Matt Bradley, SVP of Development at Oracle will likely be well known to listeners; he’s a familiar face to customers and partners and can often be found talking about Oracle’s EPM strategy at conferences and other events.

Matt has worked for Oracle not just once but twice, led a healthcare decision support company way back when we still called it decision support, and joined Hyperion as the development for Planning on Valentine’s Day 2000. Listeners old experienced enough to remember the very first release of Hyperion Planning can thank Matt.

We talk about the future of on-premises Oracle EPM and Oracle’s policy of offering a rolling ten-year runway to customers who haven’t yet decided to move to Cloud for some or all of their business processes, how many customers remain in that position (via a gentle dig at a notable competitor’s market penetration), and about why that might be. Speed to a revised plan is becoming more and more crucial and we Matt shares his thoughts about how this can be supported via ML, IPM and Gen AI features. These features are a definitive break from the EPM past which have enthused the development team. We also learn about where that team sits in the world, how developers are selected and how the EPM development group works together with other Oracle teams.

Matt also talks about his customers, describing just how much (or little) of a customer’s activity can seen by Oracle – they can measure the adoption of new functionality, for example – and the way that newer entrants to the workforce have brought with them higher expectations of user experience that match what they see in non-enterprise application software.

Finally we talk about life outside of work. Raised in Warrenpoint, Northern Ireland and educated in Belfast, Matt and his family now reside in Dublin (but the Californian one). Matt is married to his high school sweetheart whom he met while performing in a stage production of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? - which, respectfully, your hosts would not have guessed given a dozen attempts. Matt shares his tastes in literature, film and his admiration for (arguably) Northern Ireland’s greatest footballer of all time.

Spend an hour with Matt (and us) by listening to the entire episode.

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Oh How The Tables Are Turned

I trust you’ve listened to Part the First of the interview with Gabby. This episode is better. Why? Simply because Gabby starts interviewing us and we get a taste of what it’s like to be on the other side of the metaphorical table.

I’m not going to reveal any more than that – it’s simply too good and if you don’t end up laughing at Gabby’s interrogation techniques and our squeamish answers, well, you must be bereft of humor.

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I (and the rest of your EPM Conversations hosts) first knew Gabby from his time in Essbase product management, a role he has long left. Celvin and I (50% of your host population) have been out of the Oracle space since 2017 so it’s difficult to remind ourselves that nothing stands still, and certainly not a dynamic personality like Gabby. Forgive us two if some of our questions dwell overmuch on the past, where Natalie’s and Tim’s are focused on today.

However, Gabby’s past story is one worth exploring as it informs the present – from the military to multiple startups to Big Red. Throughout it, he’s his inimitable self, bringing humor (yeah, this is the plug for the first episode, but wait till the second episode – it’s…incredible, and it doesn’t make sense unless this episode is heard first) and a playful wit to the performance management space.

HyperRoll and its first home in Oracle Express, ASO, the lawsuit, HyperRoll’s purchase by Oracle. just what exactly is Hybrid Essbase (the number of hours we’ve debated just what is happening under the covers), Essbase’s place today and tomorrow, working at small and large firms alike, helping out idiots who write multiple books on Essbase, and philosophy. That’s an awful lot to cover in an hour, hence this episode as part one of two.

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EPM Conversations has been lucky to have a variety of Performance Management guests: vendors, people from other places and tongues, fantastic players in our little technological space, and of course the Women in EPM series. All of them are great (even the ones where Yr. Obt. Svt. is a guest), insightful, interesting, and often quite funny. In short, they are the stuff that technology podcasts dream of.

What we have not had is a consultant who does not primarily have a technical bent. By that I mean, EPM Conversations is a technical podcast, it is presented by four consultants (although our participation switches round as our guests’ background dictates) who (mostly, although as you’ll hear in this episode that isn’t 100% true) are techies first and foremost. This episode’s guest, Sharon Wang, has an element of a technologist’s perspective, but at her core she is a management consultant focused on organizational change within the context of technology. Without – hopefully – sounding like a hick from the sticks, I find that utterly fascinating. It also opened my eyes about yet another professional path not taken in my so-called career because of the breadth that this dual focus brings to work, but such are the fortunes of war and of life.

Oh dear, that makes consultants sound like monsters who care not a whit for their poor clients. Of course that cannot be true lest said consultant wants a very short time in the workforce, but regardless putting oneself in someone else’s shoes can be difficult, particularly if you haven’t walked a mile in someone else’s shoes. Yes, two idioms referencing shoes in one sentence but they work.

Sharon has that experience in industry and so understands the needs and goals of both sides of the project table. Consultants work with clients during project implementation but then, if the Good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, they leave at project end. The customer then owns the application. What happens then? A good consultant, a consultant who understands the customer’s world – in other words, an emphatic consultant – understands these potential outcomes and their likelihood. In my (gasp) 28 years of consulting I’ve sometimes been witness (surely never party) to a distinct lack of empathy; pain ensues. A consultant that understands the other side of the conference table never lets that happen.

We technologists often view technology as the lever to move the organizational world and we are often successful in that approach. However, in my (gasp, yeah, again) 28 years of consulting, I have seen (alas, this time sometimes as party to, but always against my better judgement and will) projects that only focus on the system and not the people. Sometimes clients need only a better mousetrap, other times they need a wholesale change in the way they think and work. Sharon (and I might note Natalie does as well) sees that gap and how to fill that.

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A Portrait in Leadership: Women in EPM with Oracle Barbie aka Kate Helmer

Kata Helmer, aka Oracle Barbie formerly known as Hyperion Barbie, Oracle Ace Director, and oh yes ODTUG board member is just one person, but oh my, what an accomplished one.

I’ve always been intrigued by Kate’s alias: she’s quite obviously a professional of some import and yet names herself after a child’s doll. Why?

Subversion vs. celebration

Barbie (the doll, not the guest of this episode in the Women in EPM series) – or at least I thought so before recording this episode – sort of has a not totally awesome reputation. How wrong I was (again, Cameron, again?) and, having been the host (and listened to the episode eleventy times during the edit), how sure I am there can be real difference between a man’s and a woman’s perspective. Or I was just wrong. Or why not both?

Kate views Barbie as an exemplar of a woman that can do anything. Beyond the popularity of Barbie as a doll and the success of the recent Barbie movie, there are any number of academic posts on the subject.

So is “Oracle Barbie” a sly flip of an incorrect impression or an overt embrace of a powerful woman? Listen and find out.

NB – I was strictly a 12 inch GI Joe (surely the only real one – those Wee Willie Winkie ones are sort of an action figure abomination) fan and they taught me that camping is fun, which although a nice leisure activity, was not a transformative life effect.

Kate’s journey from the defense industry to Hallmark to consulting with an ever-increasing emphasis on managing the data that defines data is interesting.

What I also find interesting that Kate was introduced to Essbase in a manner similar to mine: her manager asked her to take a look at Hyperion System 9 and the rest is history. Performance Management has many branches but its roots are the same.

EPM Conversation episodes have a “rule of 3” where the guests tell us what their favorite three books, movies, and people in history are. Nowhere in that list is the subject of serial killers although I suppose opening it up to “people in history” could include them. Don’t believe me? Go to about 52:25 to hear the immortal words. “You’re not a true crime junkie until you have a favorite serial killer”. All I can think of is this song.

There’s more, much more than the above précis. The only way for you to know is for you to listen to Kate’s episode.

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We (your EPM Conversations hosts) owe a lot – a financial kind of debt as well as a professional one – to Shankar and Hyperion/Oracle on premises /PBCS/EPBCS/EPM Cloud Planning. Seriously, I first set eyes on what was then Hyperion Planning Desktop (which alas I cannot find a screenshot of but know it’s out there somewhere), I thought, “Cameron, you idiot, this is the future” and so it has been through (gulp) decades of work. Never, our Performance Management audience, look askance at a sure thing.

Part of that product’s success has been Shankar Viswanathan’s careful stewardship of a product that grew from an application wrapper around Essbase (and a horrific and quickly abandoned Win32 app that was supposed to be the workspace of users of All Things Hyperion and yes, Shankar, I really do hope you didn’t create that) to a complete EPM cloud platform. At its core, planning and budgeting hasn’t at it’s core really changed all that much (ZBB came and went, driver based planning is still here, and yes AI/ML now has its turn in the Wheel of Planning Fortune) but what we still call Planning certainly has. Of course Shankar didn’t write each line of code nor did he define and design every bit and bob of UI, but it’s easy to see his steady hand in Planning’s evolution through the lens of customer success.

Each and every one of EPM Conversations’ guests is a joy for they are enthusiastic, open, thoughtful, visionary, and just about everything one might hope for in a colleague and a friend. Shankar is all of things and yet he is different.

By that I mean Shankar is quiet in the physical sense. We struggled with Shankar’s voice until we (we = Celvin) realized that is simply how Shankar talks; he is well worth listening to and the volume button on your phone isn’t that hard to use. Sometimes how we think is reflected in how we speak: introspection, consideration, reasoning, and sensitivity don’t need to be shouted to be understood. Shankar is well worth a listen.

All of what I wrote about Shankar’s professional interests hold true for his personal ones.

There’s a wide range in all three areas of historical men, literature, and movies: E.O. Wilson, , Gandhi, and Steve Jobs for the historical figures, in reading, Ayn Rand as a teenager, to E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Anatomy of Power, and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, and finally a varied palette of movies in Shawshank Redemption, The Bang Bang Club, and Heat.

This is, in case you’ve not been able to tell, one of my favorite episodes.

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Yr. Obt. Svt. finds broad cultural movements to be interesting both conceptually (what are they, why do they exist, how did they start, and the rest of the who, when, and where list) and in practice because of their broad outcomes and impact on individuals.

My inveterate curiosity aside, women in STEM (STEAM) has been a current in social and professional change for roughly the past decade. Various organizations and companies, e.g., ODTUG, PwC, OneStream, Oracle, and many others, have been active advocates of this program

In many (most, really) respects, EPM Conversations is a series of, um, conversations with the leading lights in our Performance Management (and others) community and we have been blessed with a truly eclectic and interesting set of guests.

EPM Conversations has a started a new series in that vein – Portraits in Leadership: Women in EPM. Our first guest is Minie Parikh.

She is a true renaissance woman: driven, smart, far sighted, artistic, perceptive, altruistic, warm, positive, and more and oh yeah, right in the thick of EPM with her firm, EPMI.

Minie's story is inspiring: a first generation American who rejected her expected professional path and instead became a Big4 consultant, cofounded a boutique consultancy (EPMI), is a guest on this podcast (ahem, that’s only kind of a joke, one that is quite firmly tongue in cheek, but it is quite hard to pique our collective interest and oh by the way, she too has a podcast), while leading through active participation and by example in WIT. If that isn’t leadership, I don’t know what is.

And lest you become overwhelmed by all of this, there is of course that human story, and it’s kind of out there.

With the most profuse apologies possible to Old Blue Eyes and Sammy Khan, love and marriage and Excel and Smartview and Essbase rarely, and I do mean just about never except maybe this one and only time, come together and yet in Minie’s case, it most absolutely did because she met her husband, Nihar Parikh in a bar where they bonded over their mutual love of SmartView. It is totally geeky cool and very sweet. Never say there’s nothing new under the Sun.

Fingers crossed, our new series finds favor with you, Gentle Listener. One of the great things about this podcast is the ability to quickly jump from one theme to another. As this section header notes, Minie is not the last.

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Roger Cressy is a fascinating guest, unlike any other we’ve had. His jobs have spanned from retail management (yup, a department store, a really nice one – I’ve been there – and not the one in the States or the UK) to our Beloved Performance Management.

Roger’s is also a geographical journey, from Malawi/Nyasaland (he just missed the Central African Federation) to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, to South Africa, to the United Kingdom, back to South Africa, and thence to the United States – I may have missed a few countries in that list and perhaps got the order wrong.

Part of his peripatetic perambulation is an artefact of decolonization, the rest is a restless quest for opportunity. Oddly, in person is a very calm man.

I first met Roger through, unsurprisingly, ODTUG’s Kscope. Equally unsurprisingly given my stupendous memory, I don’t remember the year or the city. Such is the hurly-burly nature of a good conference.

If you’ve not met him, Roger is tall (maybe it’s that I’m shrinking, ah the joys of middle age) and has a beard of biblical proportions; once met, he is indelibly remembered.

Roger has a full life, more than most of us, safely ensconced in the West, and the places, roles, and people he’s met have given him a unique and philosophical outlook on the business and technical world we all share.

Have a listen to this fascinating episode.

Be seeing you.