Alight LLC, maker of Alight Planning financial planning and analysis software, today announced that BPM Partners, the leading independent authority on business performance management (BPM) solutions, has named Alight as its “Best New Vendor of 2008” in its annual “Beyond the Hype 2008” Webcast. In awarding the honor, BPM Partners cited the unique driverbased planning architecture of Alight Planning, as well as the product’s deep-seated modeling capabilities.

An Excel replacement, Alight Planning has already gained a solid user base for its driver-based planning approach which employs a unit-rate-amount architecture and object-based linking for line items which are the building blocks for financial plans. The result is better insight into the underlying activity drivers of a business, giving planners a better handle on forward-looking plans and backward-looking analysis of actuals.

“Alight Planning is very focused on what its name implies—budgeting and planning,” said Craig Schiff, CEO of BPM Partners, as part of the company’s annual Beyond the Hype 2008: Unbiased Vendor Review presentation. Schiff also noted that Alight Planning has “a very deep set of functionality that enables collaborative budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting, targeted at midsized and larger companies. In addition, Alight Planning automates sensitivity analysis and goal seek—both essential operations for analyzing complex financial data.”

BPM Partners’ annual “Beyond the Hype” report is the product of a yearly survey of BPM customers, vendors and trends conducted by the firm. Results were presented via a Webcast cosponsored by Business Finance magazine on January 15, 2008.

“BPM Partners is well-known by Business Performance Software users as well as throughout the BPM software industry. Its opinions carry tremendous weight, which makes this honor hugely gratifying,” said Rand Heer, president of Alight LLC. “The strong reception we’ve received to Alight Planning from customers, as well as from industry experts like BPM Partners, gives us terrific momentum as we move into 2008.”

In addition to its positive view of Alight Planning’s strategic approach, as well as the extensive experience of individuals behind the product’s creation, BPM Partners lauded the software’s sophisticated approach to budgeting.

“….it isn’t often you see someone new jump into the budgeting software category, which requires extensive domain expertise,” Schiff said. “Usually we see new vendors focusing on dashboards, databases, visualization and the like, but to focus on something as deep as budgeting and forecasting is fairly rare. It is interesting to note that modeling is built throughout the entire product. It’s not an afterthought; it’s the whole structure of the product.”