By John O'Rourke September 8, 2021
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:
- Harnessing Operational Data at Teledyne Technologies
- How Salesforce is Leveraging Analytic Blend for Analytics and Reporting
- How Brookfield Properties Cut 30% From its Reporting Timelines
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:
- How Bunge Replaced HFM and FDMEE with OneStream
- How Crane Worldwide LogisticsAccelerated Close, Automated Reporting, and Enhanced Planning with OneStream.
- How Presidio Transformed Finance Processes While Transitioning ERP Systems
- Architecting an Agile Business Driven Solution for Today and Tomorrowland at Cimpress
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:
- Making the Impossible Possible at Sasfin Bank
- Oxbow Carbon LLC's Journey to Automating Cash Flows and CTA in OneStream
- The Power of OneStream in Private Equity
- Women in Tech: Journey to a Public Company – featuring a panel of amazing women from Dynatrace and GBI Consulting
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!
