Adaptive Planning Express Edition 3.0, which is available as a free download from the open source software development website SourceForge, comes with a host of enhancements around its budgeting and forecasting modules that improve performance and ease of use.
As the branding suggests, ease of deployment and simplicity of use rather than richness and depth of functionality are Express Edition’s strongest selling points. Adaptive Planning’s performance management offering comes with one-click download and installation and uses a simple spreadsheet-like user interface for expense and revenue planning, a specialized personnel planning spreadsheet, formula-based modeling, and hierarchical management and user access rights. That makes the service an attractive offering for small and medium sized businesses looking to take an inexpensive step into performance management.
Mountain View, California-based Adaptive Planning launched itself into the performance management in November 2004, first as an on-demand (ASP) provider. However at this summer’s Linxworld Expo it released full open source versions of its core budgeting, planning, reporting and analysis modules, as a way to further lower the bar for total cost of deploying and running performance management applications.
Adaptive Planning said that Express Edition is now listed among the top 50 of the 135,000 projects hosted on SourceForge. The project has produced over 6,000 downloads from 60 countries since it was set-up.
The company also develops a commercially licensed Corporate and Enterprise Editions of the software that provide broader feature sets for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis.
The release continues the momentum of software-as-as-service and open source business intelligence products driven by firms like Business Objects, LucidEra, Oco, JasperSoft, Pentaho and Greeplum that promise to give users an option of more affordable yet fully functional BI capabilities that are comparable to some commercially licensed BI tools.
