Alight Planning announced that 2011 was the strongest year in the company’s history. The company nearly doubled its employee base to reflect a focus on industry-specific solutions, partner development, and the growing demand for planning that adds value throughout the year. Alight Planning posted significant revenue growth and introduced The Planning Maturity Curve, a framework for measuring the ROI of financial planning activities.
Customer Growth
In 2011, Alight Planning’s revenue grew over 30% compared to 2010. In cases where objectives included Agile Planning™ and rolling forecasts in addition to streamlining the budgeting process, the company’s win rate was nearly 80%, helping Alight Planning increase its customer base to over 250 organizations. Companies from virtually all industries selected Alight Planning and reported especially high ROI in cases where driver-based planning and what-if analysis were critical requirements. Notable new customers included PerkinElmer, Transgenomic, Health Net Federal Services, Larkin Hospital, Bumrungrad Hospital, Northeastern University, University of the Pacific, The New School, Sundance Resources Limited, Lynas Corporation, Polaris Metals, Capriccio Software, Bionostics, YMCA of Simcoe-Muskoka, and AAA Northern California, Nevada and Utah.
Management Team Expansion and Partner Development
The company announced that Jeff Walker, former Oracle CFO and founder of Oracle Applications, joined the Alight Planning board of directors. Building off the most successful year for Alight Planning partners, Aidan Mitchell was promoted to the management team as Vice President, Partner Development. After a series of successes with mining companies, Alight Planning formalized a strategic partnership with Scope Systems, a global leader of ERP to the mining and mining services industries.
“During a workshop with a partner, one of our joint customers reported that the Alight Planning solution added $1M in value by enabling better strategic decision making,” said Mitchell, “These types of value statements reflect the enormous potential for partners looking to expand their offering with a world-class planning solution. Alight Planning is uniquely positioned to help our partners create and develop their financial planning solutions and practices. I am looking forward to expanding the partner programs while ensuring every one of our partners gets everything they need along the marketing, sales, and product support continuum.”
Thought Leadership
After reflecting on why Alight Planning customers consistently report major success, Rand Heer, Chief Architect and CEO, introduced and won the trademark for Agile Planning™, a best practice methodology that maximizes business value of planning activities. Heer was selected to speak on The Planning Maturity Curve and Agile Planning at venues across the globe including New York, Boston, Washington DC, San Diego, London, and Amsterdam.
Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 250 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pennsylvania State University, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.