What does your solution add to the field of Performance Management?
Christian:
Tidemark is a modern cloud, mobile-first analytical platform for financial and operational performance management. Our vision is to empower everyone in the organization to make better decisions, to democratize insights and to free the information in the context of what matters, when in matters to whom it matters.
Tom:
As the inventors of both HFM and FDM in the late 1990’s, we have always been the innovators and thought leaders in the EPM space. The unique single platform OneStream XF is a result of a new level of innovation. Because all solutions leverage a single platform, new solutions can be delivered at an incredibly rapid pace.
Don:
Unlike many Performance Management solutions we don’t want to replace Excel, but embrace it. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we give organizations the tool their users already love, with the control and reliability their management needs.
What is the way forward for financials who are drowning in data and starving for information?
Don:
No matter the department or function (finance, marketing, development), effective collaboration is a must-have for modern business solutions, and this comes down to having the right workflow capabilities. Workflow needs to be intuitive and easy to design, but at the same time backed up by strict version control, business rules, user-level permissions and a detailed audit trail. With these ingredients in place, finance professionals can free up to 50% of their time.
Tom:
We believe the way forward for any corporation that is looking for better decision making is to take a realistic look at the time and energy that goes into maintaining their current financial planning and reporting infrastructure in relation to the value it delivers. The focus should be on delivering business value to the entire office of finance rather than managing multiple technologies.
What is the biggest, perhaps game changing, technical innovation ahead?
Christian:
The biggest technical innovation ahead is the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This will have a profound impact for the EPM area and finance in particular.
Finance has developed into forecasting the impossible and improbable to outpace the competition. Machine learning will greatly aid with this new era of finance, precisely because it can assist business by monitoring, learning and then surfacing, in the moment. It’s shows what really matters and what to do about it forecast wise, without waiting until the month-end or year-end when it’s too late.
If you look at the future, what will EPM be like in 5 to 10 years from now?
Tom:
We believe that EPM will be dominated in 5 to10 years by solutions that live on a single platform. A similar transformation happened with the advent of smart phones. Multiple gadgets and products were replaced by a platform approach where customers could download apps for immediate use.
Don:
EPM in the next decade will undoubtedly be centered on the centralization of performance information in a single, secure cloud database. Enterprise Performance Management is quickly becoming a function of more than just financial data. Departmental KPIs, HR management, operational drivers and other non-financial metrics will play an increasingly important role in determining the true performance of an organization.
How does your company maintain speed on growth and innovation while staying reliable?
Christian: I believe it’s important to have a solid product architecture that runs in the public cloud. Companies like Netflix – a customer of ours – have shown the way in terms of reliability and extensibility when one designs from a blank sheet of paper what a native cloud infrastructure should look like. Tidemark is no different. From the beginning, we decided to build this company leveraging the cloud as a computational platform and learn from companies like Netflix and Google on how to properly scale it.
