Anaplan vs. Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention

I've implemented a number of projects for Anaplan for Sales Performance Management use cases. It is obviously built for financial planning, but it allows for a lot of flexibility for territory and quota, ICM, sales forecasting, and other important use cases. Territory and Quota is very powerful in the tool as it organize complex assignment structures into hierarchies for easier analysis and reporting.

-Where companies need to secure their attachment, which goes outside, means from their company to outside -Where companies need to ensure their client's personal information -Where companies need DLP. They need to look for Forcepoint only, as they have the upper hand over the rest of their competitors.

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.

• It has predominantly protected us from unauthorized parties and has provided us with better visibility and control over our data.
• This software has also successfully prevented us from both malicious and accidental tasks, which are quite flexible actions when it comes to the violation of data loss prevention policies.
• This product has been successful in improving compliance and even mitigating compliance violations, which further facilitated IT security.
• I think there is room for improvement, as the user interface is slightly rough and difficult to adopt in the beginning. The software also hangs up at a few instances, which leads to some wasting of time and annoyance, but other than that, this software is good. The technical staff should work on the complexities for a better user experience.

Incentivized

• Some end users don't spend the required amount of time to familiar themselves with Anaplan.
• Auditability, while good in theory, can be lacking and clunky when needed.
• Model building can become convoluted over time, leading to confusion over the specific use of line items.

• Forcepoint technical support--specially for users who go with essential support--is challenging to get support on time. You need the ticket to be raised long beforehand to get support from TAC. However, in the case of enterprise support, its is not like this technical person will come on a priority basis.
• However it comes with higher prices, especially for SMB, it is allowed to pay that amount for support only.

Incentivized

Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

We have been fairly happy with the product and how it has worked. We have looked at other vendors for url filter and such and have not found one that meets our needs or does what we have been doing with Websense. The product has been fairly stable and we have only had a few issues in the past. We have all seen that it was one of the highest leaders from the Gartner Group Magic Quadrant for Web Gateways.

Incentivized

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

For us, Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention was difficult to administer, did not work well when it did work, was incredibly expensive for the feature set you get, and was difficult to uninstall when we moved on from the software. Once it was fully set up, it worked occasionally for us.

Incentivized

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

Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.

Incentivized

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.

Support from Forcepoint has been lacking. When calling in with a high priority issue we rarely are able to work with a technician immediately. The queue waits are very long and when you get through there are no support engineers available and we need to wait for a call back for hours it seems.

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.

Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams

One key insight from implementing Anaplan is that success comes from focusing on designing the process, not just building the model. Anaplan is extremely flexible—there are very few planning scenarios it cannot support—but that flexibility means the project needs strong governance, clear ownership of requirements, and a well-defined data model. When those foundations are in place, implementations are fast, iterations are easy, and users can quickly see value.
In our projects, both Financial Planning and Integrated Business Planning models were adopted smoothly because we involved business users early, kept the model design intuitive, and leveraged Anaplan’s Excel-like syntax and user-friendly dashboards. The result was more efficient day-to-day work, reduced manual tasks, and increased collaboration across teams. In short: when you combine Anaplan’s flexibility with a structured implementation approach, adoption and value realization happen quickly.

Anaplan is more powerful than Pigment considering that it is an Enterprise class system and is able to manage bigger data sets. Anaplan allows for advanced scenario modeling and formula capabilities along with custom reporting functionalities. Anaplan has proven its capabilities and stability across various use cases and across bigger enterprises when compared to Pigment which is still in earlier phases of its development

User friendly solution that makes it easy to deploy and manage. Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention very effective to protecting our valuable data on endpoints and where data lives like in the Cloud, server and on-premises disk drives and its valuable to just set policies once and start utilizing Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention solution.

Incentivized

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

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• The exchange of financial documents with customers creates extreme risk as data loss could result in financial and reputation damage to the customer. The cost of deploying Forcepoint is fractions of pennies compared to the potential financial impact of data loss.
• There is some administrative overhead associated as false positives are inevitable, requiring a manual review and a potential loss of productivity.

Incentivized