In late May, Revelwood team members were among 1,600 finance professionals, Adaptive Insights team members, and Adaptive Insights partners and sponsors (Revelwood was a Bronze sponsor) attending Adaptive Live 2019 in Las Vegas. The two-day conference included keynotes, featured speakers, training, breakout sessions, birds-of-a-feather lunches, a Customer Appreciation Party, and more.

The sessions included dynamic and engaging sessions from guest keynote speaker Dr. Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, and a Harvard and MIT graduate. Diamandis, who is “renowned for showing audiences how to drive breakthrough thinking and innovation within their company in a fashion that delivers clear, measurable, and objective results.” The Revelwood team felt that Diamandis was a “unique” and “really cool” keynote speaker.

Adaptive Live 2019’s second general session, conducted by Rob Hull, founder of Adaptive Insights and Tom Bogan, CEO of Adaptive Insights, focused mostly on Workday’s acquisition of Adaptive Insights and how it will benefit Adaptive’s customers. They also provided information on Adaptive’s new modules for workforce planning and sales planning.

Steve Ellis, Senior Consultant/Team Leader, Adaptive Insights Practice, Revelwood, at Adaptive Live 2019

Three aspects of the overall conference were very interesting to our team:

1. First were the sessions on integrations, such as “Connecting Adaptive Insights to the World.” For example, this presentation, by Tyler Stubbs of Adaptive Insights, provided an overview of the wide variety of third-party integrations that are possible with Adaptive Insights. They detailed how customers can integrate not only data but also metadata hierarchies from a number of cloud-based ERP systems. This showed a bigger picture of how customers can connect to various sources in and around the Workday ecosystem, and how Adaptive customers can grow their data ecosystem to get a more integrated, complete view of financial and operational data.
2. Our team found Mark Thompson’s Future Feedback Forum quite intriguing. The session was billed as detailing features they’ll “be highlighting in 2020” and that this was the audience’s “opportunity to make feature requests and provide feedback directly to the Product Managers who plan our roadmap.” While that may sound like a standard product roundtable, Adaptive collected and analyzed the audience feedback in a unique way. As the product managers received feedback, they presented sample screenshots. They then polled the live audience in real-time and displayed the results on the Adaptive Live mobile app. It felt like a live, interactive feature design session with Adaptive’s in-person client base.
3. The third interesting aspect of the conference was the makeup of the audience itself. Many of the Adaptive customers our team spoke with have been on the product for 1 – 5 years. These satisfied users have conquered the basics and use Adaptive Insights primarily for the expense side of finance. As a result, our team had a number of conversations about expanding the use of Adaptive Insights into the revenue side of things, back end systems, and even the implications of changing out their chart of accounts. We had many engaging discussions about financial and business processes, not just about how to manage the basics of finance.

Sponsoring and attending Adaptive Live 2019 and meeting many customers and others in the Adaptive ecosystem was well worth our time. We’re looking forward to participating again next year!

Learn more about Revelwood’s partnership with Adaptive Insights:

Revelwood Named Adaptive Insights Partner Rising Star of the Year

Revelwood Launches Adaptive Insights Practice