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Silicon Valley based Anaplan, a cloud-based planning and performance management platform provider, recently announced it has surpassed a US$100 million revenue run-rate and reached cash flow break-even for the first time since going to market four years ago. This year, the company’s revenues have grown over 80% on year and its global user base has surpassed the 100,000 mark, leading Anaplan to expand its global workforce by 35% and to open new offices in London and Hong Kong.
Digitimes recently spoke with the company’s chief marketing officer Grant Halloran to get more details about how the company has managed to achieve such dramatic growth.
Q: Can you tell us about what is driving growth for Anaplan, or to put it another way, what is the value that Anaplan is bringing to your customers?
A: Large companies have been living with old planning and forecasting technology for decades. To meet the demands of the modern era managers turned to Microsoft Excel to model and run all their different analytical processes. Excel has the versatility to do this across every part of a company, but Excel doesn’t scale to large data sets; it is non-collaborative, insecure, error-prone and not easily connected to source systems.
And the Global 2,000 spends over three billion hours a year simply administering these processes in Excel, which is zero value work.
Q: How is Anaplan used by these companies?
A: Anaplan is used for virtually any process that involves a lot of numerical analysis (that is often done in Excel) and/or collaboration on that analysis amongst large groups of people (spread across departments or around the world), and involves forward-looking decision-making.
What Anaplan does is enable so many more people to be involved, because simultaneous collaboration on big data sets is possible. That decentralizes the process of planning, which empowers more of the frontline staff of a company. Secondly, big data sets are now possible. Spreadsheets don’t scale, whereas customers are planning on billions of cells of data in Anaplan, which means they can get much more granular and detailed in how they plan. Finally, Anaplan creates a ‘living plan’, where performance data is continuously fed to the system to compare against the plan, so managers can easily see where they need to course correct and they can now do this more often.
Some examples include a sales department using Anaplan to set territory and quota planning for sales reps or a finance department using Anaplan to determine annual corporate financial planning, budgeting and forecasting.
We have customers that have their marketing departments using Anaplan to keep track of marketing programs throughout the world in real time. Supply chain management is another key area where Anaplan is seeing success. Using a cloud platform makes it easier for them to formulate complex demand forecasts to determine how many, and what types of products need to be built or procured.
Q: As a cloud solution provider, can you talk about some of the trends of trying to offer cloud based solutions to large enterprises, which tend to be companies that move at a slower pace when it comes to adopting new technologies?
A: Regarding adoption of cloud services, it is true that the market is on a fast pace. However, we haven’t had to do a lot of evangelization/teaching in the five years we’ve been on the market because companies like Salesforce have already done a pretty good job about it.
We see cloud services being better than on premise services for several reasons. First, you don’t have to worry about new (costly) releases to implement. Second, it’s more secure (data is not exchanged or passed around through email or USB flash memory). Third, and in the case of Anaplan, our technology is much better than the traditional in-premise solutions SAP, IBM and Oracle invented 30 years ago.
Q: Can you provide example of some of your customers and how they are using the Anaplan cloud platform?
A: To understand the dynamics, we can take the example of Hewlett Packard (HP). HP is a huge company spread throughout the globe. Business planning for any company of that size can be a nightmare that eats away at company resources.
Before Anaplan, it took HP four months to allocate quotas and territories every year for each of its 25,000 salespeople (in 178 countries, with 800 calculation parameters for quotas, and over 80,000 clients with an allocated quota). Now after implementing Anaplan, HP needs just one week to complete the quota plan. HP manages over 200 billion cells of data in Anaplan, equivalent to 20 million large spreadsheets.
There are many other examples. Food supplier Del Monte is using Anaplan for finance to optimize budgeting and formulate rolling forecasts. London Gatwick Airport is using Anaplan to harness greater speed and accuracy across all of its passenger forecasting operations, which involve scenarios that previously took two and a half days to run. Louis Vuitton held a hackathon earlier this summer to develop a future supply chain model for the company using the Anaplan platform.
Q: Can you tell us about your plans for Asia?.
A: Asia is growing very fast for us, more than doubling each year and we see no reason why that will not keep happening. We continue to add new customers, expand our team and add more partners, and we are planning to open a data center there soon. We opened an office in Japan around six months ago and are thrilled with the momentum we’ve already attained there.
In Asia Pacific we are seeing primary Anaplan growth driven by customers proactively seeking cloud-based solutions to replace outdated and legacy planning solutions from traditional vendors. Companies in Asia Pacific have matured from the ‘what can cloud do for me’ conversation to the ‘what is cloud doing for me’ mentality. The community, specifically CIOs and CFOs in the region, have responded well to the advantages of implementing cloud based planning and modeling solution to drive smarter business leadership within their organizations.
With now have operations in Japan, Hong Kong, and India, and Anaplan continues to invest and demonstrate its commitment to serving existing and future customers in the APAC region. Some of the company’s current customers include JG Summit Group, Del Monte Philippines, Telekom Malaysia, Kathmandu, Vodafone India, AXA Business Services and Dimension Data Asia Pacific.
Q: Anaplan is a young company but you have already established yourself as a major partner to large international enterprises. Can you quantify some of the growth Anaplan has seen over the past few years?
A: Anaplan went to market in 2011. In the past four years the company has been one of the fastest growing SaaS vendors offering cloud solutions. We started with two offices and a staff of 20 and we now have 17 offices and more than 600 people at the company. It helps that we added 600 customers in that time and 100,000 users to our platform.
And the industry has taken notice. We’ve added 200 partners since we went to market and Anaplan has so far raised approximately US$240 million in capital, including its last round of US$90 million at a US$1.1 billion valuation. Investors include Salesforce Ventures, Workday; and venture capital firms that have also invested in companies such as Facebook, Tesla, Twitter, Box and SpaceX.
Anaplan chief marketing officer Grant Halloran
