At the recent SuiteCloud conference (see disclosure) I met with AdaptivePlanning and had a look at their application. AdaptivePlanning was founded in 2003 by a CFO who had previously been involved with many large businesses. Having built a number of highly complex budgeting tools in spreadsheets in the past, and having used heavyweight tools like Hyperion and Cognos – he decided there had to be a better way to fulfill the budget function. AdaptivePlanning was founded in 2003 and shipped product in 2004. They’re pitching themselves as the first true SaaS budgeting, forecasting and reporting too – positioning firmly within the mid market – between excel for smaller organizations and the large offerings from Oracle, SAP and IBM at the larger end. They now have 700 customers spread across a number of industries – from software to manufacturing, from healthcare to non-profit. Their customers range from pre-revenue to multi billion dollar companies. NetSuite was an early customer of AdaptivePlanning and this relationship made both parties look at the core budgeting functionality within NetSuite – AdaptivePlanning decided to do a full integration that would allow actual financial figures from NetSuite to be fed directly into the AdaptivePlanning budgeting tool to run plans and forecasts. AdaptivePlanning claims it only requires five minutes to set up their tool with a NetSuite integration. I had a quick look through AdaptivePlanning and it does indeed seem to do what it promises – AdaptivePlanning starts at $600 per user per year and, being a SaaS product – this is the total cost of ownership. They boast a 12 day average deployment time and run to a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Setup when used with NetSuite is a simple four step process I did find it interesting that a financial management tool as robust as NetSuite doesn’t ship with its own budgeting toolkit – instead it seems NetSuite would rather give customers the flexibility to mix and match third party tools for this feature set.