EPM Conversations Episode 27 — A Conversation With Matt Bradley, Oracle Senior Vice President, Development

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.

Join us, won’t you?

EPM Conversations — Episode No. 6, A Conversation With Mike Nader, EPM’s Very Own Data Analytics Polymath

EPM doesn’t get a lot of polymaths, does it. Yet Mike is exactly one of those.

A polymath is, “a person of great and varied learning” although Mike is too modest to agree with that description. If you but listen to this conversation, you (and he) will see that it is a fair characterization.

NB – The above graphic isn’t for n00bs but instead for veteran EPM practitioners who recognize the graphical genius of the long-gone and much-lamented Arbor Software’s training decks. Mike has several ties to this as you’ll hear.

But wait, there’s more

In addition to Yr. Obt. Svt., this conversation also has Natalie Delemar as our guest host and regular John Booth. This varying cast of characters is what I hope is the (or at least a) future of EPM Conversations. Tim, Celvin, John, and I are wonderful (ahem) hosts but there’s much, much, much more to EPM than us, cf. our guests and Natalie.

I’ve known (at least I was at the same conference although as I really and truly worked 100 hours that week in addition to presenting and working a booth so if I did meet Mike I have no recollection of it) Mike since Kscope 2009 in Carmel.

What I didn’t know was how much Mike has done: Atari 600xl owner, COMPUTE! magazine subscriber, English school teacher, roofing product computer operator/developer, operations management, Hyperion course writer, Essbase consultant, Planning consultant, Essbase PM, Big 4 consultant, startup analytics evangelist, Big 4 (but a different one) leader, and I’m sure a few more roles I’ve missed. What is crucial to understand and what is central to what Mike does and cares about is making sense of data, i.e. analytics.

Hear the conversation

  • Start – 2:55 Introduction
  • 02:55 – 14:56 How Mike Started with Analytics and EPM
  • 14:56 – 25:41 EPM vs Analytics
  • 25:41 – 28:05 Adoption of Tools in Different Organizational Functions
  • 28:05 – 36:04 Tools That Can Merge Financial and Operational Datasets
  • 36:04 – 43:44 What EPM Technologists Should Know About Analytics
  • 43:44 – 53:30 The Medium Term Future of Analytics
  • 53:30 – End Outroduction

We hope you like the episode as much as we do. If you do enjoy it, please give us a good rating on the provider of your choice as it both bathes our ever-needy egos and also – and rather more importantly – allows listeners to more easily find us.

Join us, won’t you?

 

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