Iver van de Zand 0:00:04.6:
Good morning, we are ready to start. This is Iver van de Zand. I run a part of product management, looking after calculation engines, data movement, CIO Essentials, but also the tech documentation. I came over recently to Anaplan, joining the organization for a single reason. The single reason I came over, you heard it at the keynote today, is the connectiveness and planning, which I really believe is the way to move planning forward. What we will do today in this 45-minute slot is I'm going to take you on a deep dive on where we invest with products, where we are, what you can expect from us, and what are the bigger investment buckets. To start off, and I'd really like to emphasize again on it. You heard it this morning, but here we go. There is an additional $500 million budget extra on product. We are additionally investing that $500 million in product, and what we have done in product, we choose four key investment areas where we place our cards. In products, there are four areas where we said, with the additional budget, that is where we are going to double down, that is where we are going to accelerate, and I will take you through those topics. Before we go there, I think there was another thing that you conclude very well this morning. We focus on connected applications. That's super important, connected applications use our platform. All the things we do in the platform are in the benefit as well for the applications, which allows us to scale, to scale, to scale, and to scale, end of the line. That is where we are playing with applications scaling out.
Iver van de Zand 0:02:04.5:
Now, before we go into those four investment areas, I just want to touch a little bit on the things happening most recently last year. We accelerated on Polaris, our calculation engine of innovation. You heard it this morning, all the apps run on Polaris. Really accelerating there, touching over 100 customers right now. Workflow is there. I am the former CTO of SAP. I've owned all the planning products. There was one big problem all the time. One big problem, and that was the lead time to implement planning applications. Planning is not that easy, so it took by default a year, 12 to 14 months, to roll out an application. If you look at a thing like Workflow, it seems so simple, but Workflow forces you to design for performance. A very, very important topic, using it right now quite intensely. Geo-Mapping was there, over 100,000 downloads. I just called out two applications. There were many more launched last year, but the ones to call out, Territory and Quota, you heard about it this morning from the guys, you heard about Supply Chain; many, many more applications, I will touch a little bit on it. Plus, we invested quite a bit last year in I would say the things that are good but so relevant. CIO Essentials, all about governments, all about security setup, all about access control, all those things.
Iver van de Zand 0:03:34.6:
Now, let me tell you what we will do today. I'm going to call out those four investment areas where we additionally invest, where we accelerate, and you see the four areas on the screen. The first one I'm going to talk about is the applications, the prebuilt applications. Our applications, I hope it's clear to you, are way beyond what you see others in the market do. What others in the market are doing is prebuilt business content. Very nice dashboards, what have you. Applications with Anaplan are all about models are there, connectors are there, workflows are there, automation is there, dashboard is there, governance is there. It's all there. It's really turnkey applications. You see the emphasis on the word 'connected'. I will talk about that, how we see that connectiveness. Another element that we call out as an investment area is natural dimensionality. Designing the planning application the way you run your business. We are not forcing you to adapt the design of your planning applications to dense information, for example. What you see a lot in the markets, where you can only use dense information. We allow you to design with natural dimensionality.
Iver van de Zand 0:04:54.3:
Another one, and I'm going to wake you up here because it's really important. If you look at a normal planning application, whether it's with Anaplan or another vendor, typically a well-known fact is that around 65 to 70 per cent of that work is in data prep. 65 to 70 per cent of the work is in the data preparation, connecting to data, finding the right data, wrangling it, blending it, joining it, and pushing it into your planning applications. Do you understand why that, for us, is a third investment area? Data orchestration, ensuring that inflow of data is done properly and works in a streamlined way. That's why we focus over there. Number four, my colleague Leigh Romeo will talk about that, is all about AI. Anaplan Intelligence, the way that we branded it. Artificial intelligence, you already heard our CMO talking about it this morning. Also, Adam Thier touched it. We are going to double down on it. Let me start with the first one. Applications, prebuilt applications, and here we go. Jim, he's in front of the room over here, already called it out. Time to market, bringing the rollout of an application from 9 to 11 months down to 9 to 11 weeks. That is massive. Let me tell you a little secret. There's something else very interesting on our applications. They are not only customizable, they are also upgradable.
Iver van de Zand 0:06:30.8:
If we better something in Polaris, if we add functionality in ADO, if we do something smart in CIO Essentials, it all automatically ends up in your applications. Whether you use it or you plan to roll it out, it will be there. That is super, super powerful. We have ten of those applications today, another six coming this year, doubling down next year. We will talk about that. Well, Jim, this morning he spoke about the one code base. Remember what he said? He spoke about one code base with applications. Because we use ADO in every application, because Polaris is there in every application, because we have this application design framework, we are able to provide one code for every application. That means that if you take a typical journey that I am used to in my past with another employer that looks like this, where you run different use cases over many, many years to roll them out, we are very soon going to ship, by default, every application with Anaplan. I'm going to repeat. Very soon, we are going to ship every application by default with Anaplan. That means that you as a user, you can see all those applications. You might even have a sneak peek here and there, You just point and click the ones you want to use. How cool is that? Never done. All the applications will be there for you. You make your use case, you decide which one you want to activate and use.
Iver van de Zand 0:08:23.5:
It goes beyond that, because it's not only our applications, but that same application framework that I talked about will also be opened to partners, and a lot of them are here today. They will be able to design additional applications, put them over there, and you will be allowed to click and activate them. Same story again, very powerful technology. On top of that, of course, you own applications that you might want to put there, you can simply hook into the ones that either we or our partners delivered. I wanted to repeat these slides. Jim Houston this morning, he talked about it, but it is so super essential where we are playing. Now, I made a remark in the beginning that our applications are not only customizable, they're also fully upgradeable. That customization, that set up of those applications, will work through a so-called configurator. Leigh and I made a little video yesterday evening. I just brought a video to give you a glimpse on how the configurator of an application looks like. Have a look.
Iver van de Zand 0:09:40.4:
I use this interface to set up my application. I tell the application how many hierarchies I want to have. I tell the application how the different levels in the hierarchy should work. You see it happening on the screen. I tell the applications how I want to deal with my actuals. I can set up my taxonomy and synonyms in there. Now you all see it happening, I just want to give you a glimpse. Once I've done that and I've confirmed that, I can review everything I set up, verify it, and the application will be rolled out, as you can see on the screen. Super powerful. This configurator, again, nobody has that, and it's a key element that will be used in every application we ship. Super powerful technology, and I wanted to take the opportunity to show this to you. Now, the applications you heard this morning, you saw a lot of information on the screen, but as of today, May 13th, these are the applications that we have. These are the ones that currently are GA and that are ready to use. Very soon, this calendar year, we will add another five. You will get the slides. After that we are ramping up. You heard the colleagues talking about the financial applications, supply chain applications, but the point I want to make, the message I will give to you, is that our acceleration on applications is going to be massive, so very, very powerful area.
Iver van de Zand 0:11:25.5:
Second investment area. Remember, we spoke about four investment area applications. Next one, natural dimensionality. Natural dimensionality is the ability that you can design your planning application in the way you run your business. No adaption to IT technology in terms of density of data. It uses an innovative calculation engine that allows you to plan at any grade, whether it is planning at a relatively higher granularity like financial planning or business planning, or it is planning over way lower grade, like supply chain planning, demand planning, what have you, that is very granular planning. All in one application, utilizing this super powerful turbo calculation engine called Polaris. Both Polaris, but also later on I will talk about ADO, are mandatory for every application that we build. If there's a new application coming, simple rule internally in Anaplan: must have ADO, must have Polaris, no debate. Those applications already existing not using either one of them, we will have a backfill scenario and moving them to ADO and Polaris very soon.
Iver van de Zand 0:12:52.6:
Another thing that we are going to do is introducing benchmarking. Now, if you look at Polaris, you know the numbers, the power of the engine is dazzling. It has to be, by the way, if you want to do all the different types of planning. We can easily run 500 quadrillion cells. I'm not going to even try to explain to you how much it is. It is ridiculously a lot. For me, even more impressive - I have a data warehouse background, I don't know if there are people with data warehouse backgrounds. I tried building dimensions that could run half a million records. Very, very difficult to design. We can easily run it in Polaris. It's super powerful technology. If you see how Polaris evolved here, it was launched in 2022, easily touching 100 customers right now. You see a few of the labels. One of the most recent innovation there was on-demand calc. Keep an eye on the community, I'll keep on publishing over there, you'll get very soon a very cool deep-dive article on on-demand calculation and how to use that, so Polaris, really important.
Iver van de Zand 0:14:01.3:
Over here, we did a little test internally, quite impressive. We set up a supply chain application. We did it in both ways, both classic as well as in a Polaris implementation. You see that even for the Polaris implementation, we made the dimensionality a touch more challenging with triple the number of products, four times the number of customers, and you see that the data space that we use, the model size in Polaris is only ten per cent of the one in classic. That means that we also set up publicly the way that we are innovating, building new functionalities, is focused on Polaris. The future calculation engine, we more and more invest in Polaris. Does that mean that classic is decommissioned or whatever? No, not at all. Many, many use cases where you are perfectly set with classic. We keep on supporting that, we keep on focusing on that, but new innovations are primarily focused on the Polaris. A few more technical details over here. You see what we are launching for Polaris on the relatively short term. I'm not going to call them out all, but there are three I'd like to highlight to you.
Iver van de Zand 0:15:24.6:
One of the things that is coming is that we are coming with performance improvements and a performance monitor, allowing you to exactly see what's happening in the background, how you can tune and tweak the processes in the background even in a better way, so that is number one. Second, where we are coming is that we will very often ask, where we will launch in the second half of the year, multi-select. Super important, so that option will come, that functionality will come in Polaris in the second half of the year. Third term worth mentioning is that very soon we are launching a number of benchmarks, both internal benchmarks that we have done on Polaris, but also external benchmarks. In parallel, we are constantly working with our partner organization, ensuring that our partners and our customers, we had a very good debate with some of the customers on that yesterday. We are going to accelerate and provide more content, enablement what have you on best practices, using the best out of Polaris. That is coming very, very soon. We talked applications, we talked natural dimensionality, and the third element where we invest is this big topic of data orchestration.
Iver van de Zand 0:16:46.8:
Where we currently are focusing for the future, data orchestration, on a component called ADO, Anaplan Data Orchestrator, and I think that's a message I'd like to bring. There are many, many ways on bringing in data into our platform. There's CloudWorx, there's Anaplan Connect, there's HyperConnect, what have you. All of those will be there, but here we go, look at my eyes. The way forward, the strategic direction that we have for data orchestration, no debate: ADO. That's where we are going. That is where we are doubling down, this is where we are investing in, and it's for that reason that apps mandate we use ADO next to Polaris. Now, quite fun fact: when we were debating our strategic initiatives, I don't know if you ever looked into companies like Salesforce or ServiceNow. If you really see their styles and how they grew as companies, they really accelerated when they brought this data orchestration technology into their platforms. For us, it is a very promising fact that we should be doubling down. If you see where data orchestration plays, data orchestration plays in the area of finding the right source data, connecting it, connecting to it, wrangling and transforming it, joining and blending it, and pushing it into the lists, hierarchies and the models of our applications. That is the area that I called out in orange in this logical architecture of our platform that you see on the screen. We play in the extraction, connection, transformation, and loading of data, with Anaplan Data Orchestrator.
Iver van de Zand 0:18:32.8:
Now, if you look a little bit on, I took the scenario of comparing ADO with one other way of connecting to data, which is DataHub. You heard this morning 1.5 million models that we have in production. DataHub is a model, by the way. One third of them are data hubs, and if you see if we compare DataHub connector with ADO, we easily win 50 per cent of the effort in all that work that you need to do. We easily can limit half the effort needed to set up that connectivity transformation and loading process. With DataHub, you see a logical schema on top with DataHub. Where DataHub is way more a point-to-point solution, ADO is fully streamlined. ADO is a fully streamlined data pipeline generator, works with widgets. I just drag and drop my different connectors, transformations together. Let's do the same comparison again. Over here, you see DataHub works perfectly well. We keep on using that, we keep on supporting that. Over here, you see setup of DataHub could be quite complex. With Data Orchestrator, it looks like that. I'm going to provoke you a little bit. Imagine you have a situation where you have 14 source systems. Salesforce, Workday, S4, name it, everything. You have 45 models in one table, one of those source systems breaks, and you quickly want to know what transformations are affected, what models are affected, what users use those models, use what report, and to whom should I send an email?
Iver van de Zand 0:20:26.2:
That's going to be difficult with the DataHub setup because there is no data lineage. You don't see that end-to-end trace. With ADO, we have full end-to-end data lineage. Extremely powerful, extremely lowering the effort you need to put in that transformation process. Now, ADO is not only there to be used to connect to external data. Another thing that we are doing, you're all aware that Anaplan since a year also has consolidation technology with us. We now offer end-to-end to the office of the CFO, with connected planning and consolidation included. Well, consolidation is a whole other type of data architecture. How do you think we connected that consolidation data to our platform? With ADO. We have at the moment a single-way connector from consolidation data to ADO. Very, very soon that will be bidirectional. We use ADO for many, many use cases, so that allows us today to tell you and to work with you, mentioning we can fully integrate Anaplan consolidation into the Anaplan core platform. Super powerful technology, many use cases with customers, many discussions with customers.
Iver van de Zand 0:21:59.4:
I already called out why I think you need to at least think and look and discuss about ADO. That is on the screen. It's all about lowering your cost of that very intense transformation process that takes 65 per cent, 70 per cent of your budget. It's not only about lowering your cost, it's also bettering the quality with improved transparency. You have the end-to-end lineage, part of that application and that spend, and of course the accelerating time to value. Very quickly, a number of things that we will do with ADO on the very short notice. We have a huge plan for the longer term. We recently announced additional connectors. Apart from the big ones for Salesforce, S4, Snowflake, that's all there, we also added a number of additional connectors. We're investing and making the performance of the technology even more powerful. The big one, we will come around to summer with ride back. You want to ride back your data into data lakes, you want to ride back your data into Salesforce, you want to ride back your data in S4. That will come. Third element is that we invest in the governance. We will introduce data spaces into ADO, opening up for lifecycle management. I can set up a space for testing the data, for developing ADO transformations, for production of ADO transformation.
Iver van de Zand 0:23:28.0:
I will show you the video later on in the break. If you want to join me, I will show you the video. I'd like to respect a little bit also the time for this slot, but to close down, the last element, and this is a surprise for you. The last element of ADO plays again in the application space. Remember where I started? Connected applications. Imagine you have a number of use cases over here. Are you with me, if I want to connect them, that they will probably share a number of dimensions? The use case for financial planning might use the product dimension. The demand planning application might use that same product dimension. They could also use similar cost center organizational setup dimensions. Those shared dimensions, those shared key business entities, you could even call them the application master data. Guess where we are managing the master data for applications. In ADO, with a configurator where you can, from a single place, say I want to add a hierarchy in my key SKU dimension that applies to all applications. You change it, it applies to all applications, and that is how we set up connected planning. Now, the fourth area of investment is super important. It's Anaplan Intelligence, and it's such a wonderful topic that I'd like to introduce you to my colleague Leigh Romeo. Welcome on stage, Leigh.
Leigh Romeo 0:25:17.3:
Thank you, Iver. For those of you who don't know Iver, he is a very talented man from Belgium. He's also an ex-Olympic sailor, and I did notice that he loves to stand up on the stage right on the corner, which I won't be doing today because the odds are I might fall over. I'm very excited today to talk to you about Anaplan Intelligence, continuing on from what Jim, our CMO, and also Adam Thier, our chief products and technology officer, started out this morning. We're going to dive into more detail around Anaplan Intelligence, and we'll be talking about a few main themes today. We'll be talking a little bit more around about our gen AI capabilities with CoPlanner, and then some very exciting capabilities around how CoPlanner will interact with modeling. There's a lot of model builders in the room. We want to make your lives a whole lot easier with AI capabilities focused on modeling. Then lastly, we will talk about Anaplan Agents, autonomous agents working together as a team providing efficiencies, performing specific tasks.
Leigh Romeo 0:26:46.7:
Let's jump in. Adam spoke earlier, so did Jim, around our AI-infused platform. Now, the really great thing about Anaplan is that we are a platform. We're not a single point solution. There's many solutions out there in the market. For example, one AI for sales, one AI for finance, one for supply chain. Anaplan is a single platform with one connected AI. We spoke this morning around predictive AI, generative AI, agents. They all flow through the platform. There's no point solutions or one sort of, we only offer gen AI for our reporting and insights. It flows everywhere, so for example, from our data layer and our anomaly detection, utilizes machine learning and gen AI technologies. Our planning models where we're building out all of our great applications uses a whole mixture of gen AI, machine learning, predictive as well, to help you not only fine tune and optimize, but then eventually auto build your models, and then also time series forecasting and optimization. This is where we start talking about productivity and how successful we have been at Anaplan for all of those years, by being in the game for such a long time. Jim spoke a lot about that productivity and efficiency element, and I'll give you one example.
Leigh Romeo 0:28:24.4:
One of our large enterprise customers were manually creating a forecast from Excel, as I'm sure many of you do, and they had a team of five over a month totaling over 100 hours creating a forecast manually, high risk. They weren't really sure whether it was correct at the end of it all, but then when they used PlanIQ for forecasting, they can bring that time down to one or two hours. Hitting one button, running a forecast, and then being able to do that multiple times over a month. That is a really great outcome around how AI can produce efficiencies and add productivity to your organization, and then the top layer, reporting and insights. We spoke a lot about CoPlanner this morning. This is our first gen AI capability, our conversational AI assistant. We're going to talk further around where that's headed, so let's talk a little bit more about that. CoPlanner is turbocharging our applications. We made a promise to you, our customers, and also our CEO, that we would deliver CoPlanner on every line of business. We're absolutely doing that, but not only that, we're going to connect our applications as well, and that's what makes Anaplan so unique.
Leigh Romeo 0:29:53.9:
Think about this, and Adam hinted towards it. What about if you wanted to ask a question about your highest gross margin products? Not only that, how does that affect your supply chain? Then also, what do you need to do within your workforce to handle that growth? That's the power of Anaplan, and that's something that no one else can do. We're infusing more of those AI capabilities into CoPlanner, coming to more and more applications. Every time we release a new application, it will come bundled with CoPlanner. As Adam said, a library of hundreds and hundreds of questions that CoPlanner can access, the most important questions that your users will ask for that particular use case. Now, not only the questions, but also the capabilities, we're really moving into the generative element. We've had a lot of feedback from our finance customers. Wouldn't it be great if you could generate a report for us and save us hours? Push that data into a template, create the visualization, give me a narrative summary around what's happening across all of my geos, that was taking me hours and hours to produce previously. Well, you'll be able to do that with CoPlanner, coming this year.
Leigh Romeo 0:31:17.7:
Not only that, we're talking about suggestions and guiding your users as well. You can see there suggested pages, where we will dynamically show you pages that are relevant to your questions and answers that you're asking of CoPlanner. Now, you probably know that AI is evolving so fast, and if you look at the amount of updates that are happening to all of the engines out there in this space, it's phenomenal over the last couple of months how it's just accelerated. With that comes also our development in Anaplan as well, and here what I'd like to show you is some new capabilities that we've just rolled out within CoPlanner. You're looking at CoPlanner for IFP, and we've rolled out reasoning with CoPlanner. That means that CoPlanner can better understand your question, and it'll take that intent, the question that you type in, it'll figure out what you're asking it, and then it'll go away, then it'll analyze those line items and those modules, summarize, and give you back an answer. Not only that, it'll remember your context. All right, so, 'What about February?' I didn't have to type in the entire question, CoPlanner knows that from the context previously.
Leigh Romeo 0:32:42.6:
Then we're going to ask, 'What's the delta?' Now, this is a pretty simple question. I could have probably figured that answer out very quickly in my head, but CoPlanner is going through all of that governance and compliance to make sure that those answers are correct. You can see there, it knows that you're looking for the delta between January and February, gives you an answer. It also gives you more context behind that answer. How do I really know it's correct? Well, you can look at data lineage, so you tap on the data source, and then you can see what model and module that's come from. Not only that, what the selected dimension was, and also what filters were applied to that. You're really digging in and getting that confidence around the answers that CoPlanner is giving you. CoPlanner on our applications, Supply Chain is GA, that happened last September. We launched IFP for CoPlanner last month. Our teams are very busy at the moment, going to launch T&Q for sales, and then we're on to workforce planning.
Leigh Romeo 0:33:56.5
Now, I know you're thinking that's all great, right? We don't have an application yet. What about our own data? Can we connect CoPlanner to our own data? Well, the answer is yes. You'll be able to, later on this year in early access, connect CoPlanner for any use case. That means that you can configure your modules, your line items, your lists with CoPlanner for the relevant data for your use case, the relevant data for your users. You might think that, let's say 20 per cent of your model, you want to allow access to your users for that particular data. Well, you'll go in and you'll configure those line items, and then you will add that metadata to those models and line items so that the engine understands what sales means in your organization. Is that the same as revenue? What does margin mean? What you're doing is you're giving additional context so that the engine, when a question is being asked, will give you the correct answer. You can see here in the dashboard what we have is actually a confidence level of those questions. What it does is it connects to CoPlanner, it asks the questions within that library, and it'll give you a confidence score around those questions, so that you know that if there's any tweaks or fine tuning to be made, you can go into the console and then update those.
Leigh Romeo 0:35:43.5:
Okay, so something that everyone has been asking about: what about modeling? What about enhancing CoPlanner with modeling capabilities? The good news: that is coming. We're starting out by guiding users. If we think about the challenges that some of our users have, we're guiding users around what formulas they can use, then we're making recommendations around optimizations and what formulas will work better, and then we're moving on to auto building. If you remember, we're guiding, we're recommending, we're fine tuning and optimizing, and then we're auto building. Wouldn't that make your lives a whole lot easier as a model builder? Now is where it gets really interesting. We spoke about all of our AI capabilities earlier, and what if all of our AI capabilities could work together as a team? They all have specific tasks and they all can work autonomously. This is where we're changing the game a little bit, and this is where all of our Anaplan Intelligence capabilities are all working together. Let's take a scenario that you're an analyst, the markets are moving, you're about to head home for the day, and you really need to track what the markets are doing.
Leigh Romeo 0:37:18.7:
Now, there's a couple of things that you can do here. You can manually track them, or you can just come back in the morning and then see what happens. However, that's not going to fly, but the good thing is you do have CoPlanner. You tell CoPlanner to fire off Detector, which then scans for anomalies and shifts in the market overnight. You go home and then while you sleep, Detector scans anomalies overnight. It then triggers Forecaster to run predictions and simulations around what happens with that anomaly that was found. Forecaster then triggers Optimizer, that then looks how it can best allocate resources across these business units that's in line with your top-down strategy. Optimizer and CoPlanner together then summarize all of this information into a clear, actionable summary with decision points, and then by 9 a.m. in the morning, it's connected with Workflow, that then has sent off a pre-read to your leadership before that next board meeting. That is pretty exciting. Why is that making a difference? Well, Anaplan agents, the Anaplan platform, think about the scale that you can work at. This is something that no human team can do. It runs night and day. It doesn't have feelings, doesn't need coffee. It can work at a massive scale. It can allow you to make better, faster decisions. You can run more scenarios, you can run more predictions, you can look at more geographies. A whole lot more than a human can do at massive scale.
Leigh Romeo 0:39:14.0:
Lastly, I'd like to show you a little glimpse of something that we've been working on. Adam showed it on screen earlier, around AI-driven workflows. This is all about automating your tasks, but not only just automating your tasks, but also tracking progress and bottlenecks within your business process, for example, and then giving you suggestions around how to optimize or take action or send reminders, for example. Let me show you a little bit around what we've been working on. [Music plays] All right, so that's a first glimpse at our AI-driven workflows. Just a quick reminder of what you saw was creating workflows from diagrams, from sketches, from your current Anaplan models, but not only that, tracking progress and looking at bottlenecks as well. That is all we have for you today. It has been a pleasure. I will leave you with a few things to think about. Anaplan intelligence, what does that bring you? Productivity, simplicity, and all of that working at massive scale. Thank you very much.