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Author: Kira Wagner is a Product Owner at Anaplan.

We're thrilled to announce that Anaplan is planning to expand our integration capabilities with the launch of our new Amazon Redshift connector. This addition will empower your organization to seamlessly bridge your cloud data warehouse with Anaplan's powerful planning platform, unlocking new possibilities for data-driven decision-making.

Effortless configuration and management

Getting started couldn't be easier. Our Redshift connector is designed with simplicity in mind — configuration takes just a couple of clicks. No complex setup, no lengthy implementation cycles. Just quick, intuitive connectivity that gets you up and running in minutes.

But we didn't stop at initial setup. The connector provides limited lifecycle management capabilities. Need to update your connection parameters? Edit existing connections with the same ease you created them? Whether you're adjusting credentials, modifying data extraction schedules, or fine-tuning your integration settings, the management interface keeps everything straightforward and accessible.

Seamless data extraction to Anaplan

The Redshift connector enables direct extraction of data from your Amazon Redshift data warehouse into Anaplan's Data Orchestration (ADO) layer. This means your carefully curated, transformed data in Redshift flows seamlessly into ADO, where it can then be easily pushed to your planning models using links. The connection flow is clearly visualized in your data map, giving you complete transparency into how data moves from source through ADO to your models, enabling better governance and troubleshooting.

Flexible data loading options

We understand that different use cases require different approaches to data integration. That's why the Redshift connector supports three distinct load types, mirroring the proven behavior of our existing connectors:

Full Replace: Completely refresh your data with each load, ensuring you're always working with the latest complete dataset. Perfect for scenarios where you need a clean slate with every update, such as monthly financial closes or periodic forecast refreshes.

Append: Add new records to your existing data without removing what's already there. Ideal for building cumulative datasets over time, such as transaction histories, event logs, or audit trails where historical context is crucial.

Incremental: Update only the records that have changed since the last load. This efficient approach minimizes processing time and system resources while keeping your data current — perfect for large datasets where only a subset changes regularly, like customer master data or product catalogues.

Enterprise grade security

Amazon Redshift natively protects data in transit using TLS (Transport Layer Security), ensuring that all communication with your data warehouse is encrypted before it ever leaves your AWS environment. This transport-level encryption safeguards sensitive business information, financial data, and proprietary metrics as they move across networks.
Anaplan’s Redshift connector builds on this secure foundation by establishing connections over Redshift’s TLS-encrypted channel while using simple, reliable basic authentication to access your data warehouse. Together, this combination delivers a secure, standards-based approach for moving your organization’s most valuable data into Anaplan with confidence.

Robust error handling

We know that integrations need to be reliable, and when issues arise, you need visibility. That's why we've built comprehensive error messaging into the Redshift connector. Whether it's a timeout due to network latency, incorrect authentication credentials, connection failures, or data extraction issues, you'll receive informative error messages that help you identify and address problems.

The connector provides feedback about potential issues, helping to minimize downtime and keep your data flows running smoothly.

Complete documentation and support

We've prepared comprehensive documentation and know-how guidelines to support your implementation journey. From initial connection setup to advanced configuration options, you'll find step-by-step instructions, best practices, and troubleshooting guides to ensure your success.

Why this matters

If you're leveraging Amazon Redshift as your data warehouse, this connector eliminates friction in your planning process. Your teams can now pull rich, aggregated data directly into Anaplan models, ensuring that forecasts, budgets, and strategic plans are built on the most accurate and comprehensive data available.

Whether you're in finance, supply chain, sales operations, workforce planning, or any other planning function, the Redshift connector brings your cloud data ecosystem and planning platform together seamlessly. The combination of ease of use, robust security, flexible loading options, and reliable error handling means you can focus on planning and analysis rather than wrestling with data integration challenges.

Getting started

The Redshift connector isn’t available just yet, but its release is approaching. Once live, its intuitive setup process will let you start extracting data within minutes. Please give it a try and see how straightforward enterprise integration can be!

Author: Miki Sato is a Product Manager, Product Management Team (Data Management) at Anaplan.

Your data is now harmonized, normalized, and ready for the AI era.

1. The scale AI needs

Are you ready to truly leverage AI, but constantly hit a wall because of data chaos?

In today's fast-paced environment, planning needs to be faster, more accurate, and predictive. Yet, for most organizations, data lives in fragmented silos — scattered across CRM, ERP, and supply chain systems. This fragmentation is the single biggest barrier to adopting AI.
This challenge is not unique to you: Gartner (2025) predicts that over 60% of AI projects will fail due to poor data quality and lack of context. The business landscape is simply too complex for traditional integration models. McKinsey’s *State of AI 2025 report further shows data infrastructure is now the strongest predictor of AI success.

That's where Anaplan Data Orchestrator (ADO) comes in — to turn integration into intelligence.

This marks the start of a fundamental evolution in our platform. We are moving beyond simply collecting data to creating the trusted, harmonized, and contextually-aware data foundation your business needs to make AI work for you.

2. Reflecting on Anaplan Connect 2025

In 2025, Anaplan hosted Connect events around the world — from Tokyo to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Cape Town. The focus was clear: AI strategy.

From Anaplan Intelligence to CoPlanner, CoModeler, and Agent Studio, Anaplan demonstrated how AI is becoming integral to enterprise planning. Chief Product Technology Officer (CPTO) Adam’s keynote message in Boston was simple yet powerful: scale matters. Data harmonization isn’t optional — it’s the foundation of intelligent planning.

Figure 1: Anaplan Intelligence: From predictive to agentic AI, built on an AI-enabled data foundation.

🎥 Watch the keynote

“Anaplan Innovation: AI and Product Update” – Explore how Anaplan’s $500 million investment in innovation across ADO, Polaris, and AI agents is reshaping enterprise planning for an AI-ready future.

3. Anaplan Data Orchestrator today

Before AI can deliver meaningful, explainable, and enterprise-grade insights, it needs something more fundamental than algorithms: trusted, harmonized data. This is why Anaplan’s AI strategy begins not with models, but with the data layer that powers them.

ADO plays a central role in this foundation. It is built on the proven capabilities of Anaplan Connect and CloudWorks — but goes further, transforming how organizations prepare and manage the data pipelines that intelligent planning depends on. ADO’s purpose is not just to move data, but to enable teams to harmonize, validate, and monitor it with the trustworthiness required for AI-driven decisioning.

Current ADO features:

• Model-aware environment: ADO provides a model-aware environment for scheduling, transformation, and error handling within the Anaplan ecosystem.
  
• Decoupled management: Crucially, ADO decouples data management from calculation, allowing teams to manage orchestration independently from model logic.
  
• Scalability and future-readiness: This architectural separation makes data pipelines more scalable today and positions ADO to support deeper integrations — including CloudWorks, Open APIs, and AI-ready data layers — as these capabilities evolve.

Figure 2: Anaplan platform architecture, connecting external data sources to AI-infused planning applications.

4. Advancing toward an AI-ready data foundation

Looking ahead, we plan to strengthen the data foundation that powers Anaplan — enabling future capabilities designed to make data more semantic, explainable, and resilient. These enhancements are intended to provide the level of trust required for AI to deliver meaningful business value.

Core data foundation features:

• Unified Data Model (UDM): Standardizing business entities across planning domains ensures consistency and interoperability across applications. It allows scenarios such as sales forecasts, workforce plans, and financial projections to share a common structure and language.
  
• Ontology capabilities: Helping AI understand how concepts like margin, revenue, and cost relate to each other. This enables natural, context-aware interactions — for example, asking "What's driving margin variance?" and receiving a meaningful, data-backed answer.
  
• Anomaly detection: Automatically identifying outliers and data quality issues before they affect forecasts. It strengthens trust in AI-driven insights by surfacing anomalies and emerging trends early.
• Connectivity and APIs: Expanding real-time, bi-directional data flows between Anaplan and external systems, enabling organizations to synchronize planning data instantly as markets shift.

This foundation allows organizations to synchronize planning data not only as snapshotsbut as semantic, explainable, and auditable data that truly understands context — not just dull data points.

5. From scale to intelligence

The combined power of ADO and the unified data foundation is transforming Anaplan from a planning tool into a genuine platform where intelligence is built into the fabric of your data.
Ultimately, ADO is not just about integration; it's about creating the data confidence needed for AI to make better, faster, and more transparent decisions. This ensures that AI within Anaplan doesn't act in isolation—it collaborates, learns, and adapts across the enterprise.

Let’s make it practical starting with your data.

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References

• Anaplan Data Orchestrator – Product Overview
  
• Anapedia: Anaplan Data Orchestrator Documentation
  
• Anaplan Connect 2025 On-Demand Sessions
  
• Gartner Press Release (2025): Lack of AI-Ready Data Puts AI Projects at Risk
  
• McKinsey State of AI Report 2025