Am I tired? Yes. Is it worth it? You decide.

I promise myself every year and every conference – falsely, repeatedly, pointlessly – that I won’t do what I’ve alas done, which is to stay up too late and wake up too early and then walk around like a zombie because then I’d miss out on sessions and not make connections and make an even greater fool of myself than is typical no matter how much coffee I drink, and yet, and yet, and yet, I did. Ugh. It was ever thus. I never learn.

I like to think (actually, I know) that I do this because there is much value in conferences like Splash: the content, the knowledge I (hopefully) gain, and most importantly the people, always the people. It’s that latter bit that no number and no quality of virtual session can equal. If you have an interest in any of this, get your organization to send you, submit an abstract to Splash’s content committee, or even pay for it on your own. $$$, but I know several people over the years that saw so much value in conferences that they took vacation, paid for the conference, flew out on points, and hopefully did the same for their hotel. Fingers crossed, you’ve got a less expensive way to do it but if you care, you care.

Let’s start at the beginning and work down through the day.

NB – This will be a largely photographic journey with a bit of commentary thrown in.

8:00 through 9:00, Breakfast

Isn’t this the most important meal of the day? Next to coffee? And it includes coffee?

I love/force myself to introduce myself to new and innocently unsuspecting people at meal time. New faces, new ideas, new victims for my so-called wit.

A target-rich environment:

Look at the space. This (horrible) snapshot may look like there’s unused space but there’s a reason.

The food was quite good.

9:00 through 10:30, Opening Keynote

As has been forever the case, I am no photojournalist. This room was big and it was full. Splash is – unofficially purported to be over 2,500 people. Splash is BIG.

OneStream is as always a polished group: Ken Hoenstein, Crag Colby, and Tom Shea gave their précis of the last year. OneStream continues to grow, evolve, and – pretty damn soon, it’ll do so completely – dominate the performance management market. The growth has been meteoric, they are justifiably proud and yet humble about OneStream’s success, and as an industry veteran fascinating to watch and to be a small part of the journey.

AI/ML/ChatGPT (yes, really) is coming (it’s here) to OneStream. Will the AI overlords ever be able to get Tom with his eyes closed? I think that level of incompetent photography will be beyond them for some time if not forever.

I cannot wait to have someone considerably smarter than me write Finance Business Rules for me.

Solution Exchange

OneStream as a true platform? It’s here:

It’s software as an ecosystem:

Off to geek-land we go.

10:45 through 11:45, What’s New and What’s Coming

This was SRO. I’m glad I got in early.

Remember that ALL OF THIS is safe harbored so some or none or all may come true if it’s not already released and it may happen now or tomorrow or when we all get around wearing jet packs and eating pills instead of real food. You Have Been Warned.

This is released in 7.4 and I need to blog about it, but in case you planning peeps missed it:

Ta da, C#Aggregate is now the (mostly but good enough for the likes of us) only answer for planning.

Cube Views are evolving:

Excel is as well:

Remember, I don’t know when the above two are coming, they may not happen ever (let’s hope that they do – I don’t believe they’re released as of this writing), this is all safe harbored, etc. It is super interesting to see that the UI continues to grow.

Better docs are on their way:

The architecture is evolving:

HTML 5 is coming as well:

I have an almost literally hundred more pictures that I am not going to post because it would take forever and OneStream would likely kill me, so I’ll end this session with the note that they are investing a lot of money and an awful lot of effort into the product. You should, too.

Lunchtime

I’ll not bore you with photographs but I will note that the food was good (this is important – the whining I’ve heard at other conferences about bad food has been epic) and there were a lot of vegetarian food choices. The days of chicken or beef or fish are behind us.

OneStream Press has a booth. Stop by and pick up a copy of Celvin’s and my magnum opus. Or two. Or three. Or more.

I hear there are other books there as well. They’re likely worth a read.

1:15 through 2:15, Excel Add-In 101: Back to Basics

I really love Excel. I probably need to get a life, but there it is. How could I not heckle the three presenters. I’ve literally known Tiffany and Nick for (at least) a decade. Brian is a new unlucky soul.

Don’t be fooled by the title of a session like this. There was a lot of content, tips and tricks I’d never used around formatting, liking from Excel (no, not the Spreadsheet) into OneStream dashboards, etc. I knew about 60% of it.

4 through 5, Sensible Machine Learning Customer Panel

I’m often (eh, always) a bit skeptical of customer panels: will it be rah-rah, will they be clueless, will I be bored. This time round it was no-ish, absolutely not, and nope. This stuff was fascinating. It is the future and we all are best served by embracing it now. Seriously, if you do planning (and other bits and bobs of performance management), get thee hence to a session like this.

They (your/our potential customers, your possible competitors) are using OneStream’s offerings in this space now.

The rest of the evening at the BDA event

The District has buildings that we USAians have seen all of our life in books, movies, and TV. It’s still thrilling to see it in person:

I’m glad to see BDA honor my just-a-wee-bit of Scottish heritage:

 

Cameron’s Code Red is a Rob Roy aka a Manhattan with Scotch instead of rye/bourbon.

I think the event was largely for the peacock in BDA employees to come out:

This was at the Spy Museum, so it must end with the famous Aston Martin DB5:

I had one of these as a kid. Sort of the same, but not quite:

Be seeing you.