Culture Clash Series The performance management world is broad.  Those who practice within it are wide in skills, dispersed in geography, deep in talent, and – in general – all jumbled together.  Your hosts are all North Americans (Canadians and Mexicans rejoice for this American has finally figured out how not to use “America” as shorthand for that quarter-or-so of the globe above the equator and a bit west of the Greenwich meridian ) but hail from three different continents.  Beyond the differences in our personalities, it’s easy to see your hosts’ cultural influences in this ..read more

Natalie Delemar and I – as with so many others in the performance management space – first met Elizabeth Ferrell at a conference, in this case ODTUG’s Kscope. Elizabeth’s path to her current job, focus, and professional interests evinces the typical path from school, to finance, not-at-all-usual hobby, and now to our beloved performance management community. But to characterize Elizabeth as typical is to do her an injustice or perhaps just inaccuracy on Yr. Obt. Svt.’s part. As evidence of that (beyond of course this EPM Conversation episode) is to have a read of Elizabeth’s thoughtful articl ..read more

Riding a rocket to the heavens OneStream’s rise has been meteoric: from a startup in a very small office in the not-particularly-well-known-tech-incubator Rochester, Michigan, to international powerhouse in the performance management space in less than a decade. Peter Fugere has been there from almost the very beginning and has an insider’s perspective on what makes OneStream tick, the product’s genesis, current initiatives (Peter is involved in more than one), and its exciting future. From consolidations to planning to relational to analytics to machine learning to the certification program t ..read more

We’re all wired to see patterns We live in patterns: seasonal, political, historical, and even atomic. Many live a life blithely unaware of them, which is to their disadvantage, for understanding those patterns is key to what makes us human, drives culture and society, and informs economics. We happy few in the performance management world figuratively live and die by the patterns in data. If careful observation of clients, customers, and conferences is an accurate guide, we are largely cut from the same professional and educational cloth. This is not always true. Those of us who come from out ..read more

Sree Menon, The Calc Man Many years ago (just over 10!), Yr. Obt. Svt. wrote a blog post on why he Hated and Loved Calculation Manager. I even did it twice. I am – oft times, still, it continues unabated – a complete smartass who pays little heed to what he says and writes and this was most definitely one of those times. These posts were a continuation of not altogether terrifically awesome judgement as they were an expansion of a similarly-snarky two parter on Hyperion Business Rules. 2009? 2012? My, but the time does fly. So that’s four snide technical blog posts on two closely related Oracl ..read more

Data, data everywhere, and none of it in the right place or in the right format Performance cannot be managed (see what I did there?) without data. And yet data –because it is in the wrong format, because it is in the wrong place, because it is poorly defined, because we don’t have the ability or the resources or the time to transform it into what our systems need – is ever a challenge. Data is, quite simply put, hard. FinTech Innovations aims to alleviate that challenge and make data easy. See a problem, fix a problem The performance management world is small (which suggests that alas this p ..read more

Natalie Delemar and I – as with so many others in the performance management space – first met Elizabeth Ferrell at a conference, in this case ODTUG’s Kscope. Elizabeth’s path to her current job, focus, and professional interests evinces the typical path from school, to finance, not-at-all-usual hobby, and now to our beloved performance management community. But to characterize Elizabeth as typical is to do her an injustice or perhaps just inaccuracy on Yr. Obt. Svt.’s part. As evidence of that (beyond of course this EPM Conversation episode) is to have a read of Elizabeth’s thoughtful articl ..read more

From Enterprise administrator to CEO, from market disruptor to Magic Quadrant leader We at EPM (or should that be CPM?) Conversations are – unsurprisingly – pleased beyond belief to have OneStream Software CEO Tom Shea as our very special guest. We think you’ll be pleased as well. OneStream is in the moment and of the future. How did that happen? Who made that happen? What is its genesis? Where is OneStream right now and where will it be in the future? Why is it such a success? This podcast answers all and throws in more than a few surprises. OneStream as a rocket ship Certainly its rise has ..read more

As Everyone Knows, But Hardly Anyone Actually Does One of my fondest recollections of Kscope (umm, one year or another, they all blend together after a while) is sitting in on Kumar’s introduction of Exalytics (remember that Wave Of The Future?). As Kumar dived deeper and deeper into the hardware behind Essbase-on-Exalytics, he prefaced each increasingly (exponentially?) complex computer engineering concept and detail with, “As everyone knows…”. If only. I sure didn’t. Key to Kumar’s personality is this liberality of intellectual comradeship: he thinks that surely whatever a given insanely com ..read more

Riding a rocket to the heavens OneStream’s rise has been meteoric: from a startup in a very small office in the not-particularly-well-known-tech-incubator Rochester, Michigan, to international powerhouse in the performance management space in less than a decade. Peter Fugere has been there from almost the very beginning and has an insider’s perspective on what makes OneStream tick, the product’s genesis, current initiatives (Peter is involved in more than one), and its exciting future. From consolidations to planning to relational to analytics to machine learning to the certification program t ..read more