Hub Day 2 Highlights from Maria Pergolino

Andrea.zils

Hello Anaplan employees around the world. Your colleagues in Las Vegas are doing amazing work representing all of you to Anaplan’s customers, prospects, partners, media, and analysts at Hub 2018.

The day began with Frank giving a visionary presentation of what connected planning can look like in the near future based on tools that are collaborative, dynamic, and intelligent. One quote I loved: “The distance between planning and real-time decision making must be zero.” A vast majority of attendees ranked Frank’s presentation “very interesting,” which is the highest rating, according to a poll taken in the Hub app. 

Speaking of the app, 1,117 people—73 percent of Hub attendees—were “active users” as of Tuesday afternoon, and of those nearly 900 are “engaged users.” (Our app developer explains what those statistics mean in this article.) Overall, Hub attendance has been amazing: As of 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 1,390 people had checked in out of 1,437 people registered. That’s a 97 percent attendance rate, a figure practically unheard of in the conference business. 

Frank was followed on the main stage by author Malcolm Gladwell, who used his keynote address to discuss the importance of using the right tools to get accurate, useful answers. After he spoke, Malcolm sat down with Frank for a Q&A session. In addition to over 1,200 people watching Frank and Malcolm in the room at Hub, more than 400 streamed the morning session live. 

After Frank and Malcolm spoke, the Hub audience split up for more than 50 breakout sessions over the course of the day. Many of these breakouts, including sessions on product direction, model-building best practices, zero-based budgeting (ZBB), and Centers of Excellence, were standing room only gatherings. Our customers and prospects are hungry to learn more about the Anaplan Platform, and clearly Hub is where they go to get that information. 

While most Hub attendees took part in breakout sessions, my fellow executive leadership team (ELT) members and I participated in 46 customer and prospect meetings on Tuesday. Our Influencer Relations team was similarly busy, issuing a press release on the future of connected planning; coordinating 15 media interviews with publications including Forbes, FEI, and IDGConnect; arranging 25 interviews with analyst firms including Gartner, IDC, Ventana Research, Nucleus Research, and Constellation Research; and setting up meetings between media and analysts and representatives of Autodesk, Deloitte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Seagate. 

Speaking of spreading the message: the hashtag #AnaplanHub was trending in Las Vegas on Tuesday. On Twitter alone, the hashtag got 6,522,286 impressions, meaning it was delivered over 6.5 million times to people’s timelines. The social team and our attendees have also done some creative things on Instagram (@anaplanningand #AnaplanHub) that you should check out. Please remember we are looking for everyone at Anaplan to share news of the event on social media. 

The day’s sessions concluded with a main stage panel led by Steven Birdsall, our new Chief Revenue Officer. He explored connected planning success with four diverse customers: Melinda Cox of Cisco, Sara Park of Coca-Cola, Yves Cabanac of HP Inc., and Joselito “Lito” Diga of Unilabs. The customers described their unique Anaplan successes and challenges, found commonalities between their stories, and described how they identify change agents who can make an Anaplan implementation a success.  

It’s tiring just reading about all these amazing results; maybe that explains why 175 gallons of coffee were consumed on Tuesday morning. (I’ll let you know how Wednesday’s caffeination measures up). Hub may be exhausting, but the results are unmistakable: As a result of all of this activity, web sessions and unique visitors to the Anaplan website were both up 46 percent on Tuesday compared with our average. Hub is creating tremendous buzz, and it’s up to all of us to carry the momentum forward in the coming weeks, months, and years.  

That brings me back to a point I made in yesterday’s email: Every Anaplan employee — whether or not you’re here in person — contributes to the success of Hub. Those of us who are privileged to be here in Las Vegas are doing everything we can to make Hub something we can all be proud of, and we thank you all for your support.