Adaptive Insights Inc. today is releasing its first new product since Workday Inc. snapped it up in June for $1.55 billion on the eve of its initial public offering.

The corporate performance management software provider is making available a workforce planning module for its Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud, which is used to create and test complex business scenarios. The new product, which is really more a set of templates to use with the existing business planning engine, enables better collaboration between the finance and human resources departments for workforce planning, analysis and reporting.

The new release is part of a recent campaign by Adaptive to diversify its core technology into functional areas. The company sells analytics-based tools that enable organizations to collaborate on business plans, standardize and streamline financial reporting and consolidate performance information faster and more consistently. It released modules for general business and sales planning earlier this year.

The workforce planning functions are “really a repackaging of some of the capabilities we already had,” said Tom Bogan, chief executive of Adaptive Insights, which operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Workday.

The announcement is also an effort to quell speculation about how things will change at Adaptive, which boasts more than 3,500 customers. “There is a lot of FUD [fear, uncertainty and doubt] out there about whether Adaptive will only support Workday back-end systems or whether we’re going to spend the next two years replatforming so innovation will slow down,” said Chief Product Officer Bhaskar Himatsingka. “The answer to both is that basically that it’s FUD.”

Adaptive intends to continue to support competitive back-end engines. “We have to be open,” Himatsingka said. “All our competitors are open.”

Workday said as much at the time of the acquisition, but it also vowed to step up efforts to better integrate the subsidiary software with its flagship product. Customers of both companies will see the fruits of those efforts during the next two releases, which will feature improved data integration as well as unified data and security models. Workday already had a corporate performance modeling module but said it would discontinue development and migrate customers to the Adaptive engine instead.

The workforce planning capabilities of the Business Planning Cloud enable departments to collaborate on new hires, promotions and merit pay increases. Managers can map hiring strategies to business plans while giving finance and HR professionals instant visibility into future hiring needs and expenses.

Managers can also model hiring, retention, attrition and restructuring plans by location, department and project, as well as estimate associated costs. Departmental plants can be rolled up to a single workforce model. Organizational restructuring, mergers, divestitures and relocations can be modeled on a what-if basis to identify optimal organization structures with the right people in the right roles. Users can also compare actual versus planned skill needs and model training plans accordingly.

Bogan said the company has “no specific plans” to introduce additional functional modules, but Himatsingka said to stay tuned for an announcement early next year. The workforce planning features will be folded into the existing Adaptive platform at no additional charge.

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