roll out and easy for the finance team to operate, with intuitive workflow automation, consolidation models with built-in intercompany eliminations, account reconciliation, cash flow management, and the use of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Power BI for financial and management reporting.
• Disclosure management – Designed for evolving reporting demands, enabling finance teams with complete control (no IT required), with familiar Office authoring and publishing in Word and PowerPoint with document setup in minutes.
• Excel reporting – Insightful, interactive reports on company-wide metrics for any business audience in Excel (i.e., a data-connected Excel add-in for enterprise reporting needs), with more than 30 built-in connectors to report on real-time metrics.

“Buyers who use and like Anaplan will be glad for the new option in the market coming from this expanded offering.” – Forrester

How will Anaplan customers benefit from this integration?

Anaplan is an undisputed leader in finance planning, transforming how FP&A organizations across the globe enable real-time scenario analysis. With the addition of consolidation and disclosure management, Anaplan will better serve our customers’ needs and enable outcomes such as:

• Efficiency, speed, and quality – Traditional planning is yesterday’s paradigm. Today’s model is real-time operational decision-making, and the unification of financial consolidation and Connected Planning on a common platform facilitates agility in dealing with the collapsing decision cycles associated with planning and scenario analysis.
• Simplification and reduced complexity via a unified platform – In future-state integration of consolidation and Connected Planning on a unified platform, with a common and intuitive UX/UI, finance organizations will be able to reduce system and process complexity, lower costs and improve compliance by navigating statutory audits to GAAP, down to the local entity level.
• Enabling key finance workstreams in real time – By connecting consolidated actuals, at local entity level, to forecasts on a unified Connected Planning platform, critical financial workstreams (e.g., local country/region accountability, transfer pricing studies, tax planning, local cash balance management, and FX sensitivities/hedging) are not only enabled but they are accelerated.
• Displacement of legacy on-prem offers – Anaplan’s seamless integration of Fluence into our platform, and our focus on an easy-to-use UX/UI, not only support, but accelerate the enterprise trend of platform consolidation, leading to costs savings, human capital optimization, and better decision-making.
• Time to value and cost savings – Anaplan and Fluence are both contemporary, cloud-native solutions that facilitate quicker time to value, continuous delivery of new features/enhancements, scalability, resiliency, and ever-increasing levels of automation.
  
• Acceleration of digital transformation through automation – Fluence’s adoption of automation (e.g., workflows, financial templates, and models, etc.) will further enable Anaplan’s AI/automation capabilities and roadmap across an expanded set of finance functions, from integrated planning to consolidation. In the process, Anaplan will assist our customers’ efforts to reduce costs and make better data-informed decisions in real time. 

Anaplan’s mission and roadmap are designed to help our customers make better decisions across the enterprise. Our recent Decision Excellence research suggests that highly connected enterprises make better decisions, and better decisions lead to superior financial performance.

The acquisition and integration of Fluence Technologies will provide immediate capabilities and benefits to Anaplan and Fluence customers. The same finance teams that utilize the power of Anaplan to facilitate and manage Connected Planning will now be able to leverage prebuilt advanced consolidations that can be tailored to specific business purposes, in a familiar, user-friendly UX and UI. Customers can recognize a reduction in automation costs, accelerate their time to value, improve compliance posture, and optimize finance capacity for higher-value work.

To learn more about this exciting news, be sure to explore some of the analyst coverage this acquisition has generated:

• BPM Partners: How the Anaplan acquisition of Fluence will change the CPM market (for the better)
• Forrester: Anaplan buys Fluence to round out enterprise performance management suite
• BARC: Anaplan to acquire Fluence Technologies