Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that it has joined Oracle’s partnership program at the Gold level. As the leader and industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions, Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO was delighted to be selected as an Oracle Gold Partner. Rand, who founded Pillar, the first enterprise planning software package, reflects on some important history to frame this partnership, “In 1994, Hyperion acquired Pillar. With over 2,500 customers purchasing Hyperion Pillar, the deal proved to be one of the great cash cows of the decade. Ironically, though in 2007, Oracle acquired Hyperion and finally killed Pillar which was replaced with Hyperion Planning. Some Pillar users did not make the move to Hyperion Planning including Apple Computer which is still using Pillar at the time of our partnership because Pillar had some beautiful functionality especially around unit rate amounts.” [Read more…]
Archives for November 2011
Alight Selected to Speak on Planning Maturity Curve at ASMI and CFO Events in 2012
Alight LLC, developers of Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that Rand Heer, an industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions and Alight CEO, will keynote multiple rolling forecast trainings and workshops detailing how companies can quadruple the ROI of financial planning and analysis.
“I am pleased by the positive reception of the Planning Maturity Curve that we introduced earlier in 2011. The market is seeing a massive shift from software solutions designed only to streamline the annual budget and save time with automated reports to a sharp focus on continuous planning and rolling forecasts. The Planning Maturity Curve helps you measure the ROI of planning activities and in almost all cases, we conclude that the action and excitement right now is in agile planning which is characterized by driver-based planning, integrated actuals, and scenario analysis,” Heer said. “The presentation takes the materials I developed last year to the next level and retains its educational focus on the core processes required to make planning a value-add activity. Most importantly, we’re seeing that by leveraging driver-based planning and integrating actuals at the right level of detail into the financial plan, it can be easy to implement agile planning and introduce best practices such as a rolling forecast.” [Read more…]