Officials at the Mountain View, California-based company said Adaptive Planning Express Edition is built entirely on community developed open source code, offering modules for budgeting, planning, reporting and analysis. The software is freely downloadable from the sourceforge.net site.
It includes a spreadsheet-like user interface, standard tools for expense and revenue planning, a specialized personnel planning spreadsheet, formula-based modeling, and hierarchical management and user access rights.
With this release, we’re positioned to capitalize on the two most powerful forces reshaping enterprise applications – software-as-a-service and open source, said William Soward, CEO of Adaptive Planning.
He said a unique aspect of the software is its community-driven approach that taps into a broad open source community that provides an informal forum for support and sharing ideas around financial modeling and budgeting best practices.
Users benefit by gaining insights into how their key performance metrics compare with industry averages, Soward said.
He said the open source code foundation also lets users easily customize applications and fosters partners and community development of new templates and adapters that can be shared across users.
The company said the open source code is supported by a distributed and open source community through forums.
The software can be downloaded and installed for individual use, as well as configured to provide web-based support for departments or the entire enterprise.
Adaptive Planning also develops a commercially licensed Corporate and Enterprise Editions of the software that provide broader feature sets for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis.
These Corporate and Express editions also include source code access, are also available under commercial licenses for an affordable annual subscription fee.
The release continues the momentum of open source BI products driven by firms like JasperSoft, Pentaho and Greeplum that give users an option of affordable, yet fully functional, BI capabilities that are comparable to some commercially licensed BI tools.
