EPM Conversations — Episode 11, A Conversation With Peter Fugere, OneStream Software’s Chief Strategic Services Officer

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 to the recently announced OneCommunity to OneStream Press, it’s all there in just an hour. Rocket ship as sobriquet is scarcely sufficient and this episode reflects that break neck speed and excitement.

Hear the conversation

As always, you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Buzzsprout (our provider), Stitcher, iHeart Radio, TuneIn, Deezer, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, and Castbox.

We hope you like the episode as much as we do. If you do enjoy it, please give us a good rating on the provider of your choice as it both bathes our ever-needy egos and

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EPM Conversations — Episode 10, A Conversation with Jodi Hill, Pattern Recognizer and Outlier

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 outside that pattern have different perspectives, values, and insights. Jodi Hill is one such outlier.

Her path to a job in business strategy is atypical and is driven by its unconventionality: from Army translator to accountant to consultant to strategist is surely out of our norm. So too is an educational journey from the Defense Language Institute to a BS in accounting to multiple Masters in predictive analytics, public policy, and health economics. No matter how diverse this may seem at first glance, it is held together by the thread of transforming data into information by seeing, interpreting, and understanding patterns. I’ve

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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

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My take on OGB Appreciation Day: An Essbase Hacker’s POV

“Smart boy, doesn’t follow instructions, must try harder”

Pretty much every teacher I ~~tortured with my intransigence and folly~~ gladly received tutelage from as a wee lad noted that while I had a certain level of base intelligence, (note that I didn’t use words like, “overmuch”, “gratifyingly high”, or even just, “barely adequate for the purpose at hand”) I really, really, really wasn’t terribly good at following instructions. It’s a skill that alas seems to be forever beyond my reach. And still is, as you’ll soon see.

Tim Hall, aka OracleBase, (Oracle-Base? Dunno.) organizes OGB (Oracle Groundbreakers) Appreciation Day as a way to thank all of the people in the Oracle community that have helped others. In my (OMG, surely it isn’t possible if you follow the corporate ownership path of Essbase) 25 years in the Oracle space I have: helped some, been helped by many, and confounded and confused just about everyone I’ve crossed paths with.

Tim has suggested the following potential topics:

My favourite feature of {the Oracle-related tech you work on}.
What is the next thing on your list to learn.
Horror stories. My biggest screw up, and how I fixed it.
How the

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Why I do what I do when it comes to blogging

Why I do what I do do do

Do you know why I ~~write endless drivel~~ try to contribute something to the CPM/EPM world through the-very-best-social-media-this-Gen-Xer-can-come-up-with?

This is LinkedIn message is why:

This, this, this is why I’ve spent thousands (yes, really, even if to little positive effect) of hours over the last 10+ years on the web. Only this. And trying to figure out how to do something and have an earthly chance of remembering how I did it whatever “it” might be. So, two things, but the former is much more gratifying even if it’s the latter that keeps me employed.

Dear Anonymized Reader, thank you so much for this. The thought that my ramblings have helped anyone, ever, is incredibly gratifying.

Destroying stereotypes

In case you wonder why Yr. Hmbl. & Mst. Obt. Svt. hasn’t identified the writer of this LinkedIn note, said writer really does exist and is a Millennial who isn’t 100% comfortable with public exposure on Al Gore’s Greatest Invention. A complete implosion (complete role reversal really) of stereotypes between the two of us although I have been assured that $12 avocado toasts are part of that millennial’s standard fare.

For the

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KScope 19 live blog, Day 1, Part 2

OAC’s roadmap

ALL OF THIS IS SAFE HARBORED. What does that mean?

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features orfunctionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

In your family, does “maybe” mean “yes” or does it mean “no”.? Maybe.

There. Have I made that clear? Whatever the Idiot Named Cameron posts, it’s all maybe, maybe not likely to happen. You have Been Warned.

With that, I’m going to try to give you a slide by slide take on what’s coming. Again, maybe.

Btw, you should really, really, really be here. It’s one thing to look at slides and entirely another to hear The Man In Charge to actually explain ‘cos there’s not a chance that I can. Being away for two years can do that.

With that, slides galore. Yeah, this is a huge post. I’m not going try to comment for several reasons: 1) I have

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 3 — OneStream XF Relational Blending 101, part 1

Introduction

This post is proof that my quite meager salesmanship skills are sometimes successful in convincing others to do my work. This time round, that means that my colleague Mike Gialanella agreed to write a guest post on XF’s relational blending. Thanks, Mike, for giving me the week off. And oh yeah, Gentle Reader, you too should thank Mike for writing about a really exciting and unique tool bit of functionality.

And with that, heeeeeerrrreeee’s Mike.

XF Relational Blending 101

When Cameron Lackpour asks you to write a guest blog post, the answer is yes. It is one of those things that you just can’t say no to. If Santa Claus asked you to deliver Christmas presents to kids-in-need, you would need an incredibly good reason to decline such a request.

XF networking event Nov 2017. Me on the right, Santa on the left.

So, for all you technical and finance experts that are attracted to ~~Cameron’s wit and wisdom~~ this blog, here’s my best-most-humble effort to deliver, by request of ~~the man~~ Cameron himself…. here you go:

OneStream XF is a unified SmartCPM^TM platform solution, it is not a siloed set of solutions that are fused together.

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This blog’s introduction

History

Can it be Cameron? Can it?

Without beating about the bush, I practised in the Oracle Essbase/Planning/ODI world for more years than I really care to remember. 1994 doesn’t seem all that long ago but I’ve had conversations with many who look at me aghast when they figure out how long that’s been till date: for those of you who struggle with math, that’s 24 years and counting as of this writing. In technology terms, that’s several lifetimes. It was, and has been, time for me to move on and I have, to OneStream Software.

As I noted before, you may be hearing pins drop. But it’s true, I promise you that.

The ground rules

As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to write about technology, problems, and how the former fixes the latter. I’ve been told that I have a…unique style. Or something. I certainly have a voice (ooh, if only my Faulkner professors would read this), and definitely have a point of view. With that, here’s what this blog will and won’t be.

The will

Information

Knowledge sharing is the only point to this blog for you or for me. I’m new to OneStream XF …