Workday acquires Adaptive Insights for $1.55 billion to accelerate business planning efforts

Workday, the cloud-based platform startup that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, has acquired Adaptive Insights for $1.55 billion to bolsters its business planning efforts. Workday made the announcement in a blog post on its website. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of Workday’s fiscal year 2019, ending October 31, 2018. Adapative Insights is a leading cloud-based platform for modernizing business planning.

Workday will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Adaptive Insights for approximately $1.55 billion including the assumption of approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees. For more information, please refer to the press release or a replay of the financial analyst call which can we found on the Workday Investor Relations site.

According to the company, Workday will be able to accelerate customers’ finance and business transformations across the organization through a powerful combination of integrated planning and a complete finance suite of products. More specifically, the acquisition will also fast-track its financial planning roadmap by 2+ years, delivering customers new, advanced modeling capabilities and more, powered by the Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud.

The Palo Alto, California-based Adaptive Insights was founded in 2003 and has grown to become a leading provider of cloud-based planning software with more than 3,800 customers around the world. With Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud, organizations of all sizes are able to transform business planning—for both finance and functional teams—into a continuous, collaborative, and comprehensive process that drives competitive advantage and organizational growth. Adaptive Insights has additional offices across the U.S., Europe, and APAC, and has been consistently recognized as a leader in the planning and corporate performance management markets by industry analysts.

“Over the last few years, we’ve seen increasing digital transformation in the office of finance. In response, Workday has continually delivered against our unique vision of bringing planning, execution, and analysis together in one system. A large part of that strategy has been adding breadth and depth to our core finance product—Workday Financial Management—which continues to win over customers and lead the industry. Another core component of our strategy is investing in customers’ increased demand for advanced financial planning—especially around the core general ledger—as organizations realize how central planning is to driving strategic, competitive advantage,” Petros Dermetzis, Workday Chief Product Officer, said.

Upon close of the acquisition, Adaptive Insights CEO Tom Bogan will report to Workday Co-Founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri. Under their leadership, we will further power Workday’s financial planning products with Adaptive Insights’ Business Planning Cloud, while continuing our current roadmap and strategy for Workday’s workforce planning products.

Petros Dermetzis said, “The combination of Workday and Adaptive Insights will equip customers of both companies and all sizes with the leading cloud system to drive their finance organizations and businesses into the future. Together, no other companies can offer the breadth and depth of products, experience, customer service, and go-to-market initiatives required to truly put next-generation planning at the center of driving business performance today and in the future.”

Workday is the leader in SaaS-based enterprise solutions for human resources, payroll and financial management, providing new levels of business agility for a fraction of the cost of buying, deploying and maintaining legacy on-premise systems. More than 130 customers, spanning mid-sized organizations to global Fortune 500 businesses, have selected Workday. Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financial Management use modern, standards-based technologies to provide an unparalleled level of agility, ease-of-use, and integration capability.