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 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.

OneStream 5.2’s big tenth

Yr. Obt. Svt.’s Take

OneStream XF 5.2 (henceforth plain old 5.2) is both awesome and odd.

Let’s get the odd out of the way as it’s just my opinion: this should have been version 6.0, not 5.2; there’s an awful lot of stuff here, much of it a huge extension of the product. Why something with roughly five new and frankly huge features isn’t worthy of a more exciting description than a dot release is beyond this geek’s ken and is a mystery best answered by inscrutable marketers and product managers.

Whatever the reason – possibly because it’s the product of Midwestern modesty – what 5.2 brings to the table is just enormous. Here are the highlights:

  • BI Blend
  • BI Viewer and Dashboards
  • Pivot Grid (Standard and Large)
  • Table Views
  • REST API

We’re talking new UI components (big ones including a new dashboarding feature), new engines (Merciful Creator, again, how can this be a dot release?), new connections, a new API, and a bunch of other features. This is a big, big, big release. This blog post can only cover the highlights – subsequent posts will try to review each feature in turn.

With that, let’s begin looking at these

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

A Change In The Weather

There’ll be a change in the weather and a change in the sea, From now on there’ll be a change in me  

Some of you have heard the rumor and reacted with delight (scarcely believable but possible), others have heard and recoiled in horror (arguably correctly), and the vast majority of the 42 or so people who read this blog haven’t heard and if they did wouldn’t care (definitely the right reaction) but regardless the change is upon us. Or me.

What Cameron, what oh what oh what is the change?

I’m   gonna   change my way of   livin  ’, And if that   ain’t   enough, I’m   gonna   change the way I strut my stuff

The change is I’ll no longer work (and write and present and whatever else I do – send letters care of this address if you’ve figured that out ‘cos I haven’t) with just one technology. It’s a multiproduct CPM (or EPM if you prefer) world and for me at least to stick with just one approach to solving problems simply isn’t enough.

In the past it was Arbor-Hyperion-Oracle, then OneStream, and it will now be about both. And there may be more.

Some would argue that