Market interest in corporate performance management (CPM) solutions, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytic applications that help organizations enable confident decision-making is clearly on the rise. Maybe this, combined with the reduced pandemic threat and return to corporate travel explains why attendance at OneStream’s 2023 Splash User Conference and Partner Summit reached a new high with 2300 in-person attendees.
Making a Splash at National Harbor
From April 17th – 20th, 2023 the OneStream Splash User Conference made its debut at the Gaylord National Harbor Resort & Convention Center overlooking the Potomac River just outside of Washington, D.C. This was the second in-person, North American Splash event following two years of virtual events held during the COVID-19 pandemic where a record number of attendees came together to learn, connect and get inspired by each other.
This year’s event still had a virtual option which drew over 700 attendees, while the in-person event attracted roughly 2300 customers, prospective customers, partners, employees, media, analysts and other guests. In case you missed it, here’s a recap of the highlights from the week.
The Monday of Splash week is traditionally the day when OneStream hosts hands-on workshops for customers and prospects, offers drop-in demos on a variety of topics, and opportunities for our partners and customer advisory board (CAB) members to get together and provide feedback on OneStream’s key initiatives.
This year was no exception, with full-houses at all the workshops – while most of the conference attendees spent the day traveling and arriving in time for the opening reception in the expo hall featuring our 38 partner sponsors, OneStream demo pods, and other activities.
One of the highlights of the opening reception was the presence of the Washington Nationals famous Racing Presidents, larger-than life figures who joined us to take pictures with attendees and entertain the group with their antics.
The Tuesday of Splash started with the Opening Keynote featuring updates from several OneStream executives including Ken Hohenstein – Chief Revenue Officer, Tom Shea – CEO and Craig Colby – President. In his opening, Mr. Hohenstein highlighted the growth in customers OneStream has achieved as a company, which has averaged 56% per year over the past 8 years and is now over 1200 organizations globally. Mr. Hohenstein also highlighted the featured charity for this year’s event (The Children of Fallen Patriots) and some upcoming events such as Splash Berlin in September and the 2nd annual Wave Developers’ Conference in October.
Co-founders Tom Shea and Craig Colby then embarked on their keynote session titled “Empowering Today to Plan for Tomorrow.” They spoke about the vision and strategy for OneStream’s unified CPM software platform and the exponential value it’s delivering for customers in Finance and across the enterprise, with a growing number of use cases. Then they provided the audience with a tour of the key enablers within the OneStream platform, including the Unified Data Model, Data Management and Quality, Core CPM Services, Analytic Services and AI Services.
Mr. Shea highlighted how AI Services provides the foundation for OneStream’s Sensible Machine Learning solution, and he previewed some of the use cases OneStream is exploring for Chat GPT-style AI tools under the moniker of Sensible GPT. Mr. Shea even showed a demonstration of how after consuming OneStream’s documentation, a purpose-built version of Chat GPT like capabilities could tell a user how to create a working capital ratio in OneStream. The response included a 5-step method for the user to follow and even suggested some highly accurate business rules to include in the process. Tom and Craig then announced the official launch of the OneStream Solution Exchange.
The Solution Exchange builds on the success of the OneStream MarketPlace and the inaugural OneStream Wave Developer conference to further enhance the OneStream platform development experience with the addition of partner-built and community shared solutions.
The Solution Exchange will accelerate the development and delivery of new solutions to OneStream customers to help extend the value of their investments in the platform. The Solution Exchange consists of three solution portals: MarketPlace, PartnerPlace and OpenPlace.
Five OneStream partners were included in the initial launch of the PartnerPlace: AMCO, Black Diamond Advisory, Finit, Spaulding Ridge and Strategic IQ. Check out the PartnerPlace to learn more about the solution these partners have created for the initial launch, with more on the way!
Before handing the keynote back to Mr. Hohenstein, Tom and Craig laid out OneStream’s expanded vision for the OneStream platform, delivering what they called “CPM+” capabilities. They highlighted how traditional CPM solutions have provided value to customers in enabling management to “manage” the business based on month-end reporting and planning. But there’s a big gap between the ERP systems that are processing transactions and the CPM solutions that are summarizing results at month-end, and that’s the lack of operational detail that truly drives financial performance.
CPM+ solutions fill this gap by delivering daily and weekly KPIs and metrics to managers that enable them to “steer” the business by making key decisions that can have a big impact on month-end results. The analogy they used to drive this point home was a race car driver closing their eyes and opening them every 30 seconds vs having visibility into what’s happening around them in real-time. With eyes closed, the driver has a high chance of crashing into another car or going off the track – and the same is true for enterprises that are only measuring financial performance every 30 days.
The keynote session wrapped up with a customer panel, with Mr. Hohenstein hosting a fireside chat with representatives from several customers including Pella Windows & Doors to discuss their journeys replacing multiple legacy EPM applications and custom solutions with OneStream’s unified, Intelligent Finance Platform.
After the keynote session, the crowd dispersed to attend breakout sessions, drop-in demos, meet and greets and to spend time with our sponsors in the Expo Hall.
One of the more interesting sessions held on Tuesday was the “Moving Beyond the AI Hype: Sensible ML Customer Panel.” In this session several early adopters of the solution (Polaris Inc., Stora Enso and The Howden Group) spoke about their implementations and deployments of OneStream’s Sensible ML solution and the impact this has had on their decision-making. This included improving the speed and accuracy of their forecasting, gaining improved visibility into the true business drivers behind their forecasts, and giving line managers the ability to make more agile, informed decisions.
The Wednesday of Splash continued with more breakout sessions, drop-in demos, mix & meet events and other activities leading up to the guest keynote session with former professional racecar driver, Danica Patrick. During this session, CEO Tom Shea hosted a fireside chat with Danica to learn about the journey she took from racing go-carts to the Indy 500 and her current interests and pursuits. It was an interesting conversation, that touched on a variety of topics ranging from cars to conspiracy theories about the moon-landing, to extreme workouts with surfer Laird Hamilton.
One of the more interesting and thought-provoking sessions on Wednesday was an R&D session focused on how OneStream is planning to leverage Generative AI capabilities in its platform. Initially badged as Sensible GPT, during the session Tom Shea and his R&D team demonstrated several use cases for the technology. One of these use cases was similar to the one highlighted in the keynote, where the tool consumed OneStream documentation, white papers, books and other content and could provide technical and application assistance to users entering questions via a chat interface.
Another use case was based on the tool consuming corporate information, then answering questions about legal contracts, sales forecasts, and the impact of investments in advertising. We are early in the lifecycle of Large Language Models (LLM) such as Chat GPT, and the technology is evolving quickly – but the potential is clearly compelling.
The true highlight of the day was the annual Splash Night Out party, which took the form of a rock ‘n roll themed street party in the streets and bars surrounding the Gaylord. OneStreamers, customers, partners and guests showed their true colors, dressing up as everything from Elvis and Willie Nelson to the Spice Girls, Devo, Harry Styles and Sia. A great time was had by all!
The conference wrapped up on Thursday with the closing awards ceremony, reveal of next year’s event location (Las Vegas) and a full day of more learning opportunities for attendees. The awards included recognition for the best costumes at Splash Night Out, our top customer advocates and “Power of the Platform” award given to our partners that have the broadest and most innovative platform deployments. Congratulations to:
Overall, it was another amazing event. Over 75 sessions including customer success stories, product updates, tips & tricks, and breakouts on topics such as Financial Close & Consolidation, Planning & Forecasting, ESG Reporting, Sensible Machine Learning, ChatGPT, the Solution Exchange, and more.
Registered attendees will have access to the virtual event content for 60 days. If you didn’t register or attend, you can check out a recording of a live OneStream podcast that was recorded on the expo floor, hosted by OneStream CSO Peter Fugere and featuring interviews with several OneStreamers, partners and other guests.
We hope to see you at upcoming events such as Splash Berlin in September, The Wave Technical Conference in October, or Splash Las Vegas May 20 – 24, 2024.
The OneStream community of customers, partners and employees has grown and thrived over the past few years, despite the global pandemic and reliance on virtual conferences and events. But there’s no substitute for getting the community together in person to exchange ideas, share success stories and discuss best practices for maximizing the value of OneStream’s platform and solutions. Read on to hear the highlights of the OneStream Splash EMEA user conference and partner summit which was recently held in Paris, France.
The last OneStream Splash EMEA user conference was held in Madrid, Spain in 2019 and the OneStream EMEA community was more than ready to get back together in person for the 2022 event in Paris, France. Over 700 customers, prospects, partners and employees gathered at the recently renovated Pullman Montparnesse hotel (a property of our customer Accor), as well as virtually, September 14 – 16th. They attended to learn what’s new and what’s coming in the OneStream platform and MarketPlace, exchange ideas, share success stories and discuss strategies and best practices for maximizing the value of their investment. For those who missed it, here’s a recap of the highlights from the conference.
The first day of the Splash EMEA conference started with a day of hands-on workshops, drop-in demos of key capabilities, as well as several virtual sessions for remote attendees. The hands-on workshops included introductory workshops for customers and prospects, as well as advanced workshops on topics such as Basic and Advanced Dashboards, Financial Calculations, and Analytic Blend. Drop-in demos were available for several topics including Data Integration, ESG Reporting, Application Control Manager, Account Reconciliations/Transaction Matching, and Operational Planning.
Day One also included a Partner Summit, where over 200 partner attendees from across EMEA received updates from OneStream’s leadership on what’s new and what’s coming in the OneStream platform and MarketPlace, the company’s plans to continue growing and enabling the partner community to deliver 100% customer success.
The day concluded with the opening of the Partner Expo and Welcome Reception for all attendees. Events like this would not be possible without the support of our partners, and OneStream had 21 partners who sponsored the event and had a chance to highlight their capabilities to attendees at the Partner Expo and throughout the event.
Day two of Splash EMEA kicked off with the Opening Keynote and Splash Awards session, which was hosted by Matt Rodgers, SVP and General Manager of OneStream EMEA. Mr. Rodgers highlighted OneStream’s rapid growth and success since the 2019 event in Madrid. This included the following statistics:
While the growth in OneStream’s global customer base over the past three years has been impressive, what really struck me was the number of brand-name customers the company has acquired in EMEA over the past three years. Several of these customers participated in the customer panel during the keynote session – Accor Group, Sainsbury’s and Majorel. Others led breakout sessions during the conference – Auchan, Autoliv, CMA CGM, Electrolux, KLM, Schiphol and others.
Mr. Rodgers then introduced OneStream President Craig Colby, who highlighted the business challenges that led to the founding of OneStream, and the company’s vision for the platform. He also highlighted how customers are gaining “exponential value” from their investments by taking advantage of all the capabilities of the platform and delivering additional solutions to their users while retiring point solutions and spreadsheets. Mr. Colby also highlighted new and upcoming innovations such as Sensible Machine Learning, the CPM Blueprint, Browser UX, and expanded offerings from OneStream’s Global Education Services team.
During the opening keynote, several awards were given to OneStream partners and customers to recognize the innovation and advocacy they have demonstrated to the OneStream community. This included the following recipients:
Congratulations to all the award winners and thanks for your support of OneStream!
After the keynote session, a plenary session focused on OneStream’s Sensible Machine Learning solution was delivered to the conference attendees. During this session, several OneStream executives and ML experts highlighted how our Sensible ML solution is decreasing the time to value for ML forecasting in CPM by delivering thousands of demand planning forecasts across the enterprise. The session highlighted the results of the technical preview project at automotive safety products provider Autoliv, where the solution has delivered a 35% improvement in forecast accuracy as compared to the EDI-based forecasts Autoliv was getting from their customers in the automotive industry.
Of course, no Splash event would be complete without the Splash Night out costume party where everyone gets a chance to gather for food, drink, dancing and networking. The theme for this year’s Splash Night out event was Anees Folles, paying tribute to the roaring 20’s of Paris. It was great seeing how the attendees embraced the theme with women decked out as flappers, men as gangsters, and other characters from the 1920’s.
The third day of Splash EMEA opened with our annual Women in Finance panel, where several Finance leaders spoke about how they use modern technology and processes to enable organizational collaboration, build bridges, and support career development. This year’s panelists included Michelle Fuoco from Subway restaurants, Julia Fowler from Dyson, and Gaia Kaldor from OneStream.
The day continued with breakout sessions led by several customers, including:
The closing lunch on Day Three of the event gave attendees a chance for more networking and to say their final goodbyes before heading back to their places of origin. OneStream’s recently launched ONECommunity and local user group events will allow our ecosystem to continue exchanging ideas and sharing successes until the next Splash EMEA event, which will be held in Berlin, Germany September 19-21, 2023. If you can’t wait until then, there’s also Splash North America in Washington DC April 17-20, 2023.
You can learn more about Splash and other upcoming events on our website at: www.onstreamsoftwarecom/events.
Until then – Au Revoir!
After two years of enduring virtual Splash user conferences the OneStream community was clearly ready to return to a live event in 2022 based on the pre-conference registration numbers and final attendance. When it finally came to be, we had nearly 1800 live attendees in San Antonio and over 800 virtual attendees as well. Read on to hear about the highlights of Splash San Antonio and the location of next year’s user conference and partner summit.
On May 23, 2022, nearly 1800 customers, prospective customers, partners, employees, and other guests from the OneStream ecosystem began to descend upon San Antonio, TX for the Splash User Conference and Partner Summit. This event was several years in the making, given the last live Splash conference we had in North America was in New Orleans in 2019.
In 2020 and 2021 the conference was forced to go virtual due to the global pandemic. And even though the pandemic isn’t completely behind us, the OneStream community was ready to get back together in person again. The energy level at the event was amazing and the convention center environment and scale that we have reached with the Splash conference made a big impression on everyone who attended. The feedback during and after the event was very positive from all who attended both in person, and virtually. Here’s a recap of the highlights from Splash 2022.
Day 1 at Splash is always somewhat of a warm-up for the event, with most of the guests arriving throughout the day, while the early birds attended hands-on workshops, drop-in demos, and the partner summit.
Live certification testing also took place, giving OneStream consultants, partners, and customers the opportunity to become a member of the elite OneStream Certified community by successfully completing the OneStream Certified Professional (OCP) – Lead Architect exam. This year, the virtual Splash program kicked off on Day 1 as well.
The workshops included hands-on workshops for prospective customers, introductory workshops designed for OneStream customers looking to gain more exposure to functional concepts within OneStream, and advanced workshops designed for seasoned OneStream users.
Day 1 also included the annual Splash Gives Back event, where members of the OneStream community volunteer their time to leave our host city a little better than we found it. This year’s focus was the San Antonio Food Bank.
But the conference really got into high gear at the Splash Welcome Reception which was held in the lower level of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, which runs right along the San Antonio Riverwalk. Here, attendees were treated to a number of refreshments, food stations, live entertainment, and even a live Texas Longhorn cattle for pictures!
Day 2 at Splash San Antonio kicked off with the grand opening of the Partner Expo followed by the opening keynote session.
This year’s keynote was kicked off by OneStream Chief Revenue Officer Ken Hohenstein, who welcomed everyone to San Antonio and highlighted the tremendous growth we’ve seen in the OneStream community since the last live Splash event in 2019. This includes growing our global customer base from 300 to over 950+ customers in 35 countries around the globe in 2022.
Mr. Hohenstein gave a shout-out to our 37 partner sponsors, then introduced OneStream President Craig Colby for his keynote address with the theme of “Driving Exponential Value.” The concept he emphasized here is that the more you do – the more you can do, and the more value you get from your OneStream investment as a customer. So as organizations extend their OneStream implementations and deploy additional solutions that build on their initial work, they drive exponential value to their businesses. And the journey never ends!
He supported this concept with some customer video testimonials as well as previews of several customer success stories that would be featured at Splash and the value they have derived to date. One of these is Arch Capital who saw a 65% improvement in time spent on the financial close and 50% improvement in account reconciliations – freeing up its Finance team to spend more time on value-added activities to support the business.
Mr. Colby then highlighted some of the new innovations OneStream is driving to ensure customers continue to get exponential value from their investment. This included the Browser UX initiative, Sensible Machine Learning solution, CPM Blueprint, and new offerings being launched by OneStream Global Education Services.
After Mr. Colby’s address, Ken Hohenstein returned to the stage to kick off the Splash customer panel. The panel included Erica Musgrove from Asurion, Kristen Fisher from Oshkosh Corporation, Jan de Leeuw from Ingram Micro, and Robert Bixler from United States Coast Guard who shared stories about their OneStream journeys and the value our platform and solutions are delivering to their business.
When the keynote session ended, the audience was unleashed to attend breakout sessions, visit the partner expo and drop-in demos, participate in certification testing, and connect with other members of the OneStream community. Key Day 1 breakout sessions included What’s New and What’s Coming in the OneStream Platform, several sessions on Sensible Machine Learning, Aligning ESG Reporting with Financial Reporting, customer success stories, tips & tricks, and many other topics.
Day 3 at Splash San Antonio kicked off with the annual Splash Fun Run at 7 AM, followed by the Women in Finance Breakfast and Panel, featuring several customers and OneStream executives discussing how modern leaders use intelligence finance for organizational collaboration, building bridges, and career development.
Day 2 continued with more breakout sessions throughout the day, certification testing, the partner expo, drop-in demos, and lots of networking. In fact, during the course of the conference, a wide variety of use cases for the OneStream platform were highlighted, as indicated in the keynote slide above.
The highlight of the day was the afternoon keynote session featuring comedian Kathleen Madigan. In her 32-year comedy career, Ms. Madigan has been touring 250 nights a year on the road and has risen from performing in comedy clubs to performing in marquee theaters with sold-out shows, over 40 appearances on late-night talk shows, and multiple comedy specials airing on Netflix, Comedy Central, and HBO. After enduring the past two years of the pandemic, we were all ready for a laugh and Ms. Madigan delivered – in a non-stop monologue of commentary and stories that had the audience in stitches and primed for the Splash Night Out celebration Wednesday evening.
The fiesta-themed Splash Night Out was held at the Witte Museum, one of San Antonio’s main cultural attractions. With ample indoor and outdoor space to handle the crowd, we had a beautiful night that included Mexican-themed food and drinks, multiple performing groups, and even a couple of alpacas for picture-taking. A great night was had by all!
Although the attendance was a little lighter on Thursday morning following the big party, Splash Day 4 wrapped up with several breakout sessions followed by a closing awards session and the reveal of the conference location for 2023. Wait for it……………………….the location is National Harbor, Maryland, just outside of Washington DC and the dates are April 17 – 20, 2023. Mark your calendars, and if you can’t wait that long there’s always Splash Paris, which is happening September 14 – 16, 2022. More details to come on that.
In case you missed some sessions or the entire event, there is an opportunity for registered attendees to relive Splash San Antonio via the virtual platform, which you can find at this link. Many thanks to all who attended and made Splash San Antonio a huge success, especially the OneStream employees and partners who worked so hard in planning and executing this year’s conference. See y’all next year in Washington DC, or at Splash Paris!
Well – the OneStream Marketing team thought we had a good chance of hosting an in-person Splash User Conference this year by pushing it from May to August of 2021. And by late July things were looking good with the pandemic and our registrations going over 1200 for the event. But the Delta variant had different plans and in early August we made the decision to turn Splash into a Virtual Experience.
The event was missing the personal interactions we would have had in Orlando, but thanks to the virtual event platform we still had a successful event. In fact, we finished up with over 1400 registrations for the Splash Virtual Experience which ran from August 30 – September 1st. The event included over 30 hours of content – including the keynote, partner summit, breakout sessions, virtual meetups, discussion forums, trivia contests, and awards. Here’s a recap of the key highlights from the Splash 2021 Virtual Experience.
Day 1 – Customer Success, Roadmaps, and Partner Summit
Day 1 of the Splash Virtual Experience opened with some breakout sessions focused on customer success stories, tips & tricks, and product updates. One of the featured sessions was about how the well-known professional football league, “LaLiga Scored a Championship Victory” by moving to OneStream for their planning, budgeting, and forecasting process. Another interesting session focused on “How NewsCorp Replaced Four HFM Applications and Achieved One Version of the Truth with OneStream.”
The morning agenda also included two important product update sessions from OneStream covering the OneStream Platform and MarketPlace. These sessions highlighted the innovations introduced in the OneStream platform in the past 12 months, new OneStream MarketPlace solutions such as Application Control Manager and enhancements to other solutions, as well as what’s on the roadmap for the next 12 months.
The middle of the day agenda included several virtual “meetups” and drop-in demos, as well as our Virtual Partner Summit with over 150 attendees from our global partners. The afternoon agenda included several innovative customer success stories. Some of the key sessions here included:
Day 2 – Keynotes, Customer Success, AI, and Machine Learning
Day 2 of the Splash Virtual Experience opened with some early morning breakout sessions for our friends in EMEA, including one highlighting “How EFG Bank Transformed their Budgeting and Planning process with OneStream.” This was followed by some drop-in demos and a virtual yoga session – taking care of our OneStreamers!
The keynote session with the theme of “Leading @ Speed” commenced at 10 AM ET led by OneStream CEO Tom Shea, President Craig Colby, and a panel of OneStream customers sharing their success stories. During his segment, Tom Shea spoke about the increasing pressure the past 18 months of the pandemic have put on Finance teams and the increased expectations for them to move beyond financial reporting and planning – to delivering near real-time financial signaling capabilities for managers. He highlighted the evolution of FP&A to xP&A (eXtended Planning and Analysis), aligning financial and operational planning and driving the need to turn large amounts of data into valuable business insights that support decision-making.
This led into Mr. Shea’s unveiling of the latest innovation to the OneStream platform, adding artificial intelligence (AI) services, and a new MarketPlace solution called Sensible ML that will enable finance and operations teams to easily incorporate advanced forecasting and other ML techniques into their existing planning processes. Leveraging Auto AI capabilities, OneStream’s approach will enable customers to leverage large volumes of internal and external data, build and deploy thousands of ML models at the scale required by business – all within OneStream’s unified platform.
According to Mr. Shea, these AI and ML capabilities will be in preview mode with a select group of customers in 2021 and generally available in the first half of 2022. This is exciting news and will be game-changing for organizations in putting the power of AI and ML in the hands of business users.
Following Mr. Shea’s keynote, Craig Colby led a customer panel featuring Regina Gashi from Bunge Limited, Kevin Kalicak from Darden, Jeffrey Leidl from News Corporation, and Candice Cage from Teledyne Technologies. During this interactive discussion, the panelists spoke about their business challenges prior to OneStream, how OneStream is helping them address a growing number of business challenges, and the benefits they have achieved to date. This session is covered in more detail in another blog article I’ll be publishing.
Other sessions that ran on Day 2 included product updates, drop-in demos, tips & tricks, and customer success stories including:
Day 3 – More Customer Success, Drop-in Demos, and Awards
Day 3 of the Splash Virtual Experience began with more tips & tricks, drop-in demos, meet-ups, and customer success sessions. These included:
Day 3 wrapped up with a virtual awards ceremony hosted by OneStream RVP Chad Hart and Director of Technology Alliances Charlene Maskell and the unveiling of the location for Splash 2022 – which is San Antonio!
Learn More
Congratulations and thanks to the Award Winners and all of the OneStream employees, partners, and customers who helped make the 2021 Splash Virtual Experience a success. See y’all in San Antonio May 23-26, 2022!
OneStream’s Splash conferences offer Finance teams a unique opportunity to think bigger. To step back from the daily grind and focus on unleashing the true value of Finance. How? By learning directly from OneStream customers, from industry experts and from each other, of course.
And though we couldn’t all celebrate in Paris this year, OneStream will always find a way to deliver for our customers – 100% customer success is our mission, after all. That’s why we were thrilled to kick off the OneStream Splash EMEA Virtual Mini-Series September 21 – 24th.
Moderated by Matt Rodgers, Managing Director of EMEA, the keynote featured OneStream CEO Tom Shea and our very special guest, Formula One racing world champion Mika Häkkinen.
Read on for the highlights from our keynote session.
One of the highlights of the year for OneStream has been our annual Splash user conferences. The team at OneStream had been working for months to plan our Splash 2020 user conference in Toronto. And we were looking forward to welcoming over 1300 customers, partners, OneStreamers and other guests at the conference. But the global pandemic, and related travel restrictions, forced us to cancel the live event this year. However, the content was too valuable to squander – so we decided to make selected sessions from Splash 2020 available virtually.
Wow! That’s probably the best word to describe the energy level and activity at OneStream’s Splash User Conference and Partner Summit at the New Orleans Marriott last week. While we were all a bit exhausted after four days in the “Big Easy”, the conference was by all accounts a raging success with approximately 1,100 attendees, 23 sponsors, 3 hands-on workshops, 20 drop-in demos, 55 breakout sessions, and lots of networking and socializing.
After three eventful days in Chicago listening to our customers and partners; sharing best practices and discussing future plans, the OneStream team is more energized than ever.