107: OneStream Splash 2026 Recap - Part 1

Welcome to the CPM Customer Success Podcast, where we help office of finance leaders enable an exact solution to enhance their corporate performance. Without spending countless nights and weekends in the office. Hi, I'm your host, Andy Smetana from Nova Advisory. Nova Advisory is a 100% OneStream professional services diamond implementation partner. We help OneStream customers and prospective OneStream customers get the most out of their OneStream investments. For CPM customer Success listeners, we now have a weekly email newsletter to keep you informed on the latest CPM customer success news by subscribing today. We'll keep you informed on episode releases, including customer success stories. OneStream interviews and capabilities to keep you up to date about one Stream's unified platform for finance. You can check that out now at Nova Advisory's website, Nova advisory.com/podcast and subscribe to the CPM Customer Success podcast newsletter today. Today we're kicking off a three-part recap of Splash twenty twenty-six, which is OneStream's annual user conference. Splash is always a valuable opportunity for customers and prospective customers to understand where OneStream is headed. It gives finance leaders a view into the product roadmap, the evolving role of the office of finance, and the technology investments that may shape CPM strategy over the next several years. This year, the big theme was centered around creating a new foundation for finance in the AI era. OneStream's broader message focused on helping finance become the control tower of growth for the business using unified data, faster analytics, and governed AI to help organizations move from hindsight to foresight. because finance teams are being asked to help guide decisions, identify risks earlier, forecast faster, and connect operational activity to financial outcomes. In this first episode, we'll focus on the platform foundation behind that vision. We'll cover the new high-performance cube engine, OneStream's Developer Studio, expanded sensible AI capabilities, and sensible AI forecast express. let's get into it. OneStream described finance as the control tower of growth. That phrase captures where the office of finance is headed. Finance teams have always been responsible for accuracy, controls, reporting, consolidation, budgeting, and forecasting. Those responsibilities remain essential, but the expectation on finance has expanded. CFOs and finance leaders are now expected to help the business understand performance faster, identify risks earlier, connect operational drivers to financial outcomes, and guide decisions with greater confidence. That requires a stronger foundation. A finance team cannot operate as a control tower when data is scattered across Excel workbooks, legacy consolidation systems, disconnected planning tools, operational reports, and manually maintained management decks. The same is true for AI. AI can only be valuable in finance when it is grounded in trusted data, which is governed by security, aligned to the financial model, and explainable to users. That context shaped the announcements at Splash twenty twenty-six. The common thread across the product updates was clear. OneStream is investing in speed, scale, extensibility, and governed AI. Those four areas support the practical work finance teams do every day: closing faster, forecasting more accurately, analyzing performance with more detail, and giving leaders better information to act on. One of the technical announcements from Splash twenty twenty-six was the new high-performance cube engine. This cube engine supports the performance behind calculations, consolidations, reporting, planning, and analytics. It's designed to handle dramatically larger data volumes while improving speed. Early benchmarks showed calculations and consolidations running two to four times faster, with one test reducing a consolidation from ninety-six minutes to twenty-eight minutes. It was announced that supported data units increased from two million to twenty million rows with improvements such as sparsity optimization, native attribute support, flexible precision tiers, and daily level granularity without the same performance trade-offs. Historically, detail and performance have often been in tension. Finance teams want more granularity, but system performance can limit how much data has been practically included in a model. Well, the new cube engine is designed to help reduce that constraint. For controllers, this can support faster consolidations and shorter wait times during the close. For FP&A teams, it can support more detailed planning models and richer scenario analysis. It can reduce the need for workarounds created purely to protect performance. For CFOs, the business value is better access to timely, granular information. The new cube engine supports a broader shift in CPM. Finance teams are moving towards models that combine financial and operational detail at a level the business can actually use. That can mean customer profitability, product margin, daily sales, headcount planning, regional performance, operational volume, or multi-scenario forecasting. For current OneStream customers, the cube engine is an important roadmap topic. For prospective customers, it reinforces OneStream's commitment to scaling the platform for increasingly complex finance use cases The next major announcement is OneStream's Developer Studio. This is especially relevant for finance teams, administrators, implementation partners, and customers with more sophisticated OneStream environments. Developer Studio is a desktop development client that allows developers to work with OneStream business rules and code using standard development tools. Developers can pull code from a OneStream environment into standard .NET projects, use source protocol, work in an IDE of their choice, and push code back with real-time compilation. It also supports the use of AI-assisted coding tools and is available for teams on OneStream version nine point two and above. The practical benefit is stronger development discipline. As OneStream environments mature, they often become more sophisticated. A customer may start with financial consolidation and reporting, then add planning, account reconciliations, dashboard, and custom business rules. Over time, the code base becomes an important asset. Developer Studio helps teams manage that asset more effectively. Source control supports better version management. External IDE support allows developers to work in more robust environments. AI-assisted coding can help accelerate development and troubleshooting, and real-time compilation gives teams faster feedback. For enterprise IT organizations, Developer Studio helps OneStream fit more naturally into established development practices. AI was one of the biggest areas of focus at Splash twenty twenty-six. OneStream's approach is centered on sensible AI, which is designed to bring AI and machine learning into finance processes in a governed practical way. OneStream expanded sensible AI studio to include more than sixty pre-built AI and machine learning routines. These include capabilities for forecasting, clustering, anomaly detection, and other finance-focused use cases. Most finance teams are looking for AI that can be applied directly to real finance work. They need capabilities that fit into planning, forecasting, reporting, close, and analysis. They need AI that works with the data model they already trust. They need outputs that finance can review, explain, and use. Enter Sensible AI Forecast Express. Forecast Express is described as a turnkey forecasting solution that helps teams create forecasts with minimal setup. It automates integration with the OneStream cube, feeds historical data into the model, and writes forecasts back into OneStream without requiring custom data pipelines. The overview also highlights new typed clients API capabilities, allowing AI forecasts to be consumed or invoked by other systems through REST APIs. All of this lowers the barrier to entry for AI forecasting. Many finance teams are interested in machine learning, but the implementation path can feel heavy when it involves separate data pipelines, specialized modeling teams, or manual reconciliation back into the forecast. Well, Forecast Express is designed to make AI forecasting more approachable by embedding it closer to the OneStream planning process. That provides FP&A a stronger starting point for forecasting and allows teams to focus more time on business interpretation, scenario planning, and decision support. That wraps up part one of our Splash 2026 recap. Today, we focused on the foundation. OneStream's new Cube Engine, Developer Studio, expanded sensible AI capabilities, and Forecast Express. The common thread across all of these announcements is practical modernization. Finance teams need more speed, more scale, better development practices, and AI capabilities that fit into the real finance workflows. In part two, we'll continue this Splash 2026 recap by looking at OneStream's finance agentic layer, native sensible AI agents, cluster analysis, and what all of this means for current customers, prospective customers, and finance leaders building out their CPM roadmaps. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us for this episode of CPM Customer Success Reminder to check out the CPM Customer Success Weekly email newsletter to stay informed of the latest CPM customer success episodes and OneStream News. You can check that out now at the Nova Advisory website, Nova advisory.com/podcast and subscribe to the CPM Customer Success podcast email newsletter today. Thanks again for listening, and I'll catch you next week for another episode of CPM, customer Success.