About Alight

Alight's vision is to redefine how companies plan. We do this by setting standards and best practices embodied in world-class planning and analysis software, white papers, training and solutions packages.

Alight's mission, simply stated, is to replace Excel as the application of choice for desktop and collaborative planning.

History

Rand Heer founded Alight in 2006. Rand's love for financial models and business planning came together at Pillar Corporation, a software company he founded in 1988. Pillar was subsequently acquired by Hyperion/Oracle.

After building a series of prototypes, Rand hired a team of dedicated developers who started cranking out new builds for design evaluation and usability testing. Lee Harris, the former VP of Engineering for Hyperion Pillar, joined Alight in 2007.

The business team, headed by Ben Lamorte and Don Koenes, began selling and installing Alight Planning in early 2006. In late 2007 Lisa Torbin-Shaw and Linda Hull joined the company, bringing to Alight huge product knowledge and customer experience from their work with Pillar and other products at Hyperion Solutions. In January 2008, BPM Partners named Alight Planning best new vendor for 2008. By mid-year 2008, Alight had 80 customers in a broad range of industries including software, specialty foods, healthcare, energy and services. Larger customers include Kaiser Permanente, Weyerhaeuser, and CGI.

The Alight team continues to aggressively develop Alight Planning software, improving performance and incorporating new features requested by our customers. The company releases updates approximately every three months.

Our Management Team

Rand Heer, President and Chief Architect.
Rand has 35 years financial management and startup experience spanning manufacturing, biotechnology, software and IT services. He was the founder of Pillar Corporation which developed the first enterprise budget and forecasting package later acquired by Hyperion/Oracle. He also founded three other technology companies, all with successful exits, focusing on financial systems and OLAP reporting. Rand has an MBA from Harvard University.

Ben Lamorte, Vice President, Sales.
Responsible for Alight's sales programs, Ben has 12 years experience in business development, consulting and sales support. He has worked extensively with decision models and OLAP reporting and analysis systems. Prior consulting clients included Kaiser, Adobe and PlanetRX. Ben holds a Master of Science degree from Stanford University.

Lee Harris, Vice President, Engineering.
A Silicon Valley original who has led many product software initiatives, Lee has 25 years experience in software design and development including senior management positions at Software Publishing, Pillar Corporation, and Whitelight Systems. He has a BS in mathematics from Dartmouth College.

Don Koenes, Vice President, Services.
Responsible for Alight's consulting and implementation activities, Don has 25 years experience in health care sales/marketing and startup consulting. As Vice President and Co-Founder of the CVV Accelerator, a Sacramento venture development company, Don built scores of financial models using Excel. He holds an MBA from Drake University.

Lisa Torbin-Shaw, Director of Product Management.
Lisa has 12 years experience with budgeting and planning applications in the role of consultant, project manager and product manager. At Hyperion Solutions she worked with Pillar and was responsible for the product launch of Hyperion Planning, the company's successor product to Pillar. Lisa holds a Master of Arts from Simmons College. She is also a CPA.

Linda Hull, Director of Sales.
Linda has 12 years experience as a financial analyst, pre-sales consultant, education director and marketing launch director — the latter three positions with Hyperion Solutions. She has worked extensively with Hyperion Pillar and Hyperion Planning. Linda has an MBA from the University of New Haven.