Infinera analyzes complex deals at lightning speed

Infinera’s sales teams submit 12,000+ pricing requests to the company’s bid management team every year. Infinera has more than 1,000 customers worldwide for its opto-electronic networking products, including 90% of Tier 1 carriers and 85% of leading internet content providers, and they’re constantly expanding their networks with new gear. Deals can get complicated in a hurry, so Infinera’s bid management team’s job is to confirm that every deal makes good business sense and aligns with Infinera’s deal strategy.

“Each of our 30,000 SKUs has its own pricing and associated costs, and we have customers around the world,” says Lucas Muro, Director of Bid Management at Infinera. Not long ago, he recalls, his team evaluated deals using individual spreadsheets; costs and other assumptions were sometimes out of date, and deal analysis took too much time. “We work in a super-fast-paced business, selling things that make the internet go,” Muro says. “With our old deal analysis tool, it could take us days, sometimes weeks, to get back to a customer.” Those delays could result in lost business.

Gaining time-to-market advantage

Infinera brought in Anaplan in early 2020 and uses the platform today to plan in finance as well as sales and marketing. “But our biggest use case, our bread and butter, is our deal analysis tool,” Muro says. “With Anaplan we can figure out, very efficiently and accurately, if a deal makes business sense for us.”

Using Anaplan, all deals are evaluated based on consistent criteria — even in the face of Infinera’s high deal volume, massive product catalog, and customers who do business in a variety of currencies.

“Infinera’s procurement people regularly provide us with up-to-date cost information that we build into the pricing tool,” Muro explains. “Because we’re working with current costs when we evaluate deals, we’re giving our customers the absolute best price possible.”

And they’re doing it in record time. “Salespeople can bring a deal to us, have it analyzed, and respond to the customer the same day,” Muro says. “Because we use Anaplan, our sales teams gain a time-to-market advantage.”

Operating at the speed of its customers

Infinera teams worldwide use Anaplan for deal analysis. “We’ve got hundreds of people in different time zones all around the world working on the platform,” Muro says. “I’m able to guarantee that they’re working with the most updated information so they can accurately perform their tasks every day.”

This enables Infinera’s end customers — including the largest carriers and cloud operators in the world — to expand their networks at their own pace. “Now that we have Anaplan, we can operate at the speed of our customers,” Muro says. “And because I have information at my fingertips, I can answer any question about my business. I feel like the king of my universe.”

His entire team shares that empowered feeling. “My team and I believe that we live in a world of problems that look like nails,” Muro says. “And for us, Anaplan is the hammer.”