EPM Conversations — Episode 12, A Conversation With Kumar Ramaiyer, Workday Adaptive Planning Business Unit Vice President

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 complex topic might be is easily understood by the average geek. This (possibly insanely optimistic) generosity of intellectual spirit informs this podcast as Kumar takes us (and you, Gentle Listener) through his journey from theoretician to developer to advocate to Vice President of Engineering while working at Informix, Oracle, and now Workday.

Cubes, Cubes, Cubes

Beyond the interesting personal history (and you have to catch Kumar’s glory days in the NCAA and yes, really; we in the performance management space are polymaths), he gives one of the most passionate, cogent, and comprehensive arguments of the cube as the ideal for planning and budgeting. I’ve worked with non-cube forecasting tools and

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

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. 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.