arcplan announces arcPlanning

arcplan News : arcplan announces arcPlanning, Guaranteed-to-fit Budgeting and Planning Solution for the Web and Microsoft Excel®

• Combines arcplan’s SOA-based budgeting and planning solution set with LumenSoft's Excel-based budgeting and planning technology.
• Enables users to budget and plan via familiar Excel environment and via the Web
• Allows replacement of legacy systems while retaining crucial look and feel elements and business logic processing
• Natively integrates with existing IT infrastructure such as Oracle (Hyperion), SAP, IBM and Microsoft.

Berwyn, PA. December 21, 2007 – arcplan, a global provider of Business Performance Management solutions, today announced the launch of arcPlanning, the industry’s first complete budgeting and planning solution that meets any company or industry-specific budgeting and planning requirements. arcPlanning bundles arcplan’s web-based and SOA driven budgeting and planning solution set with Xcel BI+, a turnkey solution for Excel-based budgeting and planning from arcplan strategic technology partner LumenSoft Corporation. A series of web seminars is planned in January 2008 to introduce the arcPlanning solution.

“Over the last 10 years, we have earned a very successful track record for meeting even the most specific and unique interface and workflow requirements for web-based budgeting & planning solutions. At the same time we learned from working with hundreds of clients that finance professionals want and will con-tinue to use Excel for some of the modeling that goes into the budgeting and planning processes,” explained Andreas Kugelmeier, arcplan’s VP of Product Management. “However, Excel, by itself, has inherent security, scalability, data accuracy and consistency vulnerabilities. By combining LumenSoft’s enterprise scalable Xcel BI+, which eliminates the security, data accuracy, scalability and consistency vulnerabilities, with the SOA-driven arcplan budgeting and planning solution set and our federated query, analysis and write-back technology, cus-tomers are essentially getting the best of both worlds. They now have the op-tions needed to meet various user groups’ requirements” he continued.

“We have had great success delivering Excel-based budgeting and planning solutions to global corporations for more than 12 years. This new integration with arcplans's industry leading web-based solutions will drive significant value to both companies’ customers. Clients need both web and Excel-based tech-nology to satisfy all of their budgeting and planning needs and customers will now have the option of using an integrated solution set that incorporates both technologies. We are pleased to be partnered with arcplan for this solution,” said LumenSoft Vice President of Business Development, Richard Peterson.

Many budgeting and planning solutions on the market attempt to replace existing Excel spreadsheet or other legacy environments used for budgeting and plan-ning purposes. arcPlanning on the other hand permits financial professionals to retain and enhance the look, functionality and feel of existing Excel or non-Excel based applications while at the same time adding required data-access, analy-sis, collaboration, security, control and workflow elements. Furthermore, the native integration of arcPlanning with products such as Hyperion Essbase, Hy-perion Enterprise, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle, Oracle OLAP, Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services, Applix TM1, SAP SEM and BW BPS etc. ensures that customers can leverage their existing IT infrastructure, thereby avoiding costly implementation cycles.

arcPlanning is a guaranteed fit. Compared to other industry solutions, arcPlan-ning is guaranteed to meet any company or industry-specific budgeting and planning processes and requirements, providing unlimited customizability of the budgeting and planning solution to any company’s specific budgeting and plan-ning requirements.

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