Scenario planning and analysis: the new strategic imperative

Anaplan's innovation agenda is transforming scenario planning and analysis, enabling organizations to navigate uncertainty and drive strategic decision-making in an increasingly complex environment. Anaplan Connect kicks off with our welcome session on how to outpace your competition by making the right decisions, right now.

Joe Horsey 0:00:06.1:

So thank you so much for joining us today, lovely Boston, the weather's amazing. I live in Austin, Texas, so this weather is - like it's sweltering hot still in Austin. So global SVP of pre-sales for Anaplan. I've been here about six months, so this is kind of like a big deal for me, my first big stage presentation, so be nice. Really excited. So just a little bit of survey, whose first Connect is this? Raise your hand, please. First Connect, first timers, I love it. Anaplan customers within the last year, new customers. Right here? Awesome. Two years, Anaplan customers. Three. Three years, there you go, some three. Okay, anybody here longer than three years? Look at that, wow. So amazing wealth of experience. Any prospects? Salespeople, look around. Prospects and [?we can see them 0:00:57.7]. Great. This is a great opportunity for you to network, if you've been with Anaplan for ten years, if you've been with Anaplan for one year or you're thinking about investing within Anaplan, great, I'm glad you're here. There's a wealth of knowledge, a lot of networking, a lot of experience in the room, so please the sessions are going to be amazing. In the breaks and when you have time to network, meet somebody new, that's my challenge to all of you, meet somebody new. You're all sitting with your people that you work with, you work with them all the time, right? Go meet somebody new. 

 

Joe Horsey 0:01:27.0:

So anyway, thank you so much for being here, I'm really, really excited about the agenda. Disclaimer, we're going to talk about some roadmap stuff, we're going to talk about stuff that's maybe not product yet or we can't sell you yet. So don't make any buying decisions based off of what we talk about, even though it's going to sound really great and you're going to want to buy it. So again, disclaimer, everything is subject to change, let's put it that way, legal asked me to put that in there so we had to do that. Here's a little bit of the agenda, right? So you're stuck with me for about 45 minutes, we'll talk a little bit about Anaplan's innovation and some of the strategic imperatives and where we're making some investments. We'll give you all a break. Some of these other Connects we go straight through two-and-a-half hours. That's a lot, right? So we'll do a little break, 15 minutes, all right? You're not going to want to miss the second half. Adam Thier, our chief product officer is going to come up here and talk about AI, talk about some of the really amazing innovations his team's putting together. So back in here at 11:00 so we can stay on track, but the break is going to be nice. All right, sponsors, we can't do this even without our sponsors, so first of all I just want to thank all of the partners for their investment of time, obviously of your money and the resources.

 

Joe Horsey 0:02:42.0:

Again, another great resource for all of you to engage with you when you get out during the breaks. They're all set up out there in the partner - I'll call it a pavilion, is it big enough to be called a pavilion? I think it's a pavilion. Go out there, talk to the partners, they bring some really great experience, unique experience around Anaplan. So again, a hand for our partners please, thank you so much. Okay, let's jump into some of these. I'll grab some more milk. Anybody like these cartons? No? I guess they're good for the environment. Where does Anaplan sit in the overall estate, right? Really, as I joined and I started thinking about where Anaplan sits in the overall enterprise estate, we really see us being the fifth strategic platform in the enterprise, right? Businesses are doing more with data, businesses are changing, there's macro-economic disruptions happening. Planning is not a once-a-year thing, it's not even a quarterly thing, it's happening monthly, weekly, daily, right? Not only proactively, but also in response to disruptions in your business, right? So we feel that Anaplan is positioned to be the fifth strategic platform in the environment and it's going to give you all a competitive differentiator to allow you to make business decisions with the right data at the right time. To not only drive revenue, service your customers, but to also even elevate the value of some of the other investments you've made across your estate.

 

Joe Horsey 0:04:14.3:

Very finicky. So if you think about these systems you have in your environment, right? You have ERPs, right, that are driving operational data, transactional data, you have your sales data in some sort of CRM out there, employee data in a HCM, you have a workflow platform out there. A lot of that stuff is backwards looking, right? It's transactional, it's system of record and it allows you to really report the history. Well, by moving that data and breaking those siloes, because that's the other thing, a lot of the business processes if you're thinking about demand planning, inventory, financial planning, they're dependent on data from all those different sources. So how can you forecast something? How can you make a business decision if your data is siloed in different places, right? So by bringing it into Anaplan we can actually give you a forward-looking platform to allow you to optimize your decisions, be more strategic with the business, right? Actually forecast what's going to happen. Not only like proactively forecast, but then forecast in the face of disruption, as well. I think that's really, really critical and the breaking down of the silos is really where we're making a big part of our investments in the platform that I'm going to talk about here as we go in there. We want to be forwards looking, we want to give you the data in real time, give you the performance to be able to model as many scenarios as you want and then give you the level of granularity that you need to really make informed decisions for your business, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:05:33.5:

So breaking down the silos and really driving the value that was promised in a lot of that backwards-looking transactional data. $500 million of investment, right? Adam and his team are bringing out innovation at a pace that, quite honestly, I haven't seen in a long time. I think a lot of you as customers would probably raise your hand and say, 'I have not seen this amount of innovation coming out of Anaplan this quickly for many years,' especially those who have been customers for a long time. So that pace is only going to pick up, with AI, with some of the other investments that we're making. So be ready for it. There's three really big areas of focus on our investment, one is on the platform, right? So really it's around how do we continue to drive scalability, resilience, security? AI is driving a lot of that, we need to have a platform that scale for all of you to be able to handle the amount of data that you're going to want to bring into the platform. Applications, who's rolled out applications? One person. All right, Adam, we've got to take a note on that, right? Again, applications is new, it's a new way of developing or deploying applications. It was very interesting to me, I joined from Service Now, which was a platform, you can build whatever you want. What do I build? Whatever you want. Well, again, that's great and a lot of flexibility, but it requires a lot of work and you've got to really know what you're doing.

 

Joe Horsey 0:06:56.0:

Applications are going to provide a form factor for all of you to deploy new use cases, extend your current use cases to serve the business in a way that maybe you couldn't before. Whether you're resource constrained, you don't have enough model builders in your COE, right? So think about applications as a way to not only activate our best practices, we've deployed thousands and thousands, maybe millions of models around financial planning and supply chain. Yes, all customers are special, we know you're all different, your use case is very unique, but financial planning use cases, supply chain use cases, there's probably commonality to 70 per cent of it, right? So these applications are capturing that best practices, decades of experience that we have working with a lot of customers, so that you can get out of the box functionality. Then I'll talk a little bit in more detail around how that's going to lower your cost of ownership and allow you to operate your Anaplan estate more effectively. So I'll cover those two platform and applications, Adam after the break will come in and talk everything AI. AI is not a bolt on for us, it's not an afterthought, we're infusing that to every level of our platform, so super exciting stuff we're going to see there and coming out of this keynote we're going to have a lot of our pre-sales folks and a lot of our technical folks out there being able to show you a lot of this AI innovation live, so come find us.

 

Joe Horsey 0:08:11.8:

Platform. All right, I'm going to leave that up. Adam, my water's on the left, yours is on the right, okay? Just for when you come up here. All right, so I'm going to talk about some of the platform investments and there's two key areas I want to hit on, right? So obviously planning relies on what? Data, right? Data that you can get into the system, data you can bring into the platform in a simple way, at speed, with scale, right? So Anaplan Data Orchestrator is one of the new innovations Adam and his team has brought to the market and really it's all about getting data into the platform from multiple sources. Being able to massage that data, make sure that the data's consistent so you can actually drive modelling scenarios and forecasting off of that data, right? We want to do it simpler, faster and make it an out-of-the-box configuration. Data by far, if you go talk to any of our partners, talk to any of us, is the primary lynchpin of any successful Anaplan deployment. You've got to get your data right and so we're hoping to bring out not only the ability to scale what kind of data you can bring in from multiple data sources, but do it in an effective way. Also be able to drive lineage, right? So as datasets get massive and you start making business decisions on that data, eventually somebody has to question, well, why are you making that investment? Why did we decide that that was the right product to produce for that market, right? So being able to do what we call data lineage and be able to trace that back gives you the confidence, not only how was the decision made, but then also what data sources were we using to do that, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:09:55.7:

So let me give you an example, because these are very, okay, Data Orchestrator, data in, you massage it, you model it, think about a CPG company that is planning their summer promotions, right? What data do you need to do that? You need Nielsen market data, that might be living in Snowflake, right? You need shipping information from your ERP system, potentially. You need sales information from Salesforce. I think the trade promotional character might be in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, right? So you think about the data sources that are needed to actually do the demand - what a demand planner needs to do to say, hey, what products, what promotions should we do for what beverages in what part of the country? So being able to take all that data, consolidate it, by the time somebody does that today manually the data's weeks old, right? You're not able to make the right business decision with that. So with ADO we can bring all that data, with ADO and Cloudworks, they can visualize where these data sources are coming in. You can normalize them, and so then the planners in that scenario can shift from massaging data and trying to make sure do we have the right data? Is it outdated? Is it real time? To actually proactively modelling the future, right, on trusted data. It's like a simple example of how complex these modelling scenarios can be and if you're missing one of those data sources, or the quality of that data's not there, then the decisions you're making really are probably not as accurate as they could be.

 

Joe Horsey 0:11:19.7:

Polaris. Who's got Polaris models rolled out in their environment? A few, don't be shy, okay. All right. I joined and I think I joined and we talked about - it was New York Connect when I joined and Polaris had hit the market and really one of the things is we talked to customers especially that had been long-time customers, a large modelled estate. There's this trade off, right? You either trade off granularity or you trade off performance, right? So one of the things as we started - Adam and his team started talking to a lot of customers, that was starting to hit a critical point, right? Where people had concatenated models, they were doing normal representations of their business because of the limitations of the classic engine. So Adam and team come to the rescue, they come out with this Polaris calculation engine, right? Really it is the next generation calculation engine. Let's be clear, it's not our only calculation engine, we have the classic engine, we have a Polaris engine. They're both fit for purpose, they serve different use cases, right? What we really believe is that you shouldn't have to sacrifice the granularity of your business because you want performance, right? So you should be able to dimension your business on the level that it actually looks like in the real world, versus trying to do something unnatural. So that's really where Polaris sits, it allows you to uncover trends, get insights in massive, massive datasets, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:12:45.7:

I mean I'll show you some of the benchmarking that we've done, it's unbelievable, right? So that combined with a more modern modelling experience is going to allow you to not only create models that truly represent - more accurately represent your business, but it will also allow you to drive more insightful decision making. So let's do two examples here. So financial services, stress testing of assets and liabilities, right? Banks, insurers, it's a very complex, time-consuming scenario, right? So you're bringing in data from different portfolios, from legacy systems that really could only probably support one, two, three forecasting scenarios quarterly, maybe, because of performance, how antiquated the systems are. By using and modelling that on Polaris you can actually get to granular scenario modelling, you can do instant calculations on what's the capital impact of interest rate shifts, right? What's the impact of a market shock to my assets and liabilities posture, right? So now you're getting all of this data that's not static, it's not transactional or historical, but it's real time. So now reactive compliance becomes real time and really a strategic advantage for you as an organization. Again, that's the type of decision making you can make when you don't have to sacrifice granularity, right, for performance.

 

Joe Horsey 0:14:07.3:

Pharmaceutical clinical trial supplies, right? Clinical trial supply and planning, so you think about what that entails, right? Clinical supply chains are critical, right? You need to have the right patient-level demand, country rules, drug expirations, any of those are off, you do a trial and you can't get the drug to that particular patient, millions of dollars are wasted in that trial now, right? Because now it doesn’t meet - it invalidates the trial, wastes millions of dollars. So allowing to be able to model patient and drug kit, it will level across thousands of sites, planners can simulate enrolment scenarios, they can do optimizing supply chain, prevent waste, accelerate time to market of new drugs, right? Again, think about all the dimensions that you would have to model to really be able to do that at scale globally and then forecast in real time, right? So I'm trying to bring a couple of just scenarios where you can see what would be the application of these platform capabilities in the real world? All right, benchmarking. So one of the things I talked about, granularity, so in your mind Polaris is granularity, dimension the business as it stands today, but don't sacrifice performance, right? So you can actually drive not only more real-time calculations faster, but then also the consumption of the disk space on the back end is a lot more efficient. So it's a lot more efficient model, especially for sparser datasets. This benchmark was awesome, it's a white paper, it's published on our website, right? I think it's on our website, so you can go download this. You can expect more of these types of benchmarks and white papers to come out.

 

Joe Horsey 0:15:42.3:

It was really, really interesting to see they modelled six demand inventory planning workflows, 80 process steps, with 20 concurrent users across 10,000 products, customers and locations, and look at the response time. 90 per cent of the interactions were less than a second, right? The entire planning process less than two minutes, right? So now, again, that is visually the tradeoff of granularity and performance going away, right? Now your users are getting a better experience, I mean I'm not an expert model builder, but I've gone into some of our Anaplan-on-Anaplan stuff, that's not running on Polaris, and I get the little spinny wheel, right? Again, that sacrificing that performance really impacts the way that you can make business decisions, right? So love the benchmarking data, expect more of this to come out and please go download it from our website, I think it's really, really informative. Especially as you're evaluating new use cases that might - that Polaris might be a really good fit for. All right, so here's the thing, I don't want to go to Polaris, I've got all these classic models, why are you forcing me to go to Polaris? No one's forcing anybody to go to Polaris, right? Polaris is fit for purpose for use cases. If you have a classic model out there where you're able to answer the questions the business is giving to you, it's performant, no one's complaining about it, leave it on classic, that's fine. No one's going to make you go and lift and shift that. I know there's a lot of investment over years and years and years of model building and of operating our platform. What I would argue is that there's probably new demand and new use cases from the business that you've probably put in your backlog. No, we couldn't do that in a classic model, there's no way I could dimension that out, right? Or there's no way that the performance of the model would work. So you put it on the backlog, it's easier just to not address that, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:17:33.4:

What I would encourage you all to do is think about the use case, think about the dimensions and really, honestly, the questions that the business is asking of you, can you answer it? Would you stand behind that answer, right? So I just want to be very clear because there's a lot of messaging out there, classic and Polaris are both part of the Anaplan platform, they're not going anywhere, right? I do think Polaris serves a different purpose and as you start to evaluate new use cases, Adam's going to show you some really, really amazing AI stuff. Maybe you have models that are running in classic that you're just dealing with, just limping along, maybe those are the ones you might want to move and optimize to Polaris, right? So migrating to Polaris is not as - we've done it in a lot of customers, it's not as heavy a lift or as scary as a lot of people are framing it out to be. So you can move a model in Polaris. Some of the things that you'll want to focus on is the formulas that you have in there, right? I'm not sure how many customers this is based off of, but you can see two per cent formula tweaking, 98 per cent of the model from classic to Polaris was retained. So you're not wiping everything away you did, you're not starting from scratch. Yes, it's a change, but it should unlock a lot more value for you going forwards. The two per cent of formula tweaking, if you can get 73 per cent more performance, reduce the model size by 77 per cent, right? That's significant savings on the back end, right? So yes, look, is it a one quick don't touch it and go? No, but, again, engage your partners, engage us, we can come help you assess your current estate, identify which models would probably see the biggest benefit from moving to Polaris, let's take a look at those, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:19:11.7:

Then for new use cases ask yourself, why not Polaris? Is classic good enough? So I think that's an important conversation to have, especially for those of you who have those large Anaplan estates. Less than a month to move some of these, right? So I want to clear that out, because I hear that a lot from our customers, 'Why do I have to go? I don't want to migrate, it's a heavy lift, my team's too busy,' right? So again, I think it's a good conversation to have, especially as you lay out your roadmap and you'll see some of the applications and innovation that we're going to be bringing to market. All right, let's talk about applications. Really what we set out to do, I say we, Adam and his very, very smart team, but we, the Anaplan we, is to change the way that use cases get rolled out on the platform, right? Custom platform development, sure, it's great, I love the flexibility. You need a lot of know-how, you really need to understand the business, you need to ask the right questions, It's heavy, it's a heavy lift and I love the flexibility of it. What we want to do is capture our best practices, I mentioned it earlier, we've done thousands of deployment, millions of models running in our environment. We have best practices, we can build those into the applications to serve those use cases. Why try to reinvent those? Again, 70 per cent of your best practices are going to be the same. Sure, there's 30 per cent that you might want to tailor, extend, you're not going to lose that flexibility. I hear that a lot, as well, 'If I go to applications it doesn't meet all of my use cases, it's not 100 per cent of the use cases.' Maybe it never will, but I guarantee you it'll meet 80 per cent and then you can go focus 20 per cent of the time on the more high-value activities of designing for your specific industry, your specific use case, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:21:07.9:

Again, we're trying to shift the total cost of ownership, the time it takes to deploy these applications so that you can see value a lot quicker, right? So again, a lot - in the six months there's been a lot of superlatives, it's this or that. It's not, we're giving you the flexibility, we think that there's a lot of value in being able to deliver our best practices from decades of experience out there, so that all of you, whether you've been here for ten years with Anaplan or you're a new customer and you're sitting back over there. Salespeople, remember, there's like six of them, prospects back there. Why should you build from scratch? I think there's got to be a really good reason. Maybe we don't have an application for it, great, that might be a reason, but we're going to bring out uses cases, the application roadmap is - it's insane. The teams are bringing out a lot of innovations. Then, so that's total cost of ownership, take the best practices, it's okay, deploy them, right? Then extend, configure those models to fit for purpose for your business, you won't lose that flexibility. What does it give you then? You deploy it, you're leave, you're seeing value, now version two of that app comes out, version three, we roll out the next innovation in the platform. Now that you're running on our applications that are supported by Anaplan application framework, those are just upgrades. They're not rebuilds, they're not, hey, I've got to rewrite my model so I can take advantage of the next version of ADO or the next AI innovation that Adam's team brings out. That gets form factored and packaged into the application, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:22:37.3:

So I think from a total cost of ownership initially and then over time you'll be able to consume our innovations because again, like I said, the innovation train has left the station, it is moving, right? So in that with AI it's only going to get faster. So if you don't take the efficiencies of something like an application or application framework you're going to be stuck just trying to keep up, right? So I think that's another real business benefit that you'll see of leveraging our applications. Again, you have existing use cases running out there, you don't have to move them to the application, right? For new use cases ask yourself do I need to build this bespoke or is there an application that's being provided by Anaplan, by a partner, etc., that I could deploy, get me to value quicker, right? So I think we're trying to give you a lot of flexibility in how you can get to the end state and the use cases, but I think a lot of that is you also asking the right questions, engaging the right partner, engaging us from an advisory standpoint. To really understand what makes the most sense for you. Let's talk about some actual numbers, right? So I believe these customers were all territory and quota app customers, that one came out in 2023, I believe. 40 per cent of the deals that we're seeing right now in our pipeline are new customers rolling out on apps. 60 per cent are existing customers that are investing in applications in new use cases to add onto their estate, right? So now the roadmap that was very linear and maybe over three, four, five years is getting compressed.

 

Joe Horsey 0:24:07.7:

So these are some examples, Anavate did a ten-week go live at Arrow, right? Spaulding Ridge, Flexera live in nine weeks, right? We're taking months to weeks to get live, to start seeing value from that investment, right? We deployed Rocket Software in 12 weeks and then Qlik in 12 weeks, and I love the Qlik example because it was 12 weeks to get the application out and then that also included the extension of, hey, we have some stuff that's not covered by the app. Great, the flexibility of our platform will allow you to extend to those use cases, it's not one or the other. So let's talk about a little bit the framework and what it brings to the table, right? I talked about upgradability, versioning. So there's two things that the application framework at Anaplan, we're calling it AAF now, it really rolls off the tongue, AAF, the AAF, Anaplan Application Framework. Two things, platform upgrades, right? So as we roll out new innovations in the way we bring data in, AI, security, scalability, resilience, you're going to have those just upgraded, right, into the platform or into your applications. New application versions, I think we're at version two of… Two on supply chain and IFP, that innovation's coming out, right? So to be able to consume those, the use cases, the benefits of those new applications, new functionality, regular maintenance, right? All of that changes now in your operating model.

 

Joe Horsey 0:25:41.7:

So think about that freeing up time in your COEs to then take on the demand from the business, right? So the platform upgrades and then being able to upgrade to new versions incrementally, without losing the extensions you do, right? So the application framework's going to be smart enough, it knows what comes out of the box, it knows what you've extended on top of that. So you're not going to break that work, right? So again, I think it's really important that we understand that. Look, this is moving very quickly, application roadmap that I bring up next is massive. I remember in New York this was 25-30 apps by the end of the year, I think T&Q launched in 2023, Financial Consolidation became part of the portfolio with the Fluence acquisition in May 2024. Then IFP and OWP launched in October of 2024. There's no shortage of innovation coming out in these applications, and then for 2025 already four new applications go to market, Capacity Planning, Account Segmentation, Scoring, right? Integrated Business Planning, Merchandise Financial Planning. The roadmap is going to continue, right? So again, as you look at your estate, as you look to take on new use cases, ask yourself is there an application that does this? Is there an application that does 80 per cent of this? Because if it does you're going to get more time to value and then focus on the 20 per cent, right? So again, this roadmap is out there, come talk to us if you have any specific questions around supply chain, HR workforce, finance.

 

Joe Horsey 0:27:06.4:

There's a new one, Purple Box, for IT spend optimization, right? So we're even veering into some different areas within the business to target some different use cases that we wouldn't traditionally target. So software spend optimization is really exciting, and a different buyer in the organization, so super excited about that. Again, innovation train's going very quickly, a lot of applications are going to come out and then what this allows us to do, right? Because, look, we have limited capacity, Adam doesn't have unlimited resources to have millions and millions of engineers and developers out there doing all the apps. Quite honestly, look, we're a software company and we want to serve the 80 per cent, right? There's a lot of use cases out there that we might never have an application for, enter the partners. Partners bring very unique expertise, maybe it's industry expertise, maybe it's specific to a use case, maybe it's a market that we don't see the demand in there, but a partner might because it's very unique to them. So the framework is going to allow us to then drive innovation through the ecosystem, right? So you're going to have partner-built applications, you're going to have partner-endorsed applications, right? So now we have a framework that now you go get an application from Anaplan or you go buy an application from a partner, you know that they're built on the same framework, you know that they're upgradeable. You know that they take advantage of the latest capabilities within the platform, whether it's ADO, Polaris, security AI, right? So you're futureproofing your investment in a really, really significant way and then also not having to go and build stuff from scratch, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:28:42.4:

So I'm super excited about that, I think our application innovation roadmap, along with the partner application roadmap, those things together, what use case could we not address, right? So super excited about that, more to come on the partner-built applications. So Rawlings. They were one of our first - I think demand planning they rolled out. So you think about Rawlings, right, baseball, anybody have travel baseball kids? We were talking to some customers yesterday, yes, I see you back there, Eric, like driving all over Tennessee and Georgia and that's before the mountain bikes too, right? So anyway, Rawlings, baseball, gloves, all stuff baseball, right? Again, some of these challenges are probably like you probably can read these out and say, 'Oh yes, that's us too.' You might be in a different industry, but manual, outdated, Excel-based forecasting, stale data that was never updated, the baseline forecast didn't have alerts, accuracy was questionable. Then they started growing through acquisition, so now there was data sources that weren't even available or they didn't even know what the data sources were. Or if they did they were in different systems, they weren't formatted or they didn't have the right structure to run into the forecast, right? So omni-channel customizations were harder. Rolling out demand planning, they saved three to five hours a week per planner and, more importantly, they reduced excess inventory. You don't want to have inventory sitting on the shelves that's not being bought, right? So you actually understand where the demand's coming from, get the right product to the right place for the right customer in time, right?

 

Joe Horsey 0:30:20.3:

So a great story here with Rawlings, super excited and one of our early adopters of the demand planning application. There's tons and tons of these stories out there, like I said, 40 per cent of our new business is landing on applications, 60 per cent are existing customers expanding their use case footprint with apps, right? So yes. All right. I was with Service Now, I used Anaplan once a year to do territory quota and the user interface was meh, it was okay, right? It was very data heavy and looked like a spreadsheet, right? The user interface of Anaplan is critical. You can have all the data you want in there, all the AI infused, all the insights, the forecasts, the scenarios, everything. If a user logs in, they're like, 'I can't get to the answer, it takes me seven pages to get down to answer the one question I should have answered on the first page,' right? So that user experience is a massive, massive investment for us. We search feedback for customers, so we had a customer give us some feedback around synchronizing browsers, right? That release I think came out last week. Adam, is that right? Synchronizing browsers, that was last week, yes? Right, browser sync. So again, we want feedback on all of you from what that user experience needs to be because I think it's evolved over time, but if your users - and we're talking about it with - I think it was with [unclear name 0:31:46.9]. Actually, no, it was, again, at dinner last night, people get very accustomed to where they live. They might only know Excel and they don't want to let go of Excel, right? So how do you get people into a new platform to see the light of, hey, listen, yes, I know it's different, I know you don't have your lovely VLOOKUP, right? Again, the insights and the benefit that you can bring to the business is amplified through Anaplan, and we all know that.

 

Joe Horsey 0:32:09.8:

If that first user experience is meh, they're not going to come back, they're going to be like, 'No, I'm going to go back to Excel, that's where I want to live.' So we're making a massive amount of investment in evolving this. So I mean margin management, right? I should be able to log into the first page, it should know what my role is in the organization and should just tell me. Hey, it's the third week in the quarter, you typically ask me these questions at this time of the year, I'm going to just surface those insights to you, so you can make decisions, right? Anaplan by its very nature is data heavy, data intensive, that's great. You can drill down to the nth degree of data if you want to, but let's surface those insights and make them very easy to access. So based off your role, what you're trying to do, you can get very quickly to that answer. If not you just spend a ton of time just clicking through all this data and you're like ten pages deep into the platform and you forgot the question you were trying to answer, right? So again, that user experience I think is a massive investment for us. We need your feedback, what do you want that user experience to be? You've got a captive audience in our chief product officer, so if you find him out there bend his ear, right? So again, come to us and Adam will talk a little bit about AI, but think about how AI changes this user experience, as well, right? Which I'm really excited about. So here's a couple of screenshots and mockups of how maybe you'll see the look and feel of Anaplan change as you roll out new capabilities, whether it's operational workforce planning, long-range planning, etc.

 

Joe Horsey 0:33:40.1:

So again, that user experience, especially as you start to bridge outside of just your team to other lines of business where you maybe want to bring in marketing, you want to bring in sales, you want to bring in other areas of the business. You've got to make that experience enjoyable, you've got to give them a little bit of, hey, come to this modern platform. Not only will it allow you to do your job better and more effectively, but you're going to enjoy it, right? So I'm ten minutes left, I think that's my last slide. All right, we've got a little animation, territory and quota. Again, much more modern look and feel. At the end of the day get to the answers to the questions you know you want to ask quicker, right? With all the supporting data underneath, right? So I'm really excited about this, as we start to see these out-of-the-box dashboards and more modern experiences coming in. All right. 

SPEAKERS

Joseph Horsey, Senior Vice President, Global Pre-Sales, Anaplan