Anaplan launches App Hub

Anaplan has announced the launch of the Anaplan App Hub, a community for all Anaplanners to build, share, and deploy planning apps. The first-ever planning app community brings together planning experts from a wide range of business domains, industries, and organizations including HP, Kimberly-Clark, Pandora, Deloitte, and Workforce Insight, and many others.

The App Hub builds on Anaplan’s flexible, user-friendly platform, which has rapidly become the leading alternative to traditional legacy planning software and ad hoc spreadsheet projects. Hundreds of world-class organizations are using Anaplan to create data-driven plans connected across departments.

“The App Hub is the first and only application community dedicated to business planning. It enables companies to deploy apps in minutes that can be tailored to solve their specific business challenges,” said Fred Laluyaux, Anaplan CEO. “Central to the functionality of the App Hub is the ability for Anaplanners to share the applications they’ve built and take advantage of particular expertise and best practices delivered by other planning experts. This sharing of intellectual property is a radical shift in the way enterprise planning software is developed, enriched, and consumed.”

The App Hub launches with dozens of planning apps across 10 industries including Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting, Sales Forecasting, Trade and Promotion Planning, Territory and Quota Planning, Financial Consolidation, Incentive Compensation Planning, Strategic Financial Planning, Insurance Premium Planning, and Human Asset and Labor Optimization (HALO) amongst others.

App Hub applications are all built on the highly flexible Anaplan platform. Based on a set of business dimensions and rules, calculations, and customizable dashboards, the apps are easy to understand and no programming is required to tailor them. Anaplanners can quickly discover applications built for their industry and customize them to solve their company’s complex planning challenges. They can also easily build their own planning applications on the platform and share them with others.

“We have created 20 applications in the time we’ve been using Anaplan. Now that we’re in the cloud, our users are really in control, building sophisticated applications that are integrated with other plans and outside data sources,” said Anaplan customer Jeff Brobst, VP, FP&A, McAfee. “What we’ve learned as part of the Anaplan community is that the problems are almost the same across enterprises. Once someone cracks the code on a problem, it’s really great to be able to pass that on. With the App Hub, you’re not only getting application contributions from customers but really tightly written applications from vertical industry experts that you can just plug right in.”

“The Anaplan App Hub gives us a powerful and scalable way to package our deep industry and business insights for our clients,” said Sam Kapreilian, chief technology officer, Deloitte Tax LLP. “Through the App Hub, tax departments can access resources to help them better analyze the tax implications of major business decisions including talent mobility, transfer pricing, and M&A transactions.”

“We are now able to deliver our workforce planning best practices learned from hundreds of engagements in the form of streamlined applications,” said Mike Emsley, GM and EVP at Workforce Insight. “Our apps on the Anaplan App Hub will enable our clients to execute plans that ensure the right talent is in the right place at the right time.”