Anaplan Calculation Engines — Statement of Direction: 2025

This document provides guidance to our Anaplan customers using either Classic calculation engine and/or Polaris calculation engine. It provides insight into Anaplan’s strategic product direction for calculation engines. 

Anaplan Polaris is our next-generation calculation engine for the Anaplan planning platform. It is designed from the ground up for fast, highly dimensioned calculation at scale. Polaris represents a paradigm shift in your ability to model your business planning challenges without compromise, allowing significantly greater granularity of planning for more detailed decision-making. 

Anaplan Polaris has been in General Availability since 2023 and will be the primary focus of Anaplan’s development efforts for future innovation in calculation. We will be adding new functionality for calculation only in Polaris, as well as continuing to improve and refine the performance and scalability of the engine. Polaris is the foundation engine that supports our future development and innovation in AI, pre-configured Applications and data orchestration and management.

We will continue to maintain and support the Classic calculation engine, which currently powers hundreds of thousands of Anaplan models in production. Many customers have successfully integrated Polaris-powered models into their operations alongside Classic, demonstrating a smooth transition path that can take place at a pace appropriate for your business.   

The best decisions are made using the best data — and that means data which accurately reflects the reality of your business. With Polaris, you no longer need to worry about reducing the dimensionality of your data by manipulating and combining dimensions or summarizing data – you can create models which simply and accurately represent your problem domain. 

Using Polaris, you will be able to build models which are less complex, more naturally fit the shape of your data and more accurately reflect the reality of the business problems that you are modelling. This not only has benefits for easily understanding the data during the planning process but also reduces the complexity of maintaining your models, driving down total cost of ownership. This is because whilst performant across all use-cases, Polaris excels at calculations over data with high dimensionality. From our experience and analysis, most business modelling is naturally highly-dimensional– in fact more than 95% of the models in production with Anaplan would benefit from Polaris’s ability to facilitate modelling at natural dimensionality.

With the ability to address quintillions of cells, Polaris allows finely grained plans over much longer timescales than was previously possible with Anaplan. Whether you need to model complex, granular detail, to forecast over multi-decade timescales, or both, Polaris has you covered.  

18 quintillion cells per line item is a big number — to put this into perspective, if each cell were a drop of water, Polaris could fill an entire swimming pool. That scale enables truly granular, high-dimensional planning across your entire business.

Anaplan Polaris will be the focus for future innovation in Anaplan’s calculation and modeling functionality. By using Polaris, you are ensuring that you will benefit from the latest advances and innovation in our core planning and modeling technology. You will also be building on top of the same foundation as our portfolio of Anaplan Applications. 

We are planning a series of updates to functionality which will add the ability to undertake more detailed and nuanced analysis within Anaplan. We will be adding the ability to perform native analytical functions over your data in Polaris, allowing you to more accurately and rigorously forecast probable outcomes, including:

• Internal Rate of Return and Net Present Value.
• Standard Deviation.
• Variance.
• Improved mathematical functions for customized forecasting and analysis.

This will further enhance benefits Polaris already delivers to decision makers today: 

• Pivoting across natural dimensionality.
• Optimized data loads with reduced downtime.
• Increased modeling flexibility.

Polaris already operates at a scale far beyond what is possible in our Classic engine — but we are continuing to work on optimizing Polaris for faster, larger and more complex calculations so that your planning can scale with your business. We are also optimizing other parts of the Anaplan platform to take fuller advantage of the scale offered by the Polaris engine. This will include extending the size of data that can be displayed along an axis and allowing more nested dimensions. 

Anaplan Polaris is the primary calculation engine used as a foundation for innovation at Anaplan:

• Anaplan’s suite of pre-configured Applications across Supply Chain, Sales Performance Management, Finance and HR use Polaris as the primary calculation engine.
• Anaplan Data Orchestrator (ADO) will have deep integration with Polaris to facilitate easier, faster data management and integration.
• Anaplan’s market-leading AI solutions such as PlanIQ and CoPlanner can take advantage of Polaris as a calculation engine.

Anaplan Classic calculation engine is a mature product that helps thousands of customers to plan effectively and drive decision excellence in their business. We are committed to customers using our Classic engine and will continue to maintain and support it. Our focus for innovation will be in Anaplan Polaris, and customers who wish to take advantage of the scale and new functionality that is available in Polaris should consider migrating from the Classic engine to Polaris. 

We recommend that any new model development is done using Anaplan Polaris – using Polaris guarantees that you will have access to our most cutting-edge technology and to new functionality as it is built. Not only will you benefit from access to our latest innovation, but Polaris allows for simpler, more scalable more maintainable modeling.

Building any new models in Polaris does not change your ability to continue to benefit from models that are already built for the Classic engine. Anaplan is committed to the long-term maintenance and stability of the Classic engine, and existing models which are built in Classic can still be used in conjunction with Polaris models to power Anaplan Applications and dashboards, with data easily exchanged between Classic and Polaris models using Model to Model imports or Anaplan Data Orchestrator (ADO). 

If you would like to move existing models from Classic to Polaris to allow for higher dimensionality in your model or remove compromises which have been made to increase density in a classic model, guidance and support is available. Migration from Classic to Polaris can be straightforward, depending on the complexity of your original model, but to take full advantage of the scale and power of Polaris, it is necessary to update models to align to the natural dimensionality of data. Anaplan is here to help you transition to Polaris, and there are resources available to guide you through the process.  

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