Adaptive Insights empowers organisations to accelerate cloud business analytics adoption

Adaptive Insights has introduced Adaptive Suite 2014.2, featuring Adaptive Integration and OfficeConnect. Adaptive Integration eliminates one of the last myths of the cloud – that it’s difficult to integrate cloud business analytics with existing technology investments. Additionally, the general availability of Adaptive OfficeConnect will enable cloud-connected financial, board and narrative reporting that blends seamlessly with Microsoft Office. These innovations extend Adaptive’s leadership in delivering powerful yet easy-to-use solutions, and allow companies to transform their onerous legacy reporting processes while saving time and reducing risk. Business and finance leaders can make informed, sound and accurate decisions based on a 360-degree view of business performance.

Business analytics is a key priority for finance and IT organisations alike, but both have been challenged in bringing together the ERP, CRM, HCM, spreadsheet, database and proprietary sources to achieve the comprehensive perspective demanded by executives today. Adaptive Integration helps ease this burden by delivering enterprise-class data integration, transformation, data staging and scheduling as a cloud service. The result is end-to-end cloud business analytics – from data integration to rich, visual analytics in Adaptive Discovery.

“Today’s decision makers are demanding an incredibly connected view of their business that reaches across systems and processes. Traditional business analytics systems typically require costly on-premise data warehouses, or worse, risk creating one-off silos of data and individual integration projects,” said Paul Turner, vice president of product marketing, Adaptive Insights. “Adaptive Integration provides organisations with an intuitive yet powerful cloud data integration and preparation platform, one that both data analysts can easily contribute data to, and IT can use sophisticated transformation and merging power to map sources into, finally enabling everyone to work together to achieve an enterprise view, all with the simplicity of the cloud.”

Adaptive also announced the general availability of Adaptive OfficeConnect, a powerful and intuitive cloud-connected board, management and financial reporting solution that unifies the Adaptive Suite with Microsoft Office. OfficeConnect can help organisations eliminate the time, cost and risk associated with traditionally manual board, management and financial reporting processes. OfficeConnect enables companies to transform and convert their existing Excel, PowerPoint and Word reporting sheets and documents to be live with just a few clicks and automatically updated with actuals, plans and forecasts from Adaptive Planning and Adaptive Consolidation.

“Adaptive OfficeConnect is a game-changer. Once a tedious data entry process, we can now transform all of our existing Excel reports and connect them to Adaptive, combining the distinctive power of Adaptive and Excel,” said Paulo Castro, manager of accounting, Embraer Defense and Security, Inc.

“Business leaders are regularly challenged to quickly make data-driven decisions with confidence, while ensuring teams across the organisation are completely informed and prepared to respond,” said Rob Hull, founder and chairman of Adaptive Insights. “The powerful combination of data integration and business analytics – all centrally located in the cloud - is a competitive differentiator for any organisation, providing them with a potent combination of visibility and agility.”

Adaptive Suite 2014.2 key features include:
· A unified integration platform for data analysts and IT. For data analysts, with just a few clicks it’s simple to import spreadsheets or refresh sources in a complete click-not-code experience. IT can create enterprise-class data integrations with the ability to configure data sources and define complex data transformations and preparation, as well as automate regularly scheduled data loads.
· Real data integration. No “blending” required. Adaptive Integration enables organisations to source and merge multiple data sources into the staging area, store snapshots of history, manage incremental or full data sets, store summary or detail data and cleanse and prepare data for analytics. It’s the perfect data foundation to integrate multiple sources, manage detailed history and ensure everyone is operating from a single version of the truth.
· Cloud-connected reporting. Adaptive OfficeConnect delivers automated presentation-quality reporting in board books, executive presentations and narrative reports. Adaptive OfficeConnect enables organisations to jumpstart report design by leveraging their existing Excel report library and convert them to cloud-connected reports in minutes while saving time running and refreshing reports with a single click, all while retaining Office controls including conditional formatting, calculations and charts.
· Even more “Excel-like” and more intuitive sheets. Already recognised as the easiest-to-use CPM solution, this release brings a new user experience to Adaptive Planning and Consolidation sheets. Developed based on years of feedback from thousands of organisations, sheets now include a more “Excel-like” look, feel and calculations, together with a user experience optimised for click or touch across form factors from smartphone, to tablet, to desktop.
· Integration with corporate Single Sign-On (SSO) standards. Beyond data integration, Adaptive’s new Authentication module integrates with corporate SSO standards to provide single sign-on to the Adaptive Suite. Eliminating the need for users to re-enter a login and passwords, Adaptive integrates with leading identity management solutions like Okta and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services.