“With Anaplan, each new building block adds value to all the others”
Sébastien L'Hôte, CEO of Kelerian Group
May 21, 2026
Sébastien, you've been following the EPM market for over 20 years. What's the most significant change you've seen?
The most fundamental change is the shift from a “building-block” approach to a unified platform model. For a long time, say, from the 2000s to 2015, major software vendors built their EPM offerings through a series of acquisitions.
SAP acquired a consolidation tool, Oracle absorbed Hyperion, and IBM integrated Cognos. The result?
Application suites that look alike on paper but, under the hood, speak different languages. SAP, for example, opted for a siloed approach: planning capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud, consolidation in SAP BFC, other EPM processes in legacy tools, and functions such as account reconciliation or narrative reporting outsourced to third-party partners. This isn’t an architectural choice—it’s the legacy of growth through acquisitions.
And today, what has changed?
Today, platforms like Anaplan are built from the ground up as unified systems. They aren’t just a collection of connected tools; they feature a single data model, a single calculation engine, and a consistent user experience.
And that changes everything, especially when it comes to ROI. The more use cases you have on Anaplan, the easier it is to build the next one, and this interconnectedness between tools generates an additional ROI that’s hard to quantify but very real. That’s what we see with all our clients.
Do you have an image that can explain this simply?
Yes, I really like the analogy of the power grid. In the 2000s, companies built isolated diesel generators, each powering a single building, but they didn’t communicate with one another.
If one generator failed, an entire floor would be in the dark. Connecting two buildings was expensive, time-consuming, and the result was often unstable. Today, Anaplan is like the national power grid. You plug in Finance, and the lights come on. You connect Supply Chain, and the whole street lights up. Add HR and Sales, and the entire city lights up instantly, all running on the same power grid.
And every new building you connect strengthens the network rather than weakening it. That’s exactly what the network effect of a unified platform is all about: the value isn’t additive, it’s exponential.
In practical terms, what does this mean for your customers?
This means three very concrete things.
First, implementation speed increases with each new use case. The iterative approach, starting with a minimum viable model and then gradually expanding it, allows you to deliver immediate value while optimizing processes over time. When a client already has their Finance model in Anaplan, deploying the Supply Chain takes half the time it would to start from scratch because the data, business rules, and users are already in place.
Second, the ROI of each new application benefits from all the previous ones. A sales forecast that leverages real-time HR and Supply Chain data is infinitely more valuable than a forecast isolated in a spreadsheet.
Finally, data governance improves automatically. Whereas fragmented systems force finance teams to spend their time consolidating and reconciling data, organizations that have opted for a unified platform deliver their revised forecasts 40 to 60% faster when market conditions change.
And is Anaplan recognized by the market for that?
Anaplan has been recognized as a leader for the ninth consecutive year in Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for financial planning software. This is no small feat, it confirms that the platform delivers on its promises over the long term, not just during implementation.
A final word for organizations that are still on the fence?
Don't compare features in an Excel spreadsheet. Compare architectures. A tool that does everything but doesn't connect anything is nothing more than a sophisticated diesel generator. What we're building with Anaplan at Kelerian is a network. And a network gains value with every new connection.
Anaplan en quelques chiffres :
~6,9 Md$
Taille du marché mondial en 2026
+10% / an
Croissance annuelle estimée jusqu'en 2035
71%
Des déploiements EPM en mode cloud en 2026
Sources : Anaplan Connect, Business Outcomes and ROI, juillet 2024 — AppsTek Corp, Redefining Finance in 2026, février 2026 — Oracle / Blogs ModernFinance, Ready for the future, juin 2025 — Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning Software, 2025 — Fortune Business Insights, EPM Market Forecast 2026-2034.