Dan Koellhofer 0:00:06.0: 

Good afternoon, my name is Dan Koellhofer, I'm with Anaplan. I run our applications group for go-to-market. Thank you all for joining. Today, we're going to get a chance to hear from Ciena, one of Anaplan's long-time customers, and hear about their journey with Anaplan. Joining me is Scott and Jo from Ciena. Would you both please introduce yourself to the audience?  

 

Scott Soukup 0:00:28.9: 

Sure. My name is Scott Soukup. I've been with Ciena for over 25 years now, doing various types of roles. A lot of IT work. But now I work within the - I work supporting the finance team, and I kind of run the CEO at Ciena. I've been on the Anaplan journey since the very beginning.  

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:00:45.7: 

Awesome. Great to have you. 

 

Jo Youn 0:00:48.2: 

Hi everyone, my name is Jo Youn and I'm senior manager for global sales compensation at Ciena, also reporting into an FP&A organization. I've been with Ciena for about two years now. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:01:00.1: 

Awesome. All right, so one of the really cool things that we have here today is we have someone who's delivering for their organization, in a known function, and then we have someone who's running the Anaplan COE, who's delivering for their business counterparts.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:01:15.1: 

So I work for her! 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:01:16.4: 

So we got some cool dynamics that many of you may also have. You may be in one of these roles in your organization. Just to help give context for who's joining us today, just a show of hands, really do appreciate participation here, if you're an Anaplan customer, could you raise your hand? Awesome. Fantastic. Okay, and let's kind of segment that. So if you're an Anaplan COE or practice lead, or part of a CEO within those organizations, could you raise your hand please? Okay, we're getting some segmentation. Then the counterparts right, if you're running a finance role or something with sales performance management, and you're always talking to your Anaplan CEO for changes and new applications, new use cases, could you raise your hand? Awesome. Okay, cool. So I hope for those folks that are raising their hands to those last two questions, you can see your counterparts here from a bird of a feather. Grab a coffee with them later. Continue these discussions, but we'll get things going here. So I guess we'll start off with Scott. Would you mind just giving us an introduction on Ciena? I feel like it's a…  

 

Scott Soukup 0:02:22.3: 

So how many people know who Ciena is? 

 

Jo Youn 0:02:26.1: 

Zero.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:02:28.2: 

Perfect. Okay, so Ciena, we've been around since 1992, and we are really - we manufacture data networking gear. So the way to look at what Ciena does is we create bandwidth for telecom companies or the big web scale companies like Googles, the Amazons, the Facebooks, whatever. So if you were talking, moving data, streaming, whatever you're doing, we enable that with our technology. We have our networks all around the world, and so we're the fast - we're the best at moving bits very fast with the right level of security and everything. So we connect and we enable all the technology that everyone uses today. So if you're using Anaplan and that's on a cloud application, that data is moving from that cloud application to your computer somehow. It's going across Ciena gear. That's what we do. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:03:24.0: 

That's awesome. 

 

Scott Soukup 0:03:25.1: 

Yes. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:03:25.2: 

It's one of these companies that's hidden from the general public, but it enables so much for us, streaming content, etc., you're powering so much of the internet. 

 

Scott Soukup 0:03:36.2: 

Yes, our first big play was Tencent long-distance phone calls back in the day. Remember that? If you were away at college, you called home, and it cost money long distance. It's not a thing now because of how good the bandwidth has gotten.  

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:03:48.5: 

Yes, that's super cool. That's cool. So let's start talking about how did you all hear about Anaplan? How did this Anaplan journey start within Ciena? 

 

Scott Soukup 0:03:59.2: 

Well, just a little [?to march here 0:04:00.8]. Our CEO is from England, and he has a really wonderful way of saying something that drives action. So good CFCEO. He said, many years ago, he's like, looking at how the company was growing because we used to be $1 billion a year, which we were trying to get to four and then try to get more than that, and he had this great saying that what got us here is not going to get us there. So he set the people in the business off on a mission. Go figure out what we need to do. So through a series of programs, we decided, well, digital transformation, before it was actually a thing, we were starting to do that. We knew we needed to connect businesses, business processes and people and our data together, in order to scale the company. So we heard about Anaplan, I guess back around 2019. We were looking at - so if we look at what we do, we enable connectivity across the globe. Businesses, telecoms and all that stuff.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:05:00.7: 

So we wanted to do the same thing inside our company. So we said, well, we're looking for a platform. Again, we were like most businesses, we were, you know, we had our ERP system, we had our CRM system, we had our human resources system, but everything was still kind of disconnected. It was sort of held together with people and spreadsheets. That was the magic. All planning took place on basically spreadsheets and people. So what we wanted to do is we wanted to find a way that we could actually fill in some of the gaps, get rid of the spreadsheets, and connect the business in a way that we had a digital twin of what our transactional systems are doing, so we could plan, do better planning. So when we started looking at what companies did that, we looked at a couple of different companies. We looked at the roadmaps and what they were doing and where we thought they were going, and we chose Anaplan based upon a series of criteria. It was all about trying to drive that connectedness that we knew we needed to scale. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:06:04.3: 

Yes, can you state what were some of the groups that really wanted to get connected, or what were some of those early use cases? 

 

Scott Soukup 0:06:12.4: 

Yes, the early ones are - well, the first one was actually in the finance space. It was really, you know, we had a - and I think you heard [?Danny] talk about it earlier today. All these people in spreadsheets, all these activities they are doing. We had a weekly process that started with - it was like 30,000 clicks or interactions to build a forecast or build an insurance model, to see where we were in a quarter. So we tell the market we're going to do this much revenue, this much margin, and we even started wanting to put out what does the rest of the year look like and things like that. So the process that we were using was spreadsheets and everyone pulling reports, everyone having their own process was essentially - we did a study on those 30,000 clicks. So you talk about carpal tunnel and all that stuff. That's what people were doing every week, and then they get to Thursday, they have their meeting, they get compile with Friday and Saturday by the consolidations person, and then on Monday, you start all over again.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:07:06.8: 

So the first thing we really tried was trying to solve that problem. We figured if we could solve that problem, we can solve any problem, and that use case. So we've got that use case now. So all those 30,000 clicks are automated. So people walk in on Monday morning, or Sunday night, it depends on where you are in the world, and they start their week and everything is already right there for them, and then they move directly into analysis mode. So they don't have to build any more informational content, it's all analysis. Also with that too, we realized, well, with the number of people we have, our CEO is big into people, and we really didn't have a workforce planning capability, and so we picked that up. We also did, with that, we said, well, let's do a call center expense. So we started with revenue assurance, and then in parallel, we had workforce planning feeding into call center expense, and that sort of became the first part of our connected planning journey, right there. Those three were the big ones. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:08:06.3: 

Yes, and eventually, ICM popped up. SPM came up. 

 

Jo Youn 0:08:09.9: 

Yes. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:08:10.2: 

So can you talk a little bit about how you started to use Anaplan for [over speaking 0:08:14.9] comp? 

 

Jo Youn 0:08:16.0: 

Yes, absolutely. So, the sales comp journey at Ciena has been a very fun, adventurous journey one, at that. So we put in Anaplan about three years ago, and we put it in for territories and quotas. Just to set the context, I will say, three years ago, we didn't really have the exact design requirements that we should have had in place. I will say internally, we have a very talented team of model builders, solution architects. They know what they're doing, but it's just the requirements were not provided from the user group, the end users. So when we first implemented it, it wasn't the greatest model to come out of Anaplan. So we came out of the first year, it was very much a [?more 0:09:03.9] mentality from our customers, from our end users. Essentially, it was kind of a make it or break it decision point where we had to decide, do we continue with Anaplan and see if we can understand the user journey a little bit better, get to have the requirements on the model? Or do we scratch it and go to a different platform?  

 

Jo Youn 0:09:27.0: 

Luckily, we stuck with it and we actually were able to partner with [?Rolanto] in this project for enhancing our territory and quota. So we did a complete 180 turnaround within, I would say, six months, with the support of [?Prakash] and his team. It was truly a great partnership where now we have exactly what the users want, and we got the feedback. We have all our sellers in the system, whereas previously it was only certain teams that were in there. Then being able to pump out quotas and territories. We have about 850 sellers in the system, all different types of teams, partners, overlays. Everyone is in the system now, and we have all our reporting and validation. We have a pretty extensive process as well, in terms of validating the quotas, making sure they're properly distributed. All of that stayed in app as well. Whereas last year, we had to go outside of the system to get some reporting. Everything was built in. It was a lot smoother process to the point where we had senior VPs or senior directors come to me and say, 'I never knew this is what Anaplan could do.' They were so on the opposite end of the spectrum of not liking Anaplan, and it just completely changed their perspective. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:10:55.3: 

That's great to hear. 

 

Jo Youn 0:10:55.9: 

Yes. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:10:56.4: 

I will say, the product manager in me just understands and respects the fact that you're saying the type of user experience, the way it's built out of the box, because it was done bespoke before the applications were available, you had to come up with that on your own. 

 

Jo Youn 0:11:10.1: 

Absolutely.  

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:11:09.9: 

We have best practice guides, etc. One of the things that we've been really working hard for is to bring these applications that have those best practices, that have really world-class experiences associated with them for the different personas. Any thoughts from you all, when you're looking at the applications and thinking how these could benefit us? As you look at how you rolled out your CEO and the best practices you've rolled out, how do you see Anaplan applications fitting in with your CEO? 

 

Scott Soukup 0:11:37.4: 

It's a good question. So it's going to - I think there's going to be some new use cases coming up. So as we build out and really - and we're driving towards connected planning now. So we're about a little over a year away from, we think, having a full connected planning where we can do you - where you can see if something happens on the demand side or on the supply chain side, what's the impact on earnings per share? I mean really driving that full connected view. So there are going to be some things where we've had to build the models ourselves because that was the only option, and everyone knows - we're lucky that we do have a really talented pool of model builders. We also benefit from the fact that Rolanto has been in there mentoring our team. So building it up so it can be a really world-class model-building team. But ultimately, we want our model builders to spend more time with the business, learning the business. Therefore, if we could get an application that they can understand, then they can spend more time with the business, really understand what the business wants from it. 

 

Scott Soukup 0:12:43.6: 

One thing is we have found across multiple business units, is that people, they do speak different languages. They see things differently. Whereas finance people want a lot of detail right there all the time, of multiple layers. You get to other groups where they want something, they just want to get the answer and go. So really spending more time with the business is where we think we can use some of the applications. One of them coming up might be the integrated business planning app, something like that where we can actually have something, spend time, just have it built and then tweak it, configure it, and then we can move on to the next thing. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:13:21.1: 

Yes, that's so cool. When I look at the journey you're on and all these hexagons you've deployed, you bring up a really good point with them connected. There's actually lines between all these apps. 

 

Scott Soukup 0:13:30.5: 

Yes.  

 

Jo Youn 0:13:30.6: 

Absolutely.  

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:13:30.7: 

These use cases. So as data changes in one, other groups can get the visibility of that. I would imagine you have a bit of swagger in terms of just showing - other groups can see the benefit that came from some of these use cases and how, oh, I don't need to wait for an email to come with updates. It's updated in real time. Do you have groups now coming to you to say, hey, can we get on Anaplan? Can you help me with this use case? How do other groups find out about you? 

 

Scott Soukup 0:13:58.4: 

Well, I mean yes, so being finance, we kind of have an enterprise view of the company. In fact, of all the different functions we are enterprise, we understand the balance sheet. We understand all the revenue, the cost, full P&L actuals for forecast three to five years out. We understand all that. So the way our group is structured, we actually do have business partners, like Jo was partnering with the sales teams on sales comp. We have business partners with the product team, R&D and supply chain. We have people who partner with services group. So it's sort of we look for those adjacencies where we know we can drive further connectedness, but also people do come to us, especially from the sales side where once we delivered a very successful sales comp planning with the territories and quotas, the question is, what else can you do there? Can you do ICM in there? In other words, people, once you start seeing it, they start seeing it can connect. I think once people start seeing it connect, they want it to connect. So it's that. Then we were looking at working with supply chain very closely too, on again, IBP, S&OP brings those, in our company finance runs it, runs the council. But bringing in sales, supply chain under the finance leadership there is really going to be a very powerful thing. People come to us and we discuss it, and we try to make sure we pick the right use case.  

 

Jo Youn 0:15:28.5: 

Just to add to that. I mean in terms of connected planning, the more connected we get, the better and better our models are going to be able to interact and connect together. Just from a territory quota perspective, now we can bring in actuals from a different model. We can bring in the budget or the forecast. We've brought in HR information from workforce planning. So having that interlink between all the models, it just allows greater enhancement and greater user interfaces for the end customers. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:16:04.2: 

So let's talk some more about the SPM and ICM world. Organizations will talk about inaccuracy, data overload. Products like yours are incredibly complex, where I would imagine someone's not just buying something off the shelf, it ships, and then that customer is done. I would imagine there's long deployment engagements for the type of infrastructure equipment you're putting in. Can you maybe talk a little bit about some of the challenges you dealt with from the data perspective and how you were able to address that with Anaplan? 

 

Jo Youn 0:16:36.1: 

Yes, absolutely. So data is never going to be super clean. I would say I think every organization suffers from that challenge, clean data, having it in proper, consistent formatting. We were actually able to resolve this on the fly with Rolanto. We do a restatement every year for our organization. Essentially, for our regional hierarchy, but also our product hierarchy. Like you mentioned, it's a very detailed product portfolio, and we're global, so we cross multiple regions and multiple countries. So having that structure in a system like Anaplan, where you have all the data, you can clean it, you can format it and then be able to load it back into a model, like territory and quota, is what - initially, it's the starting step of your planning cycle. You need to have that base and then build off of that to have your quota distribution. So it's been really helpful to have that connected planning journey for sure. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:17:47.3: 

Okay, so AI is a topic everyone's talking about. I'm curious to hear what are your points? What's your viewpoint here, as a customer hearing all this and what you're hearing from the market? Where are you thinking of going? 

 

Scott Soukup 0:18:00.4: 

So I think one of the great stalls for AI is the data. I mean, and just when I think - I've talked to people about this before. We spent, at least at Ciena, a lot of companies, a lot of years with ERP systems where you had gaps, your [unclear words 0:18:17.6] 80 per cent there, 20 per cent you have to figure out how to do. So people start using spreadsheets to capture transactional truth, or capture things that help them understand what's going on in the business. So we spent 25 of my years building out spreadsheets, Oracle can't do this, Salesforce can't do that. Workday can't do that. So you have a spreadsheet filler for that. What we're finding is that one, a lot of the data concerns we had, at one time, we had 32 data deficiencies that had to be solved before we could move forward to Anaplan. We basically realized that well, we got it down to 13 in a couple of months, but really are we able to live with it, and actually Anaplan helped us start resolving the data that was important to resolve. When you're just asking people what data issues you have, you'll get a whole list of things, but when you actually run this stuff through an engine that has a certain output, it helped us focus on what were the real critical ones go after.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:19:20.1: 

So we think now - and we've seen AI attempts. We've seen some proof of concepts where the answers from AI come out wrong because the data is not understood or the data is biased in some way by people putting it in. With Anaplan, what we're realizing we're getting out of it, having a complete set of financials backwards and forwards. When we end up - we're about 80 per cent of where we need to be, next year when we have it, we'll have, like I said, a full P&L balance sheet, cash flow backwards and forwards. That's going to be data that is trusted and curated. I mean people have signed off on it, people know what it is, and so that is going to be a really interesting source of AI for us to be able to ask those questions. So we see the potential AI is once we have all these different honeycombs together, even be able to go out to Snowflake or something like that, just augment a little bit. If we get these models in here, get them trained up, you're going to - one person who today is spending multiple days trying to figure out either what the next question is coming from executives.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:20:27.7: 

They're running this, they're running this, they're looking at this, they're analyzing this. They're pivoting it this way. They're running this Power BI report, whatever. They're going to be able to ask a very complex question. The AI is going to be able to go out to these models, pull out the answer and also explain how it got the answer. So we've been playing around a little bit with this, and it looks like it's promising. So the idea there is that we're going to be able to use AI to really not have to worry about building out 20 or 30 more pages in Anaplan, on the UX. We're going to be able to use AI for the folks, to the people who are actually doing the business, trying to understand it, to ask the questions. So you can sort of picture it this way, you have a model, you have an application that has your basic standard content in there every week or every day, whatever you want, and then to ask those 20 questions that get asked every week, that keep people working on Friday night and Saturday and Sunday to get ready for a Monday meeting with the executives. We think the AI is going to help that journey quite a bit. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:21:31.2: 

Yes, you said the word explainability.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:21:31.7: 

Yes. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:21:33.0: 

I think that is so key because there's this black box with these deep networks, these [?LLMs 0:21:39.2]. To understand how they came to it, is it a hallucination or is it an actual answer? [?EVO 0:21:44.7] talked about the running on one device example earlier. So having the ability to do that citation, having the ability to understand what was included in that, to weigh that. So your humans in the loop are making the right decision. 

 

Scott Soukup 0:21:57.4: 

Our business users are very savvy. I mean, we have people who really understand our business, they understand our market. They have ten and fifteen years of knowledge of what happened. Remember when this happened fifteen years ago. So for them to be able to see the answer and see how it got it, that's what's going to build the trust in that, for us.  

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:22:18.1: 

Yes. I'm curious, are you hearing people in the organization come to you and say, hey, I want this cool use case I saw on YouTube or whatever? Or is it you being able to reflect and think we want to roll this out in a manner that's going to add as much impact as possible? What's going on inside of Ciena? 

 

Scott Soukup 0:22:35.5:  

I mean finance people are starting to get their lives back a little bit with this. I mean, it's - so you get the 30,000 clicks in Anaplan done. Then the next thing they want to do, well, what's the next pain point? Well, the consolidation folks, they're out there, they're working Friday night. They're doing work between their kids' athletic events, whatever that is. They just want to be able to close out the week on a Friday and enjoy Sunday. Also too, a lot of times they're getting asked questions from executive, who is getting ready for a Monday meeting. So I think it's really driving that how do we - one of the goals we wanted to really come out of this is that we really wanted to put the A back into the FP&A. We really wanted the FP&A teams to spend more time doing analysis and less time hunting and seeking, finding, trying to fix things. We wanted them to be able to analyze and really get back to applying their knowledge of the business and then be able to put a financial lens on it to answer or to guide executives on the next best thing to do. That's really how we see this playing out. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:23:46.0: 

Jo, I'd love to hear from you, as that business user that's delivering. How do you think about AI? Are there things that are popping up on your radar? 

 

Jo Youn 0:23:55.0: 

Yes, for sure. I mean one thing that's going to come in the very near future is projected attainments on a sales comp perspective. So trying to understand where a customer will land and how does that translate in terms of employee performance? That's a hot topic. That's been coming up in the past several months. So trying to integrate that into the model, into the territory and quota planning cycle to understand, okay, if we revise quotas mid-year, what does that look like? Do we need to make some preventative measures beforehand? So it's interesting from a sales comp perspective as well, of how does this help the end user and then customer, ultimately? 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:24:43.3: 

Yes. 

 

Scott Soukup 0:24:43.1: 

Without building an app. 

 

Jo Youn 0:24:44.1: 

Yes. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:24:44.3: 

Without the app. I think everyone understands the what-if modeling that you can give to a rep, and I can see you know what I can pull in. But you bring up a really good point around that comp modeling and the predictive nature, to look at sales forecast data, run it through additional filters.  

 

Jo Youn 0:24:57.6: 

Exactly. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:24:57.7: 

Then again, that interesting factor for your business is revenue recognition. 

 

Jo Youn 0:25:01.6: 

Yes.  

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:25:02.0: 

Like you even told me before about a RevRec app, you can take a deal and it'll tell you, based on thousands of business rules. Do you mind just speaking briefly on that, because I thought that was really interesting?  

 

Scott Soukup 0:25:12.2: 

So revenue assurance. So we are hardware, software and services, which means we have multiple triggers for our revenue, and a lot of it's based on contract. So we have, let's say, 5000 customers. They all have their contracts, and so the engine we built for this, for revenue assurance, it pulls in 42 streams of data from the business. It pulls in all these lead times, all these other data points. It brings us - it reads contract information. So we've built - we've simulated the revenue recognition engine that we have in another product called Aptitude Rev Stream. We have simulated that RevRec capability, and so when we take a signal and we take a purchase order or an opportunity from Salesforce in, it will profile out the revenue, all the way out to 2030, let's say. So we can see what that revenue profile is, at a region and at a company level, all the way down to a part number level, applying those rules.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:26:13.6: 

So there are thousands of rules that fire, and then when someone wants to make an adjustment to something, oh, I want - what happens if this moves out? All those rules fire and we see the new profile instantaneously. So understanding revenue and how it's being recognized is more important for us than - bookings are great, but how it's actually going to hit the balance sheet and how it's going to impact our quarter and what we've committed to the market, is very vital. So yes, a lot of rules firing on that.  

 

Jo Youn 0:26:40.4: 

Ciena is pretty unique in the fact that we service so many different types of customers, and so we have to adapt to their business models. We have big players like Meta, Amazon, Google, but we also have very small regional service providers that are local, in the States or within Europe, a lot of telecom companies, of course, and… 

 

Scott Soukup 0:27:03.2: 

A lot of project-based work, yes. 

 

Jo Youn 0:27:04.2: 

Yes, so it's really unique in the fact that we service so many different types of customers, and we have to be able to adjust and adapt and be flexible to all of their business models. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:27:17.1: 

That's a really good point. So we're coming up on time. We would love to hear from both of you, any words of wisdom in terms of how do you work with an Anaplan COE? Any lessons learned over the years here? 

 

Jo Youn 0:27:31.3: 

Yes, I mean just from my side, lesson learned, patience is going to be very necessary as you go through your journey. It's a lot of trial and error. It's a lot of really trying to deep dive and get an understanding of what is it that the end user, the end customer needs, or maybe they don't even know what they need, but try to be proactive in understanding that, I would say in terms of words, of wisdom, I mean… 

 

Scott Soukup 0:28:02.3: 

I think one of the big things, I think I've seen this mistake made over many years, is that everyone wants a standardized okay, if we get everyone doing the same thing, this will all work fine. I mean any technology will work under that. I mean, I'm just going back from my ERP example. If we change the way our business was, jettison customers who didn't want to play by the rules, I mean, Oracle would be perfect out of the box, right? But it's not. So one of the things I've learned, really, is that you really have to meet the customers and meet the users where they're at. And understanding how dynamic our market is, I can tell you, in North America, our customers are much different in how they're sold to, how we recognize revenue versus EMEA or APJ, or even we get into the submarine business, where we're dealing with consortia, which is not even a customer. It's a whole group of people coming together under an organization. It's not even like a named customer.  

 

Scott Soukup 0:29:00.5: 

So you got all these differences, and if we didn't use the technology to flex to fit those use cases, we would have another application that people were just trying to keep up and running, as opposed to having application that's trying to make people's lives easier. So my big lesson learned is that as much as I've seen and we've tried to resist the customization, you've got to do it if you want it to be successful. 

 

Dan Koellhofer 0:29:28.2: 

Yes. Great advice. Thank you.