Company has completed over 1,500 integrations across more than 100 different systems for customers

Adaptive Insights, the only pure-play cloud vendor to be named a leader in strategic corporate performance management (CPM), reported a growing demand for integration between the company’s cloud-based Adaptive Suite and other financial and non-financial systems. The increase is tied to the rising demand for both financial (sales, expenses) and non-financial (customer renewals, employee satisfaction) data that finance teams must combine to get a clear and holistic view of the health of the business. As important, companies of all sizes are increasing the frequency with which they access data, in large part due to the cloud, which creates an expectation for accurate, consistent data across the business. The company reported that cloud-based systems top the list for integration requests, a significant shift from five years ago.

“Companies have realised that data from across the organisation is increasingly available in the cloud,” said Bas Brukx, CFO at Clarabridge, a leading provider of customer experience management (CEM) software. “But until that data is integrated, the true value of the data can’t be realised. Today, we have the Adaptive Suite integrated with NetSuite and Salesforce, so that we can easily combine sales and financial data within the same system, without having to go to a data warehouse to retrieve data and run our analysis. This has changed the value that our finance team delivers to the company in terms of accurate forecasting, reporting, and business-critical decision making.”

‘Data collaboration’ with finance is on the rise

“We see the demand for integration escalating across our customer base because organisations of all sizes and in all industries face the same challenge: getting business-critical data into a single system, from which to verify, analyse, and report,” said Carolee Gearhart, senior vice president of customer success at Adaptive Insights. “While integrating systems results in self-service access and time savings on data gathering for finance teams, the ultimate value is in the ability to achieve a complete view of corporate performance. By understanding the story behind the numbers, finance teams can deliver the strategic analysis required to successfully guide performance.”

The findings are the result of an internal analysis by the Adaptive Insights’ Professional Services group of the company’s more than 3,000 customers spanning the past decade. Key findings include:

• The top three requested integrations involve enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Oracle, and SAP; customer relationship management (CRM) software such as Salesforce; and human resource (HR) systems such as Workday
• More than one-third of integration requests received by Adaptive Insights include multiple systems implemented simultaneously, an expectation resulting from improved and powerful integration technology developed over the past five years that delivers fast and accurate integrations
• The demand for integrations of non-financial systems, such as CRM or HR, has increased by 300 percent over the past five years. This aligns with the findings in a recent CFO Indicator report that noted 76 percent of CFOs currently measure non-financial KPIs and the amount of non-financial KPIs is expected to increase by 2018

Customers integrate other systems with the Adaptive Suite via three primary routes: professional services engagement with Adaptive Insights, via Adaptive Insights’ more than 200 global partners, and in a self-service model leveraging the Adaptive Insights Integration framework.

To learn more about the continued integration of data across the organisation, read the blog “The Rise of Non-Financial KPIs.”