Adaptive Planning seeks profit in free hosted version

So free and open source software isn't good enough for your business? You want it hosted free, too?

You got it.

Adaptive Planning, an open source Business Performance Management company, is now offering free hosting.

Adaptive Planning Express carries a GPL 2.0 license. CEO William Soward said the aim is to upgrade companies from Excel spreadsheets to the BPM software, then move them up to paid support on Corporate and Enterprise versions.

Corporate support starts at $500/seat per year, Enterprise at $750/seat per year, but there are extensive discounts as you increase the number of seats and the length of your support contract.

Soward sees simple spreadsheeting as his competition. "The first thing you need for BPM is to move to a collaboratively budget based approach that gets all your stakeholders involved with one version of the truth." Even free BPM is an upgrade from a licensed spreadsheet.

Soward also doesn't see success in terms of license sales. "The key is renewals – getting people to renew their subscriptions after a year."

The idea of giving away hosting as well as software may be new in the corporate market, but it has a long history in the consumer market, where it's the main business model for blogging and other online tools.

In addition to his own efforts, Soward is also working with resellers, giving them a cut of license fees as well as the chance to earn consulting and training revenue. "The reseller for us is providing vertical expertise as well as data integration into different transaction systems."