Alight Planning Announces Oracle Gold Partnership

Placerville, CA (PRWEB) November 30, 2011

Alight LLC, developers of the industry-leading Alight Planning financial planning and reporting software, today announced that it has joined Oracle’s partnership program at the Gold level.

As the leader and industry spokesperson for budgeting and enterprise planning solutions, Rand Heer, Alight’s CEO was delighted to be selected as an Oracle Gold Partner. Rand, who founded Pillar, the first enterprise planning software package, reflects on some important history to frame this partnership, “In 1994, Hyperion acquired Pillar. With over 2,500 customers purchasing Hyperion Pillar, the deal proved to be one of the great cash cows of the decade. Ironically, though in 2007, Oracle acquired Hyperion and finally killed Pillar which was replaced with Hyperion Planning. Some Pillar users did not make the move to Hyperion Planning including Apple Computer which is still using Pillar at the time of our partnership because Pillar had some beautiful functionality especially around unit rate amounts.”

Jeffrey Walker who built Oracle's applications business and was also CFO at Oracle was pleased to learn of the partnership, “Looking back on it, it’s too bad we at Oracle didn’t pick up on Pillar and Rand’s vision before Hyperion. You can see the Pillar foundations for enterprise planning today in offerings from Oracle, IBM, and SAP. With Alight, Rand advances his vision to new heights and makes his planning tools accessible to companies of all sizes—not just big players with deep pockets. I expect the partnership with Oracle will lead to big things for both parties.”

The news of the partnership is quite exciting to finance and IT teams who are already working with both Alight and Oracle. Mark Brinkerhoff, VP Finance with Ultradent, is eager to reap the benefits of this new relationship, “Before Alight was selected as an Oracle Gold Partner, I have been able to get our financial data out of Oracle Financials and into Alight. We have a complex chart of accounts so we leverage Alight’s logfiles feature which gives us complete visibility if something slips during an import. While data integration from Oracle to our spreadsheet model often took several days, we can get our Oracle data integrated into Alight in about one business day. With Oracle Gold Partner status, Alight's import process with Oracle Financials is on track to get even better in 2012."

In addition to Ultradent, dozens of companies who use both the Alight Planning solution and Oracle/Hyperion applications should benefit from this new partnership including mid-sized companies such as Atronix and larger organizations such as Siemens PLM Software.

About Oracle PartnerNetwork
Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle's partner program that provides partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle’s growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more visit http://www.oracle.com/partners.

About Alight LLC
Alight LLC’s Alight Planning is a true driver-based financial planning and reporting software package that automates complex business modeling for more accurate strategic plans, revenue projections, budgets and rolling forecasts. Its unique architectures and easy-to-use interfaces provide finance staff the power they need to build complex driver-based planning models, while delivering traditional budgeting and planning structures such as line item detail, integrated financial statements and multiple-user security. Cost-effective and IT-independent, Alight Planning is affordable and easily deployed by Fortune 500 business units, as well as midmarket companies with limited IT resources. Alight has over 250 customers including Kaiser Permanente, Pennsylvania State University, British Telecommunications, Pittsburgh Mercy Health, the Swan and Dolphin Resort at Disney World and Verizon Wireless. For more information about Alight Planning, visit http://www.AlightPlanning.com or call 800-960-7717.

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