Anaplan vs. Perforce Delphix

With its versions and native time features Anaplan is well suited for all activities around planning in time and scenarios. Tasks involving calculating across multiple dimensions make Anaplan shine - the easiness to build complex calculation and present results on customizable pages. With its access restrictions it's well suited also for working with sensitive data (employee and customers personal data).

REST API calls are available for all Delphix activities. Delphix makes it simple to move data between production to other test or QA environments. Through the replacement with a dummy, yet realistic data of the customer or patient data, you reduce the danger of data breaches for any and all copies of data you produce.

Incentivized

• Anaplan removes the time consuming process of integrating the results of individual spreadsheets.
• Anaplan facilitates the standardization of assumptions across all sub-processes
• Anaplan provides full transparency of the calculations and source inputs
• Anaplan allows us to automate certain planning processes that would have been impossible when relying on the computational capabilities of an individual computer.

• Storage consumption reduction.
• Data environments self service for consumers.
• Excellent documentation online.
• Great community for support you.
• Great company with great people working on it.

• Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
• Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great

• User/PWD management in the Delphix Self-Service web page does not support LDAP nor AD security groups. This creates a hassle if you have a large number of self-service users to create and maintain passwords for. The fix for this is supposed to be the new Central Management tool. We just ended up creating jobs in Jenkins (which supports groups) using the python-examples scripts from the Delphix Github.
• Reporting on storage and performing capacity planning is not easy when running many (20+) virtual databases. The latest release and new Central Management tool are both supposed to storage reporting much better.
• Delphix Data Masking tool could handle masking of complex flat files better. We ended up creating a tagger and un-tagger to add/remove metadata to enable Delphix masking to be able to mask our complex flat file. Would have been nice if that capability was already built into the masking tool.

Anaplan is already an established market leader in enterprise planning area. Its flexibility to build multi-dimensional models, real time scenario plannings are proven to be the best features and successfully implemented by global organizations. Anaplan's ambitious product team is ensuring to roll out new features regularly based on customer/ partner feedback. e.g their new improved polaris environment has strong potential to build very large models without worrying about sparsity. The integration with other tools/technologies is being easier (e.g. cloudworks). Hence, considering Anaplan as a platform that has proved to be successful tool in enterprise level planning, its focus on regular feature enhancements and future release roadmaps I believe this platform has potential to evolve further along with our business processes and requirements

As a user it is a very simple tool, but at the same time with a very mature and powerful calculation engine. It is very easy to switch from excel or traditional tools with added capabilities of multi dimensionality and real time calculation engine to see quick insights needed to create plans and scenarios

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

Unless a model is poorly constructed, the platform can accommodate tens or even hundreds of users without any impact on model performance. Dashboard pages load quickly, reports can be exported to Excel or pdf quickly, and integrations with other systems can be scheduled for quiet times of the day. Adding new use cases to the platform should also have minimal impact on performance if done in a careful way and following best practice principles

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

Delphix support could be a little better. It seems sometimes we bounce through support engineers until we get one that understands our issues and know how to fix it.

Incentivized

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Learning made easy . One of the best trainings i have attended. Training was very detailed training by the trainer, which helped me understand the basics of the model building. Level 1 training was easy and instructor was most helpful here. Level 2 training was challenging but was able to go thru due to understanding of the basics.

Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.

Incentivized

Anaplan is not a point solution. Instead of having multiple systems that each do one business process (and can only do that business process in one way), Anaplan can do many different business processes for multiple business units. Sales, Finance, HR and other parts of the business can go to one place to get their work done.

There are many first generation test data management tools that use SQL scripts behind the scenes to create small subsets of data for testing of functional subjects within the database (i.e. Claims or Membership, etc.). Delphix differs by operating at the data block level on disk, sitting between the db engine (Oracle, SQL, etc.) and the physical storage. This allows Delphix to provide full size virtual databases for the cost of not much more than enough storage for a single prod sized copy. Intelligent block sharing also enables full db refreshes and rewinds in minutes, not hours or days, all without having to maintain any schema relationship information which is required in first-gen TDM tools. Delphix does not perform any SQL functions so its not for extract, transform, load or creating smaller subset databases. We figured why subset the data if we can get a full virtual copy for no additional cost!

We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption

• You will see greater accuracy within your forecasts by leveraging Anaplan to look at historical values while including projections such as seasonality.
• You will save time, resulting in team members spending more time on value-add opportunities.
• You will have happy end users that have access to self-service reports, removing any bottlenecks through the workflow.

• Delphix has a brilliant way of documentation online.
• Delphix has the constant need to improve its quality and fix bugs quickly as well as transparently.
• With Delphix, my data remains secured.

Incentivized