About frank_calderoni

Great question, @james.bryson! Around three years ago, we described ourselves as "Anaplan is the leading planning and performance management platform for smart businesses." It was descriptive but too long. The executive leadership team was working on a new strategy, vision and execution business model, and throughout those discussions, we kept coming up with the word 'connected.' We knew our technology and platform were differentiated because we were connecting people, data, and plans – and no one else (and still to this day) had anything like this. We finally settled on Connected Planning. It was simple, memorable, and we knew we led this category right from the start. ... View more

Thank you for your question, abf5w@virginia.edu. As I mentioned previously in my response to Kevin, we definitely see great potential in a self-serve education process. We're excited that so many are interested to learn how to use the platform and are working on ways to provide this option for these individuals in the near future. Once an effective process is in place, we're confident that we will be better able to support this type of customer base as it grows. Keep an eye out for updates on this soon! ... View more

Great question, @Krista.Draeger! I do indeed have our new UX mobile on my cell phone and love having it handy to show our customers and partners how easy it is to use. As far as use cases for the new UX, Anaplan uses Anaplan for fully Connected Planning and for use cases across our entire organization. We are making the shift gradually as the new UX adds new features and functions that enable us to expand its reach. ... View more

Thank you so much for participating in this AMA, @OlivierDelahaye. “Collaboration” and “Ad-Hoc” reporting are on our roadmap and will be delivered through our new user experience. Regarding workflow, we are starting with capabilities in our new UX across Web and Mobile, like tasks, notifications, commenting and sharing. For model size, I addressed that in David F.’s question. ... View more

Thank you so much for your question, @cjpassauer. One thing I hear over and over is that leaders need to be able to make decisions faster. Long-term planning is becoming a thing of the past as the speed of innovation and frequency of disruption increases. They want better visibility into all facets of their organization and to know that they have reliable real-time data. These are exciting times and I am so happy that Anaplan can help our customers on their digital journey. ... View more

I love this question, thank you @manchiravi. As new customers realize the value of our platform and connected planning and we continue to evolve our offering to be even better at solving their problems in this constantly changing environment, I believe Anaplan will become the digital DNA of companies around the world. I got the opportunity to discuss Anaplan’s future and the future of business planning on Mad Money with Jim Cramer in December. You can watch the interview   here   for a more detailed view. ... View more

I appreciate you taking the time to reach out, @adithya. We continue to invest in existing intelligence capabilities like “statistical forecasting” and “optimizer.” Along with these features, we have a very robust roadmap that includes embedded intelligence, leveraging our in-house Planning AI capabilities, as well as other best-of-breed ML platforms. ... View more

Thank you so much for your CPX feedback and question, @derek_chen. We appreciate having you in our Community. One of the common themes we hear from CPX attendees is that they would like to see more technical content. We always try to make sure everyone in attendance is getting the information that they need. As we strategize for CPX 2020, we are thinking in terms of three personas – Prospects, Customers and The Highly Technical. There will be informational sessions and customer stories for our Prospects, use case roundtables for our Customers and demos, features and best practices for The Highly Technical, in addition to plenty of other content that will resonate with all three groups. While we haven’t formalized our agenda format for CPX 2020, we think this approach will make sure it is valuable for everyone in attendance. ... View more

Thanks so much for your question, @Tiffany.Rice. Our goal with the new UX is to make it intuitive, collaborative and engaging for all our users. “End Users” have been our initial focus for the new UX, followed by “Model Builders.” Also, our product roadmap includes a completely redesigned and intuitive modeling experience. We don’t have any plans on retiring our “Classic UX” in the near term. Regarding the APIs, once we launch the new API and micro services framework in the Anaplan platform, connectors (including Anaplan Connect) will be updated in due course. ... View more

Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions, @AlejandroGomez. I addressed this in my answer to David F.’s question. As our customers expand the use of Anaplan and volume of data is growing, our customers are looking for bigger and larger models. There are items on our roadmap that will address some of these needs from our customers. We have a very robust roadmap that includes embedded intelligence, leveraging technology from our recent acquisition in this space, as well as other best-of-breed ML platforms. Also, our new UX will enable us to deliver user intuitive and purpose-built solutions with best-of-breed AI/ML platforms. Finally, we do have a few Call Center use cases and the ones we have are successful and well-received. If I’ve misinterpreted the question, feel free to reach out to our community team for more information! ... View more

Thanks so much for participating in this AMA, @jon. I would suggest that one of the biggest challenges is how fast customers can change. With digital transformations, customers have a lot going on; the customers who get the most out of Anaplan also change their planning processes. This need is why we focused on the partner ecosystem so much over the past three years. Partners who can guide customers through change more reliably and quickly will be critical for us. ... View more

Great question, @kevin.murphy. We are definitely aware of this great need and are always looking for ways to enable our current and future ecosystem of Anaplanners. It is on our radar and we are taking proactive steps to allow for enhanced self-serve education similar to the Trailhead experience. ... View more

Thanks for your thoughtful question, @tristan.colgate. We currently have a purpose-built adapter for Tableau and are working on an adapter for another popular BI tool. Also as a part of our roadmap, the API and micro services framework in the Anaplan platform will enable extensibility into other data warehousing and analytics systems. ... View more

Thank you for the question, @sheabaker! Our goal with the New UX is to make it intuitive, collaborative and engaging for all our users. Additional reporting capabilities are on our roadmap and will be delivered through our new user experience. ... View more

Thanks so much for your questions and interest, @Alessio_Pagliano. We so appreciate having you as part of our Community! For market penetration and licensing, I can only discuss things that have been made public in our financials, all of which is available   here, since we’re a publicly listed company. We’re coming to the close of our fiscal year so keep an eye out for our fourth quarter report! For the workflow portion of the question, my response to Asslam covers your question. ... View more

Hi @jawwad.syed, great to see one of our own Anaplan employees participating in the Community and we’re so glad to see your ambition for growth at Anaplan! Since this is an internal question, I would love to field it at our next FAQ. For those of you who don’t know what that is, each month I open a poll to all of our employees to answer their questions much the way I’m doing now since transparency and accountability are so core to the fabric of Anaplan. ... View more

Thanks for being a part of our Community and participating in this forum, @daithifoley. As our customers expand the use of Anaplan and volume of data is growing, our customers are looking for bigger and larger models. There are items on our roadmap that will address some of these needs from our customers. ... View more

Thanks for your questions, @Mutong. I won’t make any forward-looking statements but I can highlight a recent Piper/Sandler report that named Anaplan one of the top five SaaS applications to own in the next decade and predicts that Anaplan will be a $7.9 billion company in 10 years. Our best asset is our people who are working constantly to make sure we continue solving our customer’s most pressing problems. Our goal is to deliver native AI and ML capabilities in the platform. Also, we plan to expand the reach of Anaplan by delivering purpose-built solutions with best-of-breed AI/ML platforms. ... View more

Thanks for reaching out @DavidEdwards. As a part of our AI- and ML-enabled platform strategy, we plan on delivering an intelligent user experience with guidance and recommendations. We are very interested in the potential value of automation capabilities in the platform, as you can see in my response to @davidmccarty's question below on AI possibilities. Also our product roadmap includes a completely redesigned and intuitive modeling experience. You can see the importance of the evolution of our UX to our strategy in my response to the question on the new UX below. Stay tuned! ... View more

@Jared Dolich, thanks so much for this great question. Retail is absolutely a key vertical for us and we are fortunate to be working with several global brands. A couple of weeks ago at NRF (National Retail Conference), we had Carter’s and L’Oreal join us for a panel discussion on how they view Anaplan as a key enabler of their digital transformation. Our industry go-to-market team is focused on building on this momentum by helping articulate the various ways Anaplan can add value for retailers. You are absolutely right that processes such as merchandising are inherently cross-functional and need to be channel agnostic – that is how we are approaching it as well, from a decision flow standpoint rather than disparate ‘modules’ that we see in the market. A key component of our industry GTM is our partner ecosystem – our partners bring deep industry knowledge and experience that we as a vendor are not always able to. We will continue to work with our partners to develop and take to market more such industry-specific offerings. Last year you probably heard me talk about some of these offerings – like the Commercial Planning solution for CPG we did with Deloitte – we look forward to executing more of these offerings this year with a lot more of our partners. If you have ideas or are interested in developing a joint industry offering, please reach out to Ara Gopal (ara.gopal@anaplan.com) who heads up our industry solutions team. ... View more

Thanks for the question, @gheiler. Delivering a rich API and micro services framework in the Anaplan platform will enable our customers to seamlessly extend Anaplan with their current enterprise applications. This will also open up opportunities for next-gen App Hub. ... View more

Thanks for the question, @Misbah. Our New UX has been built with a lot of user research that involves customer and market feedback. Our goal with the New UX is to make it intuitive, collaborative and engaging for all our users. End users have been our initial focus for the New UX, followed by model builders. We have a robust roadmap to deliver much more than just parity with our classic UX and we are on our way to achieving that in the near future. ... View more

Thank you for your support and I appreciate your questions, @davidmccarty. We are exploring many ways to incorporate automation capabilities as part of our Intelligent Anaplan strategy and logical repetitive tasks seem like a natural place to start. That could be a gateway to even deeper levels of automation like intelligent recommendations, which is key to human-machine augmentation. Our vision is to take it beyond the enterprise to deliver a connected ecosystem, which includes customers and suppliers where everyone collaborates in real-time to deliver better, faster decisions. ... View more

Thanks for the question, @seemybeltz. Please see my response above to @Asslam on the topic of workflow. ... View more

@Asslam, I love this question, and I appreciate your interest in workflow. There have been a few subsequent questions about workflow and I will answer all of them here. There continues to be high interest and demand from our customers for a robust workflow capability to support their end-to-end planning processes. Our existing workflow capabilities have been in early access and during that time we’ve collected a tremendous amount of valuable feedback. Based on customer feedback and growing interest in process orchestration capabilities in planning, we are taking a fresh look at how to embed these features in the Anaplan platform, starting with capabilities in our new UX across Web and Mobile such as tasks, notifications, commenting and sharing. ... View more