Kuntal Vahalia: From Platform to GTM Engine: Inside Anaplan’s Partner Strategy

Chip Rodgers  0:01  
Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers, I had to do the signature watch move for good tal

Kuntal Vahalia  0:08  
that has the only way I would do the same to be with Chip Rodgers, the legendary clock moment, the watch movement. It's a legendary thing on LinkedIn. That's how I've seen all of your videos. That's the only way I'll accept this invitation.

Chip Rodgers  0:21  
All right. Well, well, you got it, you got it. So I'm so excited to be joined by kuntal Valhalla. And kuntal is Senior VP of channels and alliances for Anaplan, and about 11 months into the role previously with thoughtspot and then also Salesforce for many years, I think nine years and MuleSoft. Yeah, I've been with

Kuntal Vahalia  0:47  
SaaS since the very beginning. I joined Salesforce back in 2004 like a $50 million ARR company, no crazy spell sauce. We didn't know how to do rev, rec. We didn't know how to book ourselves. PS, bookings against a SaaS business. So all those things we had to go figure out. And then our software logo was, our logo was a no software, no codes, and we asked partners to go join us, and partners like no, that's not a business model, but now it's a trillion dollar ecosystem. And then I joined MuleSoft again, $50 million run rate went on to go IPO. We got acquired by Salesforce. I came back to Salesforce. Spent four more years there. Then I spent about three years with a data and AI company called thoughtspot, did a lot of business with the cloud vendors, data vendors like snowflake and Databricks, and now I'm over at Anna plan driving the partner strategy in business.

Chip Rodgers  1:44  
That's exciting. Congrats on on the the role. I know it's not exactly new, but but exciting, exciting. And Anaplan is doing some some really great things. So let's start there. Tell us a little bit more about your role at Anna plan and how you guys are going to market with partners. I know it's critical to your go to market.

Kuntal Vahalia  2:03  
Yeah, absolutely So Anna plan, and these are publicly and we are a P owned firm, but these are public numbers. We are about a billion plus dollar ARR business. We take private. Event happened, but two and a half years back, we have $600 million run rate. It's in about 202 and a half years we've grown from 600 million to crossed a billion plus dollars. We are also when we got we were in private, we were a negative EBITDA company, but now we have a rule of 55 almost between profitability and growth. Wow, that's fantastic. Yeah, it's one of the best kept secrets in SaaS. That's how I'd like to see it. Now, manaplan is going through multiple transformations. We just talked about the finance transformation, where we went from a negative EBITDA to positive beta and rule of 55 we're also going through product transformation. We were a platform only company where the platform is very uniquely differentiated. Partners love it. They love to take us to market, but in some ways, it's a blank sheet of canvas where we ask a customer, what do you need? And it takes 234, years for us and our partners to build something customers would never always recognize the value. So we moved to an application first model like Salesforce has around sales, cloud service, cloud marketing, cloud those are apps on top of their force.com platform. We're doing something similar. We started from the platform now we're going to apps that's helping our customers recognize, realize value in months and weeks now. So our partners are going through that transformation. And the second transformation we're doing on the go to market side is we're asking partners to prioritize their IP they're building applications.

Chip Rodgers  3:44  
Oh, interesting on Anaplan. So

Kuntal Vahalia  3:46  
we are having, we're going to have our own version of App Exchange. So there are a couple of big transformation that we're affecting in the market, all keeping in mind that we can add velocity and scale to our customers.

Chip Rodgers  3:58  
So customers, and I could see that customers within, within industries, certain use cases, and then also your partners, your services partners, they're building for multiple and they want to take that IP and deploy it Right

Kuntal Vahalia  4:11  
exactly. I mean, we think about an IT portfolio chip. We every CIO will have some sort of a CRM, some sort of ERP system, some sort of a financial system, HR systems, IT systems, but they're all backward looking. They are system of records, but they tell you what happened in the past. We are the only one that tells you what happens in the future. We are the scenario planning, and we've leveraged data from all of these investments that a CIO makes. Guess who made all those investments in our SI Partners? So we are that last mile event on how we collect data from all of the systems. And si planning is everywhere, financial planning, supply chain planning, sales planning, quota planning, territory planning, it's everywhere across every function, every line of business. So our partners. Is very adept at bringing business to us, driving those planning use cases, integrated planning across the enterprise as well. And that's where we we see a lot of traction. So

Chip Rodgers  5:11  
I can see that, you know, the scenario planning, especially today, in the volatile environment, it's like you got to figure out, okay, well, if this happens, what does it look like if that happens? What is in that planet

Kuntal Vahalia  5:24  
is, I mean, we are at the right place at the right time. I mean, think about just this, this whole uncertainty around tariffs, right lot of companies are starting to use us to say, build different scenarios. What if tariff is 35% what if it's 25% nobody knows. I don't think our government knows where they were. I mean, they wake up every morning with a different number. But the point is, our partners and our customers can help us build those scenarios for the CFO, for the line of business, for the merchandiser to say, hey, either of these options, we can tell you what outcome is going to

Chip Rodgers  5:58  
be, yeah. So that's interesting. So you're, I mean, it, it's, it's very tightly involved, you know, partners are very tightly involved in in, really, in your product, in delivering a they the product to customers and what, what's the talk, a little bit about the sort of the IP as they're building that, then, are they monetizing that as well, or just delivering services around it. Or how does that work? Yeah. So

Kuntal Vahalia  6:24  
we have this intention and a vision to go build a fully integrated go to market with our partners, where our partners are impacting the entire customer life cycle. We want our partners to be hunters. We want them to create markets. Sell with us, co sell with us, deliver with us. Drive expansion, drive customer value, adoption, renewals, everything. So I think that's in motion. We're starting to see value there. The second aspect is it's still all services led, though. The shift we're trying to affect, and this is all happening in real time, is, how do we take that services business turn that more into into annuity, through productizing IP, through partner applications. I think that's a movie for the next three to six months. We're still building it, but our partners are excited for your socialized idea and think about all this. RSI is GSIs, the services margins are razor thin, right? They love this concept of, hey, they can actually go build annuity off and they're building all this stuff, building those are accelerators, but we actually taking that, turning them into a product which is certified, which actually meets the right use cases, which gives us the right distribution, right? So I think it's a win, win for everyone. We got to get there, but we have a great vision to start off. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  7:46  
beautiful. And then you mentioned app marketplace as well, so then that will be the place to deploy and

Kuntal Vahalia  7:52  
start the That's right, yeah. I mean, we want to make it very organic. We want to make it market driven. We don't want to go prescribe partner apps. We want customers and the market to decide what the right apps are. We do want to bring the right set of partners with the right expertise in the domain to build the right apps. But once, once the apps are in the in there, we want marketplace, and we haven't still made a decision if we're going to make our own marketplace or we piggyback on some other marketplaces. Again, that's a decision for the future, but I think that's right mechanism.

Chip Rodgers  8:24  
Yeah, it's exciting. Well, that's amazing, good doll. You know, just really congrats on, on the success Any, any, anything else in terms of, you know, anyone that's that's watching, that might be a partner, or want to be a partner with Anna plan, how should they think about working with you. How should they engage and connect? What should they be thinking about? Yeah,

Kuntal Vahalia  8:45  
I mean, we value domain expertise, we value access and we value alignment to the field, right? Those things we value less is more for us. Nowhere. I want to go advertise and say, Hey, we need the next 1000 partners, but we do want the next 100 partners who believe in this mission of application first, who have great IP that our customers can leverage and that expands our our portfolio of use cases. We welcome those. Yeah, absolutely. That's

Chip Rodgers  9:16  
great, fantastic. Well, date, we're halfway through day two or day one, I guess, yeah, yesterday was day zero. And a lot of great sessions and content still. So this has been fantastic. Thank you for taking some time. Thank

Kuntal Vahalia  9:34  
you chip my first catalyst event. I think it's better than advertised. Love the energy. Love the unity as well. I think everyone has nobody's competing here. Everyone is trying to learn from each other, and so absolutely, a great community and a great place to be. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks

Chip Rodgers  9:51  
for all the work you've done. No thank you. Thank you. Fantastic. Well, thank you all for joining as well, and we'll see you. See you next time. Thanks everybody. You. The drop in person, especially we were.