Anaplan announced last week its plans to buy Fluence Technologies, a provider of financial close, consolidation, and reporting software. This move comes less than two years after Thoma Bravo’s purchase of Anaplan.
With so many of the competitors in the market offering a more complete suite spanning planning, budgeting, consolidation, and reporting, this move makes sense directionally to shore up a prior area of relative weakness for Anaplan. Consolidation and reporting were noted as areas of relative underperformance for Anaplan versus market par in our recent Forrester Wave™ evaluation on this topic.
Buyers who use and like Anaplan will be glad for the new option in the market coming from this expanded offering. Fluence will gain more R&D, marketing and sales, and vendor viability as part of the significantly bigger Anaplan and with the backing of private-equity giant Thoma Bravo. On the plus side, having disclosure management and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) broadens the overall product set beyond what several competitors offer; many from our Wave partner with Workiva or others due to limitations in their own disclosure management and/or ESG capabilities. On the downside, Fluence is a smaller vendor in the market and not as commonly used or asked about by Forrester clients. Due to limited client queries on Fluence, it was omitted from our Landscape and Wave reports.
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