EPM Conversations Episode 16 — A Culture Clash Conversation or 50 Million Frenchmen Can’t be Wrong with Ludovic De Paz and Pascal De Schryver

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 podcast:  British diffidence, Indian thoughtfulness, American brashness.  Stereotypes and certainly wide brushed, but where your hosts’ formative years were spent marked us.  With luck, it makes for an in interesting podcast.

In that vein, we thought it would be interesting to talk to our fellow North American performance management practitioners who work and live here today but come from elsewhere.  Our audience is primarily from that quarter of the globe mentioned above; we are not perhaps the most introspective people and might be improved if we were so.  An outsider sees the quirks and foibles that a native cannot.  This episode begins a series

EPM Conversations — Episode 9, A Conversation with Matthias Heilos, CEO of Finance Technology Innovations

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 podcast’s audience will necessarily follow suit unless we figure out how to break out – we’re working on it): I’ve known Matthias for at least a decade although when I first met him he was (I think – it was a while ago) an independent consultant.

How did Matthias go from that most independent (and arguably isolated) place to software entrepreneur? What made him leave HFM and FDMEE (apologies to all of you bass players out there – just listen and you’ll understand) behind and focus solely on the manifold

EPM Conversations — Episode No. 8, A Conversation with Tom Shea, CEO of OneStream Software

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 been meteoric. What has enabled OneStream to evolve so quickly from an industry insurgent to a market visionary? I could opine (those of you who have had the misfortune to cross Yr. Obt. Svt.’s path have long known that I have many opinions, performance management and otherwise, some of which are even correct) on why that is but ultimately that’s just a geek’s take on a force somewhat larger than him.

Better instead to listen to the man himself as he takes us all on a journey from CPA to

EPM Conversations – Episode No. 4, a conversation with John Booth

What could be better than the Three EPM Conversations Cohosts?

What whole number is greater than three? Four, totes obvs. And here we are, with Yr. Obt. Svt., Celvin Kattookaran, Tim German, and now John Booth.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MogQ6te5aDI/UZ26Gd3vA8I/AAAAAAAABsk/YXyp51lljwI/s1600/4musk.jpg

John and I did the very first EPM-in-the-cloud presentation at Kscope11: EPM 11.1.2.something-or-other running on AWS. John did all of the heavy lifting and I did…something. No matter, he still talks to me as you will gather below if you but listen.

John has been a writer in the Developing Essbase Applications books, is an ACE Director alumni, a contributor to the late and lamented Essbase Network54 message board, a frequent conference presenter, and always has a provocative and interesting viewpoint on the state of the industry, the value of performance management applications, and where on earth the Earth is heading. Heady stuff, no?

That’s quite an introduction and one that is well deserved. I am very happy to share that John will be a regular cohost on EPM Conversations.

With that, this episode’s précis:

  • Start – 8:10 Introductions
  • 8:10 – 11:00 Running Hyperion on Lesser-Used Operating Systems
  • 11:00 – 13:15 Whatever Happened To Exalytics?
  • 13:15 – 22:55 Specialization in Infrastructure
  • 22:55

EPM Conversations – Episode No. 3, a conversation with Abhi Nerurkar, co-founder of EPMware

One out of three ain’t bad

We were lucky enough to land Abhi Nerurkar, one of the three co-founders of EPMware, a software company specializing in Master Data Management (MDM) and Workflow, for our very first vendor conversation.

A note: we didn’t speak with Abhi’s partners, Tony Kiratsous and Deven Shah, as we’re simply not set up/not experienced enough to manage a six way conversation. We have to work on that but I hope that Deven and Tony understand/are deeply appreciative of not being bored to death/annoyed beyond endurance as I fear such a large group would produce.

Just what don’t you know about software development? Well, if you’re like us: everything.

We – you, me, Tim, Celvin, The Man in the Moon (probably not) – we all use software as part of our job, else why listen to this podcast? But do we know anything about writing, managing, and selling software on a commercial basis? Unless you work for a vendor and are at the coal face at that, I can answer this one for you: no, not at all. It’s fascinating. Listen for the term “wireframe” and be as astonished as Abhi was when

EPM Conversations – Episode No. 2, Part 1 & 2, a conversation with Essbase Lady, Natalie Delemar

Two (actually four) for the price of one (which incidentally happens to be free)

Our freewheeling conversation with Natalie Delemar continues apace. The conversation was so chock full o’ content (or, arguably, nuts) that we simply couldn’t make it just the one episode.

It was quite the free ranging conversation with really no holds barred. If you were looking for a wee bit of controversy (nicely put and argued – we are an antidote to negativity), here are your episodes. Our podcast hosting service has this option for each episode:

I was tempted. <grin> Seriously, no bad words, nothing NSFW, just opinion with compelling arguments for and against with a fantastic guest.

As always, there are a plethora of ways of hearing us: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Buzzsprout (our provider), Stitcher, iHeart Radio, TuneIn, Deezer, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, and Castbox. Celvin adds these and he is a podcasting madman – there are probably others that I’m not aware of.

And of course you can listen directly on www.epmconversations.com.

As noted, there are two episodes. Here’s the first, EPM Conversation – Episode No.

EPM Conversations – TWTWTW

That Was The Week That Was, it’s over let it go, 52 times a year the week is done and over with before you know

Launched on the 30th of September, as of the 8th of October (there is your week) EPM Conversations had 155 downloads across lo our many podcast aggregators:

 

Let me note that, totes obvs, none of this could have ever happened without an audience – that’s you. If you haven’t listened to us, please do so – it’ll be worth your while. If you have, thank you for a podcast is nothing without listeners. EPM Conversations can be a valuable part of our professional EPM world, but only with your participation.

Our first week’s global audience seems to be shaping up nicely with a not-everyone-in-the-world-is-a-North-American cast:

While there is understandable disappointment that neither McMurdo Station nor Dakshin Gangotri nor Halley Research Station are yet among our audience, we are patient. We may need to be.

South America? I actually lived in there as a child although I have to confess there was no internet or (gasp) Celvin or (gasp, again) Tim for that matter when I lived there. There wasn’t even any

Introducing EPM Conversations

The New Frontier

No, not a song about the anxieties of Gen Xers in the 1980s (although if you’d like to discuss that I’m always ready to share my teenage-and-beyond neuroses), nor is it an experimental recording of just-about-where-I-grew-up, but is instead something that I’ve (and two of my besties Tim German and Celvin Kattookaran of whom more anon) never tried before: the spoken word.

I’ve presented sessions, moderated discussions, and acted as a panelist at conferences, given webinars, written articles for magazines, written blog posts (OMG they go on and on), posted to technical messageboards official and otherwise, and even written books. A small amount of observation will point out that if there’s one thing I like to do, to better or poorer effect, it is to communicate. My father always told (and continues to, actually) me, “Your big mouth will get you into trouble” and I fear that Dear Old Dad was and is right. Such is life.

Most of this has been prescriptive — Cameron the Expert (ahem) tells you, Gentle Reader, how to do this and why it should be done. Wonderful on the rare occasions that Yr. Obt. Svt. is right but I fear

An easy peasy no big deasy update of the OneStream license key

It’s expired, and not your parking meter

There I was, dreaming about this and that when I decided to go into Good Old OneStream to take a looky-loo at AVBS on my laptop install and I WAS SURPRISED BY THE FOOM!

Actually, nothing so dramatic. It was more like this:

A screenshot of a social media post Description automatically generated

What, you mean these things expire? Yes, Cameron, yes, they do. Bummer.

No matter, as I am a consultant at a OneStream partner, all I need do is ask for a valid key and update away. Putting aside the fact that I’ve done this in the past and also putting aside the fact that I’ve completely forgotten how to perform said license key update, it was easy to do. On the chance that you share the same colossal memory/aversion to work/are generally as clueless as Yr. Obt. Svt. (surely not), I present to you the handful of steps required to do this.

NB – I am doing this on my consultant laptop. No (sane) OneStream customer would use something like this. Maybe, and I do mean maybe, this might be something for an on-premises customer; if you’ve a OneStream Azure hosted customer, OneStream Support will handle it all. I