Anaplan’s CPX2019! What’s next?

The best of MeltOne’s ‘A team’ is back from San Francisco after a high-flying Anaplan CPX 2019! In addition to being an opportunity to discover the city and interact with the Anaplan US teams, the event also gave us a good vision of the platform’s future.

Anaplan tomorrow, in ‘Minority Report’ mode

The first day of Keynotes was dedicated to Anaplan’s vision of Connected Planning. Presented by their CEO, Franck Calderoni, three key elements were highlighted:

• Connected Planning: This has always been and remains Anaplan’s main added value, driven by the agile ‘Honeycomb’ principle. Connected Planning allows for progressive and interconnected deployment of your various business processes,

• ‘Frictionless’ integration, which aims to provide very simple techniques to connect Anaplan to all your information systems and/or collect your data,
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning: Following on from the Anaplan Optimizer, Anaplan continues to invest in AI and ML to become – more than just a data collection and collaboration tool – a full-fledged entity capable of providing business users with relevant business recommendations, understanding their intentions, and allowing them to spend more time on their truly value-added tasks.

The combination of these three elements enabled Anaplan to offer us a comprehensive and truly exciting vision of what the platform’s future could look like: in a staged demonstration, Franck Calderoni asked Anaplan his questions directly, it understood him and returned relevant KPIs and analyses, all in spoken natural language…

What surprises this year?!

 After making us ‘dream’ of the future, Anaplan took advantage of the second Keynote day to present the latest innovations and those that will gradually arrive in the coming months.

Through numerous workshops, Anaplan gave us a comprehensive overview of what the platform already does: Optimizer and its linear programming algorithm (optimization of objectives under constraints), integrated AI and ML with AWS and Google Cloud Platform, …

Finally, during the main Keynote, ‘THE’ new feature, awaited since last year: Springboard, the new UX (user interface).

Its development required no less than the involvement of:

• 125 clients and partners,
• 259 participants in research and development activities,
• 95 ‘beta’ test clients.

The focus was on ergonomics and the ‘app-ification’ of models: everything is designed so that an average user can intuitively use their Anaplan models. In line with its ‘Connected Planning’ vision, these apps will be able to group and impact several models simultaneously.

Springboard is already available for partners and will be progressively available to all clients by the end of the year. Don’t miss our next article on this topic in the coming weeks.

If this announcement didn’t surprise us, we were pleasantly surprised to discover the future Anaplan mobile application!

This application, compatible with iOS and Android, will allow the platform to be used on all ‘classic’ mobile devices (smartphones, tablets), all through native and ‘responsive’ interfaces. The only prerequisite is to have switched dashboards to Springboard. The application will first be available in beta mode at the end of the year before its launch next year.

What’s next?

We therefore left San Francisco full of enthusiasm for the future of the platform and eager to test the latest innovations.

With Springboard, which allows grouping multiple models, and the multi-device mobile app, we imagine that, like us, you are already envisioning executive dashboards providing an overview of processes directly on a tablet! We will soon have the opportunity to test all of this as part of the mobile beta program we signed up for and share our experience with you!

In any case, the next appointments are already set: October 16, 2019, in Paris for CPX France and June 15, 2020, in San Diego for CPX World!

MeltOne thanks all Anaplan teams for organizing and executing this event.

Find all MeltOne offers on our website: https://staging.meltone.com. And for more information, you can contact us directly at jsaccona@meltone.com.