Anaplan: Who needs a CFO? Or a CEO for that matter

Tom Paine

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From The Information :

"The list of companies considered potential IPO candidates that don’t have CFO hires is long, and includes Tanium, Qualtrics, Cloudflare, Anaplan, Stitch Fix, Illumio, Gusto, Freshdesk and Jam City. Some of the largest private companies like Uber and Slack also have notably still not hired CFOs."



Of course, Anaplan went about a year without a CEO, before bringing on Frank Calderoni as CEO at the beginning of this year. Calderoni was once CFO of Cisco Systems, so perhaps the temporary lack of a CFO doesn't worry him much. But Anaplan is expected to IPO soon, perhaps this year, so arrival of a new CFO should be forthcoming.

Calderoni's brother, Bob Calderoni, who also has a CFO background, is chairman of the board at Anaplan, and was CEO of Ariba when it sold to SAP in 2012, later serving as president of SAP Cloud before leaving the company in 2014. Both Calderonis started out with IBM.

Philly guy and ex-iPipeline President ( also ex-Ariba and SAP) Paul Melchiorre was named Chief Revenue Officer of San Francisco-based Anaplan more than a year ago.

Actually founded in the UK, Anaplan is among a group of new breed cloud-based enterprise performance management platform vendors (Adaptive Insights, Tidemark and Host Analytics among the others) whose products enable enhanced cross-functional, dynamic business planning. It has raised over $200 million, was valued at slightly more than $1 billion in its last round, and achieved over 75 percent annual year-over-year subscription revenue growth and $120 million total revenue in its recently ended FY '17.

SAP is a competitor.

See Anaplan grows into a platform play – is that enough? by Brian Sommer in Diginomica.