Collaborate 2008 Has 1,000+ Hyperion Attendees

I'm tempted to rename this blog from "Look Smarter" to "Updates on All the Hyperion Conferences and User Groups" because it seems like that's all there is to write about these days. I just found out today that the number of people registered for the Hyperion track at Collaborate 08 has surpassed 1,000, so it seemed like a great opportunity to give an update on the conference. Though Collaborate as a whole attracts over 7,500 people, I'm amazed that they have over 1,000 Hyperion registrants. 1,000 was their goal and the conference is still weeks away.

If you haven't registered yet, make sure you do it by April 3. After that, the price goes up from $1,495 to $1,695 (and you're basically paying the on-site rate). The easiest way to register is here: http://collaborate08.com/COLLABORATE08/Hyperion.htm.

It will give you two options. If you're a member of OAUG, IOUG, or Quest, it will direct you to register through their links. If you're just a common Hyperion user who doesn't belong to one of them fancy "citified" user groups, you'll be instructed to click here: https://www.questdirect.org/registration/default.aspx?ec=103.

No matter which route you take, please use discount code INTERREL08 when you register (we get credit for pointing you in the right direction).

There's a tremendous amount of information available on-line about the conference. There's an overall agenda for the conference in a nicely printable PDF. If you prefer a PDF just listing the Hyperion presentations there's one of those too. There's a search page pre-filtered for Hyperion sessions if you're looking to find specific presentations. OAUG also offers a personal agenda builder to create a schedule of just what you want to see.

As far as Hyperion presentations go, they were originally hoping to offer 100-150 Hyperion sessions. (I mentioned this on a blog posting back in February.) Due to the lack of quality presentations to choose from, they only ended up selecting a little over 80 presentations (hey, quality is better than quantity). Of those ~80 presentations, ~30 are being delivered by Oracle staffers (mostly the high-level intro presentations or the product direction presentations). interRel is delivering (either alone or with interRel clients) 25 or 26 presentations. That leaves around 25 sessions that non-interRel clients and other partners of Oracle are presenting. I'm wondering if the Collaborate folks should say "The Hyperion Track is brought to you by Oracle and the good folks at interRel"...

Since they spread the ~80 presentations over 19 timeslots, a couple of the timeslots are pretty sparse. Some hours have as few as 2 presentations while other slots have up to 7 presentations. There are a few time slots where interRel isn't presenting anything and then there are weird times like 2:15PM on Monday when 3 OUT OF 4 presentations are by interRel.

Of the interRel presentations, I'm delivering 9 or 10 of them. Tracy McMullen is doing another 8 or 9 and we have another 13 people coming to the conference to help deliver the remainder. Oh, and they're staffing the booth too. If you want to come by and visit us at Collaborate, we're in booth 963. You can also visit Tracy and me at our book signings. Apparently, there will a bookstore at Collaborate selling books on Oracle topics (including copies of all of the different Look Smarter books we've written). On Tuesday and Wednesday from 12:30-1:30, they've asked us to come by the bookstore and sign copies of our books for our adoring fans (if any actually exist). If you wish for me to deface your book with my signature, please free to stop by.

I'm looking forward to seeing you in Denver!