The OneStream Podcast
OneStream Software's Podcast, where we discuss the power and key advantages of OneStream and the value delivered to customers.
The OneStream Podcast
The OneStream Podcast: Foundation Series - Platform Version 9
OneStream Platform v9 introduces breakthrough platform technology, empowering Finance to go further with integrated Operational and Financial data. On this episode of The OneStream Podcast, Jessica McAlpine from the OneStream product management team joins Peter Fugere to discuss feature highlights such as Genesis and Dynamic Cube Services, and how this upgrade benefits all of your OneStream users.
The OneStream Global Education Services team proudly presents the OneStream Podcast with your host, Peter Fugere.
SPEAKER_03:Greetings, fellow OneStreamers, and welcome to the OneStream podcast, where we explore and examine all things OneStream, talk to experts in the industry, and gain knowledge from some of the brightest minds that help deliver and implement solutions for our clients. This episode is part of the OneStream Foundation series, where we explore and examine fundamental concepts and tools and topics surrounding OneStream. I'm your host, Peter Fugere, Chief Solutions Officer at OneStream Software. And as always, I'm excited to bring this discussion to you today. And welcome to the podcast, Jessica McAlpine. Welcome. Welcome back. I should say. Yeah, excited to be back. Happy to be back. So you've been busy. You've been moving around the company. Where are you now? And tell me about your role.
SPEAKER_02:So I am now VP of products at OneStream. I actually started at OneStream over six years ago as a product manager and have kind of moved throughout the organization. Prior to joining OneStream, though, I was actually an early adopting customer. Peter, you actually were out on site at my Thank you so much. But yeah, now overseeing the general product and its roadmap.
SPEAKER_03:And so I imagine if the president of product that you guys can't fly together, is that how that works?
SPEAKER_02:We don't have those rules yet, so we'll see if Jeremy and I
SPEAKER_03:get caught off. Something to think about.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's a good point.
SPEAKER_03:So tell me, you've been working with some of the new features. We wanted to talk today about Platform 9.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's a major version for us that occurred earlier this year, which is super exciting.
SPEAKER_03:And so when we say a major version, like what's that mean?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so major versions are going to be anything that's instrumentally changing the way our software works, whether that's foundational changes like our.NET framework or if there's brand new functionality that we think changes the game. And in this case, we have two of those things within this major version.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. And what are they?
SPEAKER_02:So the plug and play architecture, Genesis, and that's foundationally going to change the way anyone, especially administrators, will interact with OneStream. It's going to really... increase users' time to value, set up new business cases, and really help everyone in the OneStream community. And as a prior admin, I would have jumped all over that. The other one is there's some foundational stage changes to our stage tables. What that's going to do for customers is it's going to improve the consistency of their load time. So they can expect load times for data to be the same as they were in January and December. So, you know, obviously, as those get bigger throughout the year, in the past, you would see some inconsistency as time to load. But with this new stage transformation, you're going to see a much more consistent load time within loading your data to stage, which is exciting.
SPEAKER_03:So that means bigger customers are going to see faster load times, faster I guess, the whole data flow. I mean, the loading of the tables and the migration of the cube. I mean, that's a big part of the time in the workflow. And that's just going to be consistent through the year.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So it'll be consistent, right? So definitely you're at your end. You'll see faster, maybe not in January, because January your data will be at its lowest. But definitely throughout the year, you're just going to see consistency of data load.
SPEAKER_03:Now, does that impact any of the relational table solutions? Does that change anything with that?
SPEAKER_02:There are no impacts. We have created a way for migration to be seamless because the table sizes have been reduced. I'm sorry, the number of tables have been reduced. But if you have specific calls out to those stage tables that don't exist, they should automatically pull to the correct table where the data now sits. I will say if you are seeing any flags or concerns when you have those custom queries to stage. The best path is to reach out to customer support because we have the way to work around that. Again, that would be very rare and it would be a custom query that was made possibly by an administrator and or a partner. But reach out to support and we can definitely get you any help you should have. But You should not expect with V9 any breaking changes like we saw to 8. We saw breaking changes in 8 because of the.NET framework change, which was a Microsoft change. So there shouldn't be concerns about migrating to 9 or the time to migrate to 9. It should be more, it's a migration, you know, it's an upgrade, not a migration like 8 was.
SPEAKER_03:Say that again. It's an upgrade, not a migration?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so I would say eight's more of a migration, right? There was things that you might have needed to do to fix business rules, whereas this is just a standard upgrade. And just like if you upgraded from 8.4 to 8.5, right, there should be no breaking changes.
SPEAKER_03:The tables get updated behind the scenes. Correct. You're not doing anything as part of the upgrade.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly.
SPEAKER_03:What about for things like drill back or custom solutions? Those should all still be okay, right?
SPEAKER_02:100%. Yep. No effect on any of those things.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. Interesting. Well, that's exciting. So that's sort of a foundational change. But it sounds like, you know, it's going to be a performance improvement. One of the big things that I've got to work with a little bit with the Express, CPM Express, Genesys is pretty exciting. So do you want to give an overview of what Genesys is about?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so last year, again, we introduced version 8, which was a major version. And at the heart of version 8 was the.NET, like I talked about, moving to.NET framework. But additionally, we introduced workspaces. And as a prior customer, when I first heard about workspaces, I thought that's more for solution developers. That's not going to impact me. Candidly, I was not very wowed by it, but I kept being told by customers. that was more important than me, that this is gonna foundationally change the way things are built. And now we're seeing that. Workspaces enabled the creation of this plug and play architecture, but really what that means for customers is foundationally, they will be able to create things that possibly might've been out of their realm before, or if it was possible, it would take weeks for them to create. There's examples of different dashboards, like a variance analysis and creating AI and reading the variance analysis to come up with solutions. And you're setting those things up within five minutes. So I like to give the example when I first saw or first had hands on Genesis. I was shown a, you know, a. dashboard, which was interactive that you could add commentary. So you could think of it as a form to not just reporting. I was shown a dashboard that I would never have been able to make. Let alone, I saw the demo and I watched the demo and without any instructions, without any step-by-step, I built the exact same thing. This variance analysis with the water flow chart with commentary in five minutes. It's, crazy to think about. And that's why I keep saying whenever customers ask, how do I plan my roadmap? Which version do I go to? Fundamentally, nine is so changing to how people can do their job and provide value and show their CFO, show the rest of the organization, you know, the value that they can provide. It just makes sense, right? Like you, you're going to, you want to talk about being a finance hero. You're going to be a hero now and you're going to, it's going to just change the way you work. Right. So it's super exciting.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you know, it's funny, what I got to see with Genesys was, you know, the sort of the common interface that we have. How do I update it? But also, too, we had so many other dashboards that we wanted to make a part of Express around auditability, metadata, you know, some features, some of the planning stuff. But to pull it all together and create a UI that, you know, sort of unifies all the dashboards, organizes them, has security so only administrators can get to certain pages, all that. And you're right, like it took me, I don't want to make it sound like I was goofing off all that time with Express, but it took me like, I could build it all from scratch in a couple of days, like a whole UI, which with the old concepts and the paradigms and stuff, it was like I would have spent weeks doing that. And that's you.
SPEAKER_02:You have been doing this for a minute, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I'm not great. Well, I'm not great with dashboards, too. I think they're more of, this is another thing I think is helpful with it, I think they're a little bit more art than science, right? Like making them look good and like pulling them together. And just the way Genesis worked and the way I was able to access the color palette and change the fonts and integrate pictures for icons, for buttons, and like to pull that all together. And yeah, it took like seconds. So it was like, it was so much simpler to use, easier to use. I wasn't counting pixels. to move stuff around, like it was just easier and significantly so. So I thought that was really powerful. Have you done a lot of stuff with blocks? And why don't you tell, like for the listeners, why don't you explain like what a block is and how that fits in Genesis?
SPEAKER_02:So... First, before I just had a thought when you were just talking about dashboards and existing dashboards, I do get questions from customers saying, well, what about dashboards I've already used or already created? You can implement those and include them in Genesis. So have no fear. Your work isn't getting thrown out. So I just wanted to throw that out there. But in terms of blocks, I like to think of them as a Lego piece, right? So if you have blocks, one stream in general, and you don't have these foundational blocks, you could give me a hundred piece Legos. My kids have a hundred piece Legos. There's no instructions. It's just a bunch of Legos. I can build anything with it, but really there's no, if I want to get a pretty house, there's no construction or instruction manual on how to create the pretty house because it's, it's create your own, right? The world is your oyster. These blocks are configuration blocks that allow you to configure them in a way that That's repeatable. So they're more like templates. So for example, I have a block that says I want three different items that they're called cards, but three different items. I want one chart here. I'm going to pick my chart. I want to have one Q view here. I'm going to pick my Q view and, you know, one commentary here. I'm going to pick the text that I want to add. So really it's kind of a step by step process. process to configure what you need to. And we have pre-delivered 30 content blocks already with the initial release. But what's exciting as well is the way that we're releasing the content blocks. So, you know, previously in the past, or currently still, we have three platform releases a year, and then solutions are delivered consistently throughout the year. Our larger ones follow a three release cycle as well, and then the smaller ones are more infrequent. But the way that that content blocks are deployed is different than how you would previously take a solution. So if you wanted to take a new version of AccountRex, right, you go to the solution exchange, you download it and import it into your application. With content blocks, once you're in Genesys, you can literally select content library, And you can see all of the available content blocks that are available. And you're doing this within your application. So there's a list of the blocks, a definition of what the block does, and you can select it and download that block automagically in OneStream. So this is a new way that we're deploying and we're constantly adding to that library. So at Splash, we announced 30 blocks. We will have 10 more by Splash EMEA.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, which is right around the corner.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right. I got to
SPEAKER_03:almost book my travel.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you got to do that. So it's just a really exciting, constantly new way to evolve the software. And it's a way, and that's why when customers think about upgrade path. So if you go to Nine now, not only do you get all this, the infrastructure, the improvements of the consistency, but you can continuously get new innovation from us via the block library.
SPEAKER_03:What's a good example of a block?
SPEAKER_02:There's a basic QView designer, QView creation, I think. I'm not going to name it correctly. But a lot of the QViews have parameters created within them. Previously, if you wanted to create a form that was based on those parameters. So I had a form for my budget for North America, and I want to fill out my budget for the year. Well, let's say then I want to have a parameter dropdown that then says... Let's now do it for EMEA. And now I want to change the year and I want to create a parameter for the year.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Well, now you don't have to create that form, that interactive experience, because there's a creator that automatically reads the parameters and creates that form right away. Like that's the most basic one and the most digestible to me. But again, I mean, definitely if you have questions about it, there's, they're on the solution exchange. You don't need to be a nine to, you know, They're also downloadable on a solution exchange with definitions of the block for each and what they do. And we're also creating content videos that are available on Navigator that show how the blocks work, what they do, and, you know, the high level value of those blocks, which is exciting.
SPEAKER_03:But you do need to be on Platform 9 to get in Genesys, obviously, to start to use those blocks. But if you want to learn more about them, and where's the website would they go to?
SPEAKER_02:Navigator, which is for all customers and anyone who has Okta. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And that's a great resource, too. Like if people are thinking about training, you know, you think about taking a class. Class is great. But a Navigator subscription, like there's so much information out there and you get it all year and all kinds of additional content like this is pretty is pretty valuable.
SPEAKER_02:For sure. And just really quick on Navigator, we're we product and as part of our go to market, you know, making sure everyone understands what we're working on. You're going to continue to see on Navigator free resources. resources for new and exciting solutions. So, for example, there's an entire Genesis course on Navigator that's free. We call it the Readiness Toolkit. It walks you through videos, how to set it up. It provides examples, but there's also a toolkit for ESG if you're interested in just learning about what ESG is, etc. So, New solutions like that, the Productivity Pack has a readiness toolkit. So anything that you're hearing about or seeing announcements about, especially that's happened in 2025, that is a major release in our opinion, will be available for free training on Navigator.
SPEAKER_03:And all that training for that for Genesys, it's all self-paced online?
SPEAKER_02:Correct. Yep.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, that's great. You know, the other thing I was thinking about when you were explaining Genesis is, and I think it's one of the things, you know, we used to have in the name extensibility, OneStream XF, OneStream extensibility, and we talk about it. I mean, the idea of Genesis, I mean, is... is extensibility, right? Like once you've built something for one purpose, you can use it for other purposes. And I mean, I was thinking too more about like, you know, my little experience with Express and, you know, just being able to go in and have a webpage that pulls up a PDF. Really simple to do. Or a dashboard that pulls up a PDF. Really simple to do. We got all kinds of documentation. I want to embed it in the tool. Instead of having a link that someone clicks on or opens another window, I want it to just appear in the solution. You click on the link, it takes two seconds. There's nothing to do. It's incredible.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. And it's so easy to understand. It's very intuitive. And we're continuing to evolve it as well, right? So we are actually having a workshop where we're talking to customers, getting their feedback, and doing hands-on testing. And based on that, we're going to continue to add to the UI how that interacts interacts for you as customers. So it's a huge initiative for us and it's a very big focus continuing into 2026 and beyond.
SPEAKER_03:Now, what about blocks for like bigger solutions? Like you mentioned ESG. Would that ever be a block where you just press a button and ESG would install sort of thing?
SPEAKER_02:Sure. Possibly. I see a vision of blocks being embedded in solutions. Okay. So not necessarily the entire solution because there is some code development that's required, but we are looking for ways to incorporate blocks into existing solutions. An example of that would be, we built a block for dynamic queued services. So possibly if we wanted to easily set up dynamic queued services in a solution, we could pull in that block as part of our solution. I think blocks will be the building, the building pieces for solutions. I don't think an entire solution would be just one block.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. Got it. So how does this help partners? Like if I'm a partner listening to the podcast and I've got solutions maybe I'm building, I would leverage blocks to build out my solution, right?
SPEAKER_02:100%. And it's not just building, right? It's also obviously with implementation. I think a lot of us can agree when it gets to implementation stage, what gets cut first or what is the dashboarding or the reporting and stuff like that. So it's definitely gonna help with implementations, but also, yeah, with solution building, also, because this isn't just, I focus on dashboarding and reporting now, but it won't just be that, right? So I talked about Dynamic Cube services and how to set that up. That's an implementation process. So that's going to improve that implementation as well. Or if you want to include Dynamic Cube services in your solution, that's going to enable you to easily create your solution as well.
SPEAKER_03:Well, you know, it's interesting too, like I think about how AI integrates with this too. And there are these, I'll tell you too, like one of the things I was blown away with at Splash was seeing AI embedded in Account Rec, which I thought was really cool because it was like, it was practically doing the work for you, like identifying risks and stuff and flagging. I thought it was brilliant, a brilliant use of it. And what I think is really interesting, what I'm seeing from OneStream around AI, it's like, common sense, practical sort of things that are getting integrated that just improve the data, improve the reporting. To me, that's the future of AI in this space. But going back to the dashboards and with Genesys, companies have obviously different solutions or things they've developed. The dashboard is... is the place where you bring it together. You know what I mean? And so being able to access that and having a tool, having that simplified, you know, you can't just like, I don't know, drop it onto a webpage or something or have people go back and forth, click back and forth and like bringing all that together. I think that's really the future of it. Don't you think?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, that's, yeah, you said it very well. I can't really even add any comments here for that.
SPEAKER_03:Well,
SPEAKER_02:all
SPEAKER_03:right.
SPEAKER_02:Every now and then, Peter.
SPEAKER_03:Broken clocks right twice a day. Tell me, those are the two big things. What else is coming in in this new release? Is there anything else we should be looking forward to?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean, we're always constantly doing new enhancements, but I touched briefly on Dynamic Cube services, but that's kind of a broad term. And like, what does that mean to you as customers?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:what it's going to mean is we're going to continue to see ways to look at operational data. And, you know, we talked about cube data and loading from stage to cube, but what we really want to be able to do is analyze data at a more granular level. And this dynamic cube services, the ability to look at data from any source, you know, as if it were a cube view is pretty foundationally important. a huge change, right? So previously there'd be concerns about data, data unit explosion. If you put too much data in the cube, if you have too much dimensionality, you can see, you can see degradation, but with dynamic cube services, you can interact with any data as if it were a cube. So what kind of really made the lights click for me was thinking about any tech table data. So for those of you who are, I'll be very candid, but before I started here, I was like, what's table versus cube? So I'm going to talk to everyone who did not know. Any table data, aka data not in a cube, let's take people planning. If you wanted to do a quick view on that in Excel, you can now do that utilizing dynamic cube services. So you can look more granular. And that's just a very easy example. but you can also take it from any data source. So let's say I wanted to go even farther down and look at my ADP system. You can interact with that ADP data as if it were a cube. So I can pull and interact with it as if I was, you know, analyzing cube data. And that's just foundationally different. I like to think of it, it's almost where, We're BI viewing, but not in a visual way. We're using BI. We are a new way to analyze external data in that way, which is foundationally different.
SPEAKER_03:So I can pull data for reports, but is that data I could use in calculations too?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So if you pick some data, let's say I analyze my people planning data. And I've determined based on people planning that my forecast number for compensation should be pushed to the cube because that's a single line item, right? That's... that's stored data that we should hold there. It's not foundationally changing. Whereas you might be planning and moving stuff around more granularly. You don't want to store that because it's too great. It's probably
SPEAKER_03:a large volume. And why would you, and why would you want to recreate like millions of transactions just in another database? Like that's a hundred percent. You're moving it, you're mapping it. This is the technical debt that we're always talking about that people take on to do, you know, one calculation, like, you know, you're, you're migrating the data, creating a reconciliation point. a maintenance point like it's a huge pain in the neck right so right yeah
SPEAKER_02:so then you can push it then into your cube to then show via dc via dynamic cube services you can then push it into your cube to create your forecast which is huge
SPEAKER_03:so i could go to adp and i could look at time sheets yep and i could pull that level let that type of a detail you know summarize some stuff pull some numbers together and then use that for an allocation in my cube
SPEAKER_02:100 percent
SPEAKER_03:That's impressive. So now you're, and you're right too, you know, in the old paradigm, I've been around a while doing this nonsense. And when you, you know, you say, okay, well, I got to do a black shoals calculation for shares or something. And okay, now I, where's the data exist? Now I got to go find it. Then I've got to create buckets to store it in. And then I've got to write rules. Then you've got to calculate it. And I'm replicating everything. It's totally redundant. It's a whole maintenance point. It's always clunky. And the other thing that I think people don't appreciate is the timing of the data. So when the source data changes, my numbers are stale or need to be updated, and there's no way to keep that refreshed without doing it manually or constantly. It's a real pain. And I've always thought that was... really a powerful thing with OneStream. Like we'll go after, we'll report on the data where it is, unless we have to change it. And then you have to bring it into another tool to make, you know, change it and stuff like that. But that's a really powerful option. And that'll be in the new version too then, huh?
SPEAKER_02:Yep, that's in version nine. And then again, so there is a block as well coming out soon. And those 10 new blocks that will allow you to easily configure the data this service. But it really just changes the game for how we do operational planning, and it expands a lot of different use cases, honestly.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. No, that's really powerful. So on Navigator, is there any place on the OneStreet website where people want to learn more about Nine? Would they call their sales rep or call support?
SPEAKER_02:So Customer support managers all have a V9 fact sheet, which goes over a lot of this information and even more. On Navigator, there's also a free self-paced course that is a couple hours, I want to say, that goes over the highlights of all of V9. There's also that Genesis course. We do free self-paced courses for any platform release to go over the new features if you're ever wondering what the new functionality is, why it matters, etc. But all CSS have a V9 fact sheet, and then Navigator would be the place to look for all of this different information and training.
SPEAKER_03:That's great. Is there anything else with 9? It seems pretty jam-packed.
SPEAKER_02:Well, we always continue to add. We're doubling down on Excel. We're going to continue to add new functionality to Excel, specifically at Splash North America. One of my coworkers did a presentation on Excel. It was like, what's new and coming? There was a line out the door. We're never getting rid of Excel. We're never getting rid of Excel. I love Excel. You can't take it from me either. You can preserve your Excel formatting. which previously, if you did a refresh, you know, you lost that formatting. You can preserve that. Everyone was super excited about that. You can do in-sheet actions. So think about it that if you wanted to save back to run any data management job, submit your data, refresh it. You can create those buttons in Excel, which is super exciting. You know, and then again, all of this information on what's new in Excel is also on the what's new in nine course. So definitely check that out. But yeah, I always like to do an Excel plug because everyone loves Excel.
SPEAKER_03:They do. And Jessica, I heard AI Studio is coming out in this version too?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So that's obviously AI is another big area we're doubling down in. We've been doing forecasting, et cetera, but AI Studio is going to It enables what we talked about with AI and RECs, right? So the anomaly detection in RECs is enabled by AI Studio. You're going to continue to see AI embedded in different parts of the platform and solution, but anything AI-related that's outside of, you know, expands to the platform, such as AI and RECs, will be a 9.0 version because the AI Studio is version 9.
SPEAKER_03:That's great. Another great discussion. Thank you so much for bringing your expertise to the podcast today. And thank you, fellow OneStreamers, for joining us. Remember, if you like this content, please don't forget to subscribe. We'd love to hear from you. Questions, comments, concerns, please just reach out at podcast at one stream software dot com. I look forward to bringing you another exciting podcast. And until then, take care and I'll see you next time on the OneStream podcast.
SPEAKER_00:The OneStream podcast is brought to you by the OneStream Global Education Services team.