Look Smarter Than You Are

Kscope12 - Schedule is Published

2012-01-23T01:08:00.003-06:00

Waterpark at the JW Marriott Hill Country

2012 will be my final year as conference chair for the Kscope conference. In case you haven't heard elsewhere, in 2012, it's June 24-28 in San Antonio, TX at the gorgeous JW Marriott Hill Country. The schedule has been finalized, published, and (I'll humbly admit this since I really had very little to do with it) it's the best schedule I've seen for a conference in my memory. Yes, historians, the schedule is better than the last Hyperion Solutions conference because there are no marketing sessions (beyond one timeslot for clearly marked vendor sessions) and the content is deep and not just broad.

It's also not dominated by the software vendor (unlike Solutions). When the maker of the software speaks (Oracle, in our case), it's because they're asked to speak and on topics we care about. On the subject of Hyperion, for instance, Oracle is hosting an entire day-long symposium on what's going to be released in the future for Hyperion, Essbase, and OBIEE. It's led by product development and not the Oracle product marketing guys.

One of the expansion areas this year is that in the areas of BI and EPM, they're adding more business and introductory content. Here are all the dedicated BI/EPM tracks for Kscope12 amounting to over 150 sessions (click on the name of each to get a page about each track):

- Business Intelligence. This track is led by some of the best OBIEE (and other Oracle BI product areas) people in the business. The track has been expanded this year as the importance of BI has grown tremendously within Oracle.

- Essbase. They have over 50 sessions all on Essbase this year. This is more than any other conference in the world. This track will cover intermediate to advanced Essbase sessions you won't get at conferences like Collaborate, Connection Point, or OpenWorld.

- Essbase Beginner. This is a new track that allows people who are just getting started in the world of Hyperion to get some introductory training from the best in the business.

- Hyperion Applications. Hyperion Planning, HFM (Hyperion Financial Management), Hyperion Strategic Finance, and all the other Hyperion applications finally get a track of their own... and it has over 50 sessions dedicated to the Hyperion applications. Like the Essbase track, this makes it the largest Hyperion application track of any conference in the world.

- Hyperion Business Content. For the first time in 2012, we are adding a track devoted to the business users. If you're a director, manager, VP, controller, power user, or any type of person who primarily uses or manages Hyperion/Essbase instead of implementing it, you finally have a place to turn. Since Solutions ended in 2007, a true Hyperion or EPM business-specific user didn't have dedicated content at any conference. Collaborate tried (and no offense, failed). OpenWorld missed dramatically by assuming most users were either CFO's or users with hard-core IT backgrounds. Business people, welcome to Kscope.

In addition to those 150+ sessions on Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management, there are other tracks serving the non BI/EPM community:

- Applications Express

- Oracle Database

- Developer's Toolbox

- Fusion Middleware

If you haven't registered for the conference yet, I will save you $100. If you've already registered, it's too late. When you register, put in promo code IRC (it stands for interRel Consulting) and it'll take $100 off whatever the prevailing rate is. Consider that my gift for you reading this far in the blog (for which $100 is not nearly enough, I'm sure you're thinking).

Hyperion Solutions Roadshow to Denver

2012-01-13T13:07:00.002-06:00

Hyperion Solutions Roadshow to Denver - Agenda

I just finished booking my travel to Denver for the big Hyperion event on the 24th at the Hyatt Regency (downtown by the convention center). It's the closest Denver has come to a HUG (Hyperion User Group) meeting since Hyperion got acquired 5 years ago (wow, it's hard to believe Hyperion was acquired in 2007). Oracle and interRel are putting on a 5+ hour event split across two educational tracks.

The first track is an introductory track that introduces some products and also covers what's new in Oracle EPM/BI 11.1.2:

What’s New in Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 and OBIEE 11g: A Customer Story with Catholic Health Initiatives
Taking Control of Your Hierarchies with Data Relationship Management
Quick Start to Hyperion Financial Close Solutions

The second track is for people that have more intermediate to advanced experience with Hyperion:

Hyperion Financial Reporting: Top 10 Tips & Tricks
Thinking Outside the Cube: Non-Financial Applications of Oracle Essbase
10 Reasons Why You Don’t Have to ‘Code’ or ‘Customize’ Hyperion Planning

I will be giving some of the sessions, Essbase expert and fellow Oracle ACE Director, Glenn Schwartzberg, will be delivering some others, and Oracle and Catholic Health will be splitting the rest. I'm most excited that Toufic Wakim (one of the greatest Product Development guys in the EPM/BI business unit at Oracle) will be delivering the keynote to start off the day. He'll be talking about the future of Hyperion in an interactive discussion. Among other things, Toufic is responsible for development of Smart View and the classic Essbase Excel Add-In, and you've seen how much those products have evolved recently under Toufic's tutelage. For anyone that's had a chance to hear Toufic speak, his sessions are always hugely attended, hilarious, and full of information. I will actually be attending his keynote and taking notes (and hopefully, blogging whatever we're allowed to publicly restate).

Throughout the day, we'll be having networking time and at the end of the day we're going to have a group dinner and then go to the Colorado Avalanche game after. I think the Avs play hockey (it's a Canadian ice sport played with sticks, I think), but I'm primarily going to the game to meet the local rocky mountain Hyperion users. It's time that the users get back together and form a community. If you're an Oracle client and can fly in on January 24th, send an e-mail to Danielle White and she'll send you more information on registering. Flights in and out of Denver are cheap and the event is free, so I hope to see you there.

Exalytics - Pricing Has Been Announced

2012-01-12T13:24:00.000-06:00

What is Exalytics?

The official catchy Oracle name is "Exalytics In-Memory Machine X2-4" which come to think of it is not very catchy but does sound techie. Larry Ellison announced Exalytics at OpenWorld 2011 to great fanfare and little details. In a nutshell, it's Essbase, OBIEE, and TimesTen running in-memory on a really powerful server. How powerful? 40 Intel cores (4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 processors with 10 cores each), a terabyte of RAM, an InfiniBand backbone (40 GB/s when talking to Exadata), two 10 GB/s ethernet ports for connecting to non-Exadata sources, and 3.6 TB of hard drive. Imagine Essbase running fully in memory with ethernet speeds so powerful it's like you're running Essbase locally (subject to the speed of your actual corporate network, of course).

It's an exciting development for those people who want to make BI virtually real-time. There's even a slightly modified front-end on the OBIEE side of things to make queries a more interactive "speed of thought" activity. If you want to make Essbase even faster, this is the solution for you. Early benchmarks have been all over the map (I've seen 5 times improvement all the way up to 80 times improvement) but suffice to say, that once you've tuned your Essbase cubes for running in-memory, you'll be looking at five-fold improvement at the bare minimum. If you want to learn more, Oracle has an in-depth whitepaper at:

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/business-intelligence/exalytics-bi-machine/overview/exalytics-introduction-1372418.pdf

How Much is Exalytics?

Various rumors have leaked out on the pricing for Exalytics, but it's now been finalized and posted on the Oracle website. While there are a few places where you can find this on the web this morning (including the actual PDF of the pricing from Oracle), the best summary I've read comes from Chris Kanaracus at IDG.

Here are the pricing highlights:

Hardware: $135,000
Processor Licenses of TimesTen: $34,500
Named User Licenses of TimesTen: $300
Processor Licenses of BI Foundation Suite: $450,000
Named User Licenses of BI Foundation Suite: $3,675

Some additional points:

Annual Maintenance is the typical 22% of net.
Licenses of TimesTen and BI Foundation Suite must be equal (if I'm reading a footnote on page 8 of the price list correctly).
BI Foundation Suite includes Essbase, OBIEE, and Oracle Strategy & Scorecard Management. The pricing above is the current pricing for BI Foundation Suite (technology price list, page 5).
Processors must be licensed for every core meaning full list at processor licensing for every core on the box is almost $20,000,000 (though the article points out that Oracle would probably drop that as much as 70%). That's still a lot of money so I foresee most companies going with the named user license.
Oracle will probably discount named users as well. Assume ~50% discount on these (though Chris Kanaracus points out that it can go as much as 70% for large deals). Hardware, following Oracle traditional appliance discounting, will discount at most 25%.

Following the math, list price for 100 users (the minimum you're allowed to buy) would be about:

Hardware: $135,000
Software: $397,500
List Total: $532,500
Discount: $232,500 (25% hardware, 50% software)
Net Total: $300,000
Maintenance: $66,000 (due on signing for 1st year)

It's expensive, to say the least, but keep in mind that list for 100 users of just Essbase is $290,000 and this gives you some great hardware, Essbase, OBIEE, and TimesTen with everything pre-installed and configured (reducing your infrastructure costs). I don't know what Oracle will do if you already own licenses of BI Foundation Suite. My guess is (and I don't work for Oracle) that they won't make you pay for it again, but you'll at least have to pay for the full hardware and TimesTen.

SAP's Sanjay Poonen Is Clueless

Before I leave the subject of Exalytics, I have to point out just how worried SAP is about Exalytics competing with their HANA solution. SAP's Sanjay Poonen (President, Corporate Officer of Global Solutions at SAP) wrote one of the worst attack pieces I've ever read right after Exalytics was announced. To summarize his point, Essbase is an old dying OLAP technology that's been around for 20 years and is therefore worthless. First of all Sanjay, the relational database has been around a lot longer than that and no one is saying that RDBMS' are going away. But my main problem with his article is that if you take him at face value, he has no idea about Essbase beyond 10 year old bad competitive intelligence information. To quote from his article he paid to post on Forbes.com:

Essbase even with all its “optimization” cannot efficiently run in-memory – you still have to do pre-calculations and pre-aggregates, with no ability to do calculations on the fly. You’d have to limit how far the Essbase calculations propagate to ensure performance doesn’t blow up, and insert operations force the indexes in the database to be rebuilt, thus ruining performance...

Um, not to imply that no one fact checked your essay Mr. Poonen, but you're talking about Essbase Block Storage (the 20 year old technology which most would think means it's more reliable than something released in the last 2 years). Essbase Aggregate Storage (created about 6 years ago) was created to solve all these problems. It's a fundamentally different architecture than Essbase block storage: it doesn't need to be aggregated, it doesn't need to be pre-calculated, and it does all formulas and calculations on the fly. There is no separate index that needs to be rebuilt. Basically, all your problems you're listing (forgetting that there are many things the Essbase Block Storage does better than any OLAP technology out there), are for the Essbase Block Storage technology.

I would forgive Sanjay Poonen for just using out-dated information under the excuse that he doesn't have access to Essbase directly, but a simple Google search takes you to the Essbase Wikipedia page where it defines Essbase Aggregate Storage:

Although block storage effectively minimizes storage requirements without impacting retrieval time, it has limitations in its treatment of aggregate data in large applications, motivating the introduction of a second storage engine, named Aggregate Storage Option (Essbase ASO) or more recently, Enterprise Analytics. This storage option makes the database behave much more similarly to OLAP databases like SQL Server Analysis Services. Following a data load, Essbase ASO does not store any aggregate values, but instead calculates them on demand.

That text has been on Essbase's Wikipedia page for a few years, so the only conclusion I can draw is that either Sanjay doesn't know how to use Google, or he was blatantly ignoring the facts. Assuming he's not a moron, SAP must be very afraid of Exalytics to put this piece together and hope no one pointed out how fundamentally errant the whole discussion is. I don't have time to point out every one of the wrong things in his article, but if you wish to comment on his article, visit here, and feel free to correct anything you disagree with.

And just in case Sanjay thinks I'm not willing to stand behind what I write, I challenge him to a cube build-off. Let's get together and put whatever cube technology SAP is pushing today (SAP BW? SAP BIW? Business Objects? HANA?) up against Essbase. You and I can jointly benchmark cube build time, query time, calculation time, whatever you want, and we'll both jointly publish the results. If you're not afraid of how the results will come out, call my office at 01-972-735-8716. Ask for Edward Roske and say it's Sanjay Poonen calling. I'll make sure my receptionist knows to forward your call to my cell anywhere I am in the world. I look forward to hearing from you.

When does Exalytics release?

Exalytics should be generally available soon, but it has to wait until, among other things, Essbase 11.1.2.2 comes out since they're tweaking Essbase to run better in-memory. If I had to guess, I'd say before the end of Oracle's fiscal year (May 2012). Exalytics will continue to make Oracle Essbase and OBIEE a factor to be reckoned with going forward. I'm told there's a waiting list for the first Exalytics boxes to come off the line, so call your Oracle rep now if you're interested.

Blogs - EPM, Hyperion, and Essbase

2011-11-27T15:37:00.000-06:00

Blog Seeking Blogs
Hello, all. I wanted to wait to do a new blog posting until after the holidays. Originally, I meant Easter which turned into Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Black Friday Continued, Cyber Monday Pre-Sale, and a whole lot of other very important holidays. Rather than wait until Christmas, I thought I would do a very brief blog entry.

Since I started this blog a few years ago, many blogs have sprung up that have excellent information. I'm sure I don't know about all of them, so I'd like your help in linking to the great Oracle EPM, Hyperion, and Essbase blogs I may be missing. Have a look at the scroll on the right (if you're reading this through RSS, go to http://looksmarter.blogspot.com/ and look on the right). If there's something it seems like I'm missing, comment on this entry and I'll add it.

My only criteria is that the blog not be a wholly self-serving marketing blog designed to drive traffic to that person's company's website. For instance, readers of my blog historically find it difficult to find out what company I actually work for (it's interRel, by the way). This is because I believe one should be educated first and if they like what you're sharing, they'll seek you out for work.

Calc Script Class on December 8
Now that I've said that, allow me to be slightly hypocritical for a second and mention that I am teaching one of my once a year "Advanced Essbase: Calc Scripts for Mere Mortals" day-long classes. I do this once a year and it's about the only time I ever teach a paid class. Unlike previous years, it's a virtual class, so you can take it from anywhere in the world. If you want to learn about writing Essbase BSO (and ASO) calc scripts, the class is December 8 and it's open to customers of Oracle and partners as well. The class is $995 USD and at last check, there were a couple of spots open (awesomeness of the virtual classes). For more info, visit http://www.interrel.com/currenttraining.aspx. To register, send an e-mail to Danielle White.

Returning to my original point, if you know of some great blogs I'm missing, comment on the blog with the new address (and yes, it's fine to mention your own blog).

Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 is Available

2011-04-07T15:20:00.002-05:00

Gentlemen, begin your upgrades. Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 has finally shipped. Those who've been waiting for the migration (and slightly more stable) releases of Essbase, Hyperion Planning, HFM, and the rest for around a year can finally get real lives.

I know: I'm shocked it's out too. It's not on edelivery.oracle.com yet (at least as of 4:15PM Eastern on April 7, 2011) but it is available for download on download.oracle.com. I made a bit.ly link to the exact page:
Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1

Tell everyone and impress your friends.

UPDATE: As of April 8, 2011, EPM 11.1.2.1 is now available in nice Media Packs on eDelivery.oracle.com for the following operating systems:

HP-UX (Itanium)
IBM AIX (64-bit)
Linux (32-bit and 64-bit)
Solaris (64-bit only)
Windows (32-bit and 64-bit)

As mentioned before, the EPM docs (including all the new features and yes, there are some new features) on 11.1.2.1 can also be found here:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17236_01/index.htm

Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 - Releasing No Sooner Than April 10

2011-04-01T11:25:00.000-05:00

In a posting back in February, I relayed that development was virtually promising that Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 would be out sometime in March. I then padded that to be sometime by March 31. Here's what I was told from multiple sources (not one of which is Glenn Schwartzberg): apparently, development discovered two bugs during testing just this week. They are being immediately corrected and then the patch should release to manufacturing (meaning it can be bundled up and posted on edelivery.oracle.com).

This jibes with a public announcement that Oracle made during a Customer Advisory Board meeting in Copenhagen this week. A customer that was there told me that Oracle announced they were releasing 11.1.1.2 to edelivery on April 10. This is the first time I've ever heard of an exact date spoken in a semi-public forum.

No I think that the more likely date is April 11 (which is a Monday and as such, a lot more likely than Sunday). That said, the earliest I would expect it is April 11 since, well how do I put it gently, Oracle has been working this for around a year now and has lost pretty much all credibility with estimating patch release dates.

To add to the bad news, it looks like support for other application servers (like WebSphere) will NOT be in this patch. Looks like it will be delayed until to 11.1.2.2 (and who really believes that will really release by year-end?).

Keep watching here and I'll let you know when 11.1.2.1 gets posted for downloading.

ISA Consulting Bought by E&Y

2011-03-16T01:52:00.004-05:00

And so the consulting company acquisitions continue. I haven't written about this in over a year mostly because these acquisition entries take so many hours to research (cry me a river, Edward), so let's bury the lead by first covering all the major acquisitions that have occurred since my last entry:

November 24, 2009: PWC acquires Paragon
Those in the Oracle EPM areas in Europe & Asia knew of Paragon. With close to 100 employees, they were a significant player in the UK, Turkey, and Singapore markets. It's not known how many of Paragon's employees made the transition to PWC, but press releases seem to reflect around 40.

March 29, 2010: Perficient acquires Kerdock
Kerdock was a major, long-standing Oracle BI/EPM vendor dating back to roughly 2002. Based out of Houston, they had close to 65 employees at their peak. When they were bought last year by Perficient (a public-traded company - NASDAQ: PRFT - with about 1,400 employees), they had roughly 45 employees and about $8MM in annual revenue. They were bought for $6MM (of which $3.4MM was in cash and $2.6MM in PRFT stock).

May 4, 2010: Idhasoft acquires TLC Technologies
TLC is a long-time Oracle EPM partner based out of Pennsylvania. Though they dated back to the late 90's, they were never that large. Last year, a controlling interest in TLC was acquired by Idhasoft (through their Prism Informatica subsidiary) for an undisclosed sum.

May 18, 2010: Edgewater acquires Meridian

If you hadn't heard of Meridian when Edgewater acquired them, you weren't alone. They were only a few years old (and they were pretty small) but they had begun developing a reputation as a Hyperion Strategic Finance implementer that was able to compete with the focused expertise of BlueStone. We'll never know if they would have fulfilled that promise of HSF experience, though, because they were acquired too early on by Edgewater. They did have several former Alcar executives (the company that became HSF) on their leadership team (including Alcar's former head of services, Ricardo Rasche), so their acquisition was significant.

August 31, 2010: E&Y acquires Global Analytics
Global Analytics, as you may recall, bought Narratus (the former "Data into Action") a couple of years ago and in 2010, they were gobbled up themselves. Largely through the strengths of Hyperion installation expert, Bill Beach, Global Analytics had developed a reputation in the Hyperion infrastructure world. For a time, they were one of only 5 companies (interRel was one of the others) with a significant infrastructure practice around Hyperion which included them subcontracting to other larger global systems integrators. They had several areas outside of Hyperion, and my guess is that's why E&Y bought them in 2010. The small size of their Hyperion practice doesn't seem like it would have warranted E&Y's attention. Though maybe this should have been a predictor of the acquisition of ISA?

October 21, 2010: IBM acquires Clarity
In my opinion, this was the most significant acquisition in the Oracle EPM, Hyperion, and Essbase world in 2010. Clarity Systems out of Canada (same place my high school girlfriend lived, by the way) was the first substantial partner to build a pre-packaged budgeting solution on top of Essbase that way pre-dated Hyperion Planning. Originally a consulting partner at Arbor, Clarity turned their spreadsheet-based front-end to Essbase eventually into a full-featured financial planning, consolidation and reporting product. What was once a fairly pleasant working relationship got contentious for a number of reasons including alleged licensing violations and what later turned into a compete between Clarity and Hyperion's own Planning and Financial Management products. As Clarity began to score some competitive wins over Hyperion at companies like Southwest Airlines and Alcon Labs, the relationship took a turn for the downright hostile.

Eventually, Clarity started integrating with non-Hyperion products as they continued their expansion. Interestingly, when IBM bought them last year, IBM made no secrets about their intentions to kill off most of the Clarity suite (including the planning and financial consolidation functionality). This actually makes complete sense since they already have the Cognos and TM/1 products doing virtually the same functions. So why did they acquire them? Consultant bodies to implement BI/EPM at IBM's consulting clients? Clarity's client list? Just to eliminate a competitor. None of the above. Apparently, IBM noticed a weakness in their XBRL reporting and one component of Clarity handled this functionality. Seems like overkill to me, but then I'm not a company the size of IBM.

Throughout 2010: Palladium founders leave to form other firms
As disastrous as the Hyperion/Arbor merger was back in 1998, there are many who feel that the merger of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Painted Word, and ThinkFast into Palladium was even worse. While I'm not one to judge, it has definitely been true that Palladium has been bleeding talent (in the Hyperion/EPM world, at least) since their founding. The last 15 months have been particularly harsh with three major group personnel departures:

Painted Word executives including Scot MacGillivray, Jim Leavitt, Chris Boulanger, and Peter Graham all left to found Cervello. All of these people were founders and/or executives at Painted Word when it became part of Palladium. They stuck it out for a few years and then left as a group to create Cervello which seems to be doing Oracle BI and EPM consulting. I can't vouch for that personally, because I haven't run into them at all, but their departure from Palladium was definitely a blow.
Tom Phelps left Palladium to start up ClearLine Group. Tom Phelps was the original founder of the company that later became ThinkFast (one of the three components of Palladium). Tom and his brother, Marty, founded a company that appears to be doing Oracle EPM consulting (but again, like Cervello, I haven't run into them yet). With Tom Phelps departing and the Painted Words executives departing, the only founders of the component companies that are still part of Palladium are the Balanced Scorecard guys.
Palladium Pace team members including Dean Tarpley, Michael Wright, Carolyn Sieben, and a few others left to join Alvarez and Marsal in August, 2010. The Pace product hadn't been selling anywhere near what its creators expected and this was the final nail in the coffin of the product. While Pace is still mentioned on Palladium's website, it doesn't seem that there's anyone left at Palladium still working on the product. Palladium had been shopping around for a buyer of their Pace business unit for a while, so it's unclear as to if Palladium sold the developers to Alvarez or if they simply were hired en masse. Since there wasn't any sort of "predatory workpractices" lawsuit, I'm concluding that it was a purchase of the talent and Alvarez didn't want Pace at all.

March 15+ 2011: Ernst & Young acquires ISA
Well, I'd love to point to a press release on this, but there isn't one simply because it's not been announced yet. [Editor's Note: it is now public. Scroll to the end of the story for more.] Normally, I wouldn't do a blog entry on this until it was official, but this is the least stealthy acquisition in history. I have heard about it from no fewer than three sources at three different companies, and since offers have already been extended to the employees that are going to get them at ISA Consulting, the affected people already know. Keep watching Ernst & Young and ISA's news pages and I'm sure something will be up in the next week or two.

ISA is based out of Pennsylvania and is a very large player in the Oracle BI and EPM space. Though they do other products, ISA is still considered by many to be a primarily Hyperion partner. Based on what I've been told, E&Y is acquiring ISA primarily for their consulting expertise. While they're letting almost all the sales and back office staff go (Mitch Rubin and Cliff Matthews being notable exceptions), most all of the consultants seem to be getting offers to join E&Y. The partners at ISA do seem to be coming on as either partners or close to it at E&Y.

Even though E&Y is one of the 10 largest privately held companies in the USA, this is a significant acquisition because ISA does appear to have well over 100 people focused around BI, EPM, and data warehousing. Whether they end up putting ISA in the BI & Data Warehousing group or into financial transformation (or split them between them), this acquisition will significantly increase the number of individuals in those areas. If E&Y does manage to hold on to the talent from ISA, they will now be able to much more directly compete with Deloitte on the BI & EPM front.

I haven't heard terms of the acquisition, but since E&Y doesn't need ISA's client list or sales expertise but rather just wants the consulting bodies, the dollars are presumably based on a multiple of EBITDA. Based on other similar deals in the last year, I expect the multiple is 6.5 times 12-month EBITDA (give or take a factor of 1.5). If anyone knows any different, by all means, either shoot me an e-mail (I'll keep you anonymous) or post it in the comments to this entry.

Who's Next?
If you go way back to my posting from January 5, 2009, I offered up this list of potential targets for acquisition:

One could speculate that it might be interRel, PII, Kerdock, Global Analytics, US-Analytics, Analytic Vision, HCG, TopDown, or even the Hyperion arm of Palladium, but it could just as likely be some other tiny Hyperion vendor that's not on anyone's radar screen right now. Heck, it might even expand beyond the consulting world to one of the Hyperion software partners like Applied OLAP or Star Analytics.

I then went on to say that interRel could be removed from the list. Well, I was right on Kerdock, Global Analytics, and the Hyperion arm of Palladium, so that leaves PII, US-Analytics, Analytic Vision, HCG, TopDown, Applied OLAP, and Star Analytics. I guess I would add MarketSphere to that list too even though they're obviously in areas beyond Oracle EPM. While many of these companies are too small to attract the attention of Deloitte, IBM, E&Y, and Oracle, don't be shocked if one or more of them is gobbled up in the next year by an off-shore consulting firm looking to fill in the EPM/BI gaps in their offerings.

It's now almost 2AM and I have to present to the HUG group in Minneapolis in a few hours, so I'm going to post and then sleep. If I've stated anything incorrectly above, feel free to comment and please assume I wasn't trying to be malicious. It's just been a long day and this entry (essay?) was almost 1,800 words.

UPDATE April 5, 2011: E&Y Officially Buys ISA Consulting
It took a week into April, but E&Y finalized the ISA deal and announced the deal publicly. The press release states that ISA had 130 employees (I'd speculated 100+) and financial terms were not disclosed. Read more about it here.

I'm Totally Lost: Which Conference Do I Go To for Hyperion and Oracle EPM/BI Content?

2011-02-28T17:02:00.000-06:00

The final Hyperion Solutions conference (the great big conference Hyperion used to put on with non-stop Hyperion content and over 4,000 attendees) was in the spring of 2007. Back then, everyone knew which conference to attend, because there was only one national conference (Solutions) and then a whole lot of regional HUG (Hyperion User Group) meetings. But then Oracle bought Hyperion and immediately disbanded the conference leaving the user community in disarray.

There are now several options depending on what you're looking for. While I could attempt to make some sense out of the whole conference jumble in a blog post, I decided it would be better explained in a webcast. To that end, I'm devoting two webcasts this week to the question “Now that the Hyperion Solutions conference is gone, which conference should I attend?”

I'm going to compare the benefits of the better known 2011 conferences:

Collaborate. April 10-14 in Orlando, FL.
Kscope. June 26-30 in Long Beach, CA.
Connection Point. Probably in July in Seattle, WA and November in Atlanta, GA.
OpenWorld. October 2-6 in San Francisco, CA.

I'm in a unique position to do this, because I don't work for Oracle and I have some ties to every one of these events (so you could say that while I'm biased, I realize the value each one can bring to the right audience). Usually, our webcasts are only open to Oracle customers (not partners) but in this case, I want everyone to know why you'd want to go to each of the conferences so they don't find themselves wasting money at a conference that's totally not right for them.

Click on the links below to sign up for either Tuesday or Wednesday's webcast:

Tue, Mar 1, 2011 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EST

Wed, Mar 2, 2011 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST

I will spend around 45 minutes covering all the conferences and then take questions from the audience. Before you sign up for one of the conferences, devote 45 minutes of your life to making sure you won't find yourself trapped in the 7th circle of hell (otherwise known as stuck at a conference you hate).

Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 - Looks Like March

2011-02-14T00:38:00.001-06:00

Disclaimer
I don't work for Oracle. Everything you see below is what I've heard said in public forums followed by some speculation of my own. Oracle not only does commit to release dates, they don't even commit to specific future functionality. For that matter, they won't even go on the record that there will actually be any future releases of products. So take this whole entry for the best guess that it is.

Why Do I Care About a Little Dot Release?
Based on the disclaimer above, I have been really hesitant to go on the record with any information about Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 (sometimes called "Talleyrand SP1" or "11.1.2sp1" or "The Patch" or "The Migration Patch" or "The Dot Release" although personally I like calling it "Waiting for EPM Godot"). The initial release of 11.1.2 dates back to April 2010 (yup, we're going on 10 months now) and there's still not an official service pack. That doesn't mean there haven't been bug fixes. They just slip them in as minor fix releases (like 11.1.2.0.02 and the rest). What we're really waiting for are some of the things that should be in 11.1.2.1:

Bug Fixes. Supposedly, all of the big show stopper bugs (like some of the Life Cycle Management issues and the almost complete unusability of the EAS fat client) are fixed in this release.
Migration. 11.1.2.0 was released with no migration tools from earlier releases. It was what was called a "greenfield release." In other words, you could install it, but you couldn't get there from any earlier version. Now my company like many others have done several "upgrades" to 11.1.2 of as many parts as we can, but officially, there's no way to migrate to 11.1.2... until 11.1.2.1. This version should have wizards and conversion utilities to migrate from multiple versions including 9.2, 9.3 and 11.1 (well, specific point releases of those). In other words, you'll finally be able to do a supported migration and it should be easier than the manual methods we're doing now.
Wider Server Support. 11.1.2.0 was released with support only for Oracle WebLogic 10. Unlike earlier versions, it did not support Apache Tomcat nor IBM Websphere. Now the good news was that Oracle was kind enough to issue a limited use WebLogic license. The downside obviously was if you were not already a WebLogic shop. Taking on a new application server infrastructure isn't easy. The patch should support Tomcat and Websphere as well as Windows 2008r2 from an OS standpoint. While it's on the client not server side, also expect to see Office 2010 support in 11.1.2.
Performance Improvements. With all the new functionality in EPM 11.1.2 (especially in Hyperion Planning), some things just aren't very speedy. Development has said publicly that they are working on improving the speed of many of these new features including workflow and the new drag-and-drop forms designer.

Any New Functionality?

The four items above are as close to 100% definite as you can get. They might change the specific versions you're allowed to upgrade from (current rumor is 9.2.1, 9.3.3, 11.1.1.3, and 11.1.2) but there will be lots of bug fixes, a migration path, wider server support, and performance improvements in 11.1.2.1 most assuredly. Where we get into a grayer area is, like the iPad 2, when we start speculating about any new features of functions in the release. So here's what may or may not be in there (and don't base any buying decisions off my wild ass speculation):

Data Relationship Management. This is straight from Oracle themselves, so it's very likely to be in there. From the excellent though sporadically updated "Versioned Hierarchy of Reality" blog (ya, I'm one to talk), 11.1.2.1 should contain:

Performance Improvements
Upgrade Support
Console Improvements
Property Namespaces
Single Sign On
URL-based Navigation
Job Status and Cancellation
Action Script Options

Disclosure Management. Both Disclosure Management and Financial Close Management saw their initial releases in 2010. As such, they should both be seeing substantial functionality improvements as Oracle tends to do in dot releases after the initial major release. For Disclosure Management, the only major improvement I've publicly heard multiple times is for the UK folks: the ability to do XBRL income tax returns for HMRC.
Financial Close Management. It looks like the main improvements to HFCM (Hyperion Financial Close Management) have to do with direct integration to PeopleSoft. Expect to see direct PeopleSoft 9.0 and 9.1 integration with AP, AR, BI, AM, and GL into HFCM. For details, scroll down to page 17 of a presentation Oracle delivered to the NorCal OAUG. Looks like Oracle eBS integration won't make it into the 11.1.2.1 release of HFCM but should be out by the end of 2011.
Smart View. There will either be a bunch of improvements to Smart View in this release or they'll delay them to 11.1.2.2. A lot of the new Smart View features we've seen demoed in the last year have to do with a new look for Smart View that makes it look a whole lot like Essbase classic (such as the ability to hide the POV). I'm expecting that these User Interface improvements will actually make it into 11.1.2.1, but I wouldn't bet on it.

The ones above are what I would be willing to wager make it into 11.1.2.1. There will doubtless be some minor improvements that I'll try to detail once the product makes it out the door. As for some of those other big development things you've been hearing about (like custom dimensionality in HFM, account reconciliations in HFCM, project planning module for Hyperion Planning, micro-costing in HPCM, etc.) is probably going to end up waiting until 11.1.2.2. The most recent public EPM roadmap presentation from Oracle (scroll down to page 12) seems to reflect that other big items are being held.

So When Does It Come Out?

Talk about burying the lead. The post is almost over and I'm just now getting to what I mentioned in the subject line. Every person who's talked about release dates to this point has been wrong. It went from August to fall to October to 2010 year end to January to "when Dallas freezes over the same week they host the Super Bowl." Well, we all thought that was never going to happen, but then last week leading into the Super Bowl festivities, Dallas spent 100+ hours below freezing and it snowed several inches too. So recognizing an apocalyptic sign, I reached out to a very high up source in Oracle EPM development...

... and was told March. Further, the person was almost willing to guarantee it if I promised to not mention her/his name. "March?" I asked incredulously, because I had frankly lost all belief in release dates for 11.1.2.1. Development then explained to me why 11.1.2.1 has been delayed for so many months. And here's the thing: it's actually not development's fault nor legal's fault nor sales nor marketing nor any of the other groups that would tend to cause holdups like this.

No, it seems to be because of Fusion. Oracle EPM is part of the Fusion Middleware team, and it is built on several other Oracle technologies both Fusion and otherwise. The delay is because one of the key technology "tentpole" components in Oracle EPM coming from the Fusion side keeps changing. Every time that underlying technology changes how it's implemented, they have to go modify the code for Oracle EPM. In other words, EPM 11.1.2.1 is just sitting there waiting for the tentpole technology to stop changing.

March, Seriously?

So how did development come up with March? It seems that there's been a line drawn in the sand and that supporting Fusion tech will be finalized this month (February) which makes sense since it's the last month of Oracle's quarter. Then it's just a quick change to Oracle EPM, some regression testing, and voila: Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 will finally be released. That said, I'd bet on March 31 to be a whole lot more likely than March 1.

I know a lot of you will be waiting until the patch comes out, but please don't blame me if the date slips again (but give me kudos if I turn out to be right). My infrastructure team at interRel is gearing up for all our clients that have managed to be dissuaded from going to 11.1.2 until the patch comes out, so we're concluding that this delivery date is real. We're expecting busy times in March and April with all the migrations. Keep watching here, and I'll let you know when 11.1.2.1 finally shows up on edelivery.oracle.com.

Kscope - Sessions All Finalized

2011-02-08T13:17:00.002-06:00

Despite all rumors (and some fond desires from my competition), I'm not actually dead. I have not been in a Platonic cave nor was I abducted by aliens (this time). The best excuse I can plausibly provide (unless I could convince you that a massive snowstorm hit Dallas the week leading up to the Super Bowl, cause ya, like that's believable) is that I and the rest of the conference team have been hard at work putting together the agenda for ODTUG Kscope11 to be held June 26-30, 2011 in Long Beach, California.

There are five tracks at the conference:

Big Picture
The one that's the dearest to my skillset is, of course, the BI, EPM, and Hyperion track. This year's track has around 100 BI/EPM sessions, several half-day hands-on labs, and two day-long deep-dive symposiums on Sunday. In the BI/EPM world, there are 7 major areas we'll be focusing on:

Financial Management Solutions (HFM, FDM, Disclosure Management, Financial Close Management)
Planning Solutions (Planning, Strategic Finance, EPMA, Operational Planning, Crystal Ball)
Essbase Solutions (Essbase, ASO, Studio, HPCM, Java API, all the rest)
BI Solutions (OBIEE, Warehouse Builder)
Reporting Solutions (Smart View, Financial Reporting, Interactive Reporting, Answers+, Dashboards, Publisher, Visual Explorer)
Keeping It All Running (Utilities, Tips & Tricks, Tuning & Optimization, ODI, MDX, MaxL, Scripting, etc.)
Third Party Tools (Dodeca, Star Analytics, Cloud Computing, etc.)

All those are detailed on the Kscope11 landing page for BI & EPM at Kscope11.com/BIEPM.

I'm a technical user/admin/developer

If you're a technical user, administrator, of developer of Essbase, Hyperion Planning, HFM, OBIEE or any of the other Oracle BI and EPM products, then by all means, this is the place to go. Kscope 2010 had more Hyperion and Oracle EPM attendees than any other conference in the world (yes, that includes Oracle OpenWorld and Collaborate). Attendance was also 50% greater from 2009 to 2010, so obviously it's where people in the former Hyperion community are gravitating.

I'm advanced

Congratulations on rising up to the upper levels of Hyperion, Essbase, and/or OBIEE knowledge. Your mother must be very proud. If you're an intermediate, advanced, or guru-level user of Oracle BI/EPM, then you'll find lots of like-minded people at Kscope. I'm personally giving, for instance, 2 hours of sessions on how to hack Oracle Essbase and an entire presentation on the fine art of writing ASO calc scripts. You won't find that level of content at any other conference, so if you want good training you can't get anywhere else for less than $300 per day, join us in June.

I'm a beginner

Don't feel bad. We all started there. One of the comments we got from last year is that with the Hyperion Solutions long in the rearview mirror, there's no longer a place for new users of the Oracle BI, EPM, Essbase, and Hyperion products to get started. I know I began my Essbase career back when by looking at what other companies were doing with Essbase, so we've expanded the beginner content this year. We now have implementation stories and sessions from ~40 companies for you to choose from. Here's an entire track of suggested beginning sessions:

Kscope11 Beginner Track

But I'm not a techie

The number one area we wanted to improve on this year was to add an entire track for business users, end users, and decision makers. We've added around 20 sessions focused on the non-technical side of Hyperion. If you want to learn how Oracle EPM can be better used at your organization, if you want case studies of other successful firms, or you want to know how to better use the investment you've made in Oracle BI, EPM, and Hyperion, we now have an entire track devoted to you:

Kscope11 Functional and Decision Maker Track

I need to register right now

I have to admit: I love Kscope. It's the best of the old Hyperion Solutions and Hyperion Top Gun conferences rolled into one (with all the marketing stripped out). It's the only conference each year that I look forward to (which is why I volunteered to help chair the conference this year). If you want to sign up, visit Kscope11.com/registration. Early bird deadline is March 25, but I wouldn't wait, because seats in the hands-on labs will be assigned based on the order people sign up for the conference. Oh, and as a reward for reading this entire blog entry, use promo code IRC at checkout for $100 off. That's a limited time code and don't share it with anyone. It's a secret for the 7 people who actually still read my blog after my 4 month blog sabbatical.

Mea Culpa

Sorry for the massive break between posts. Expect a flurry in the near future. You have been warned.

Kscope11 - Abstracts Due

2010-10-20T14:34:00.008-05:00

I know it's hard to believe it's already that time, but your abstracts for the ODTUG Kscope11 conference are due in only a week (on October 26). If you want to attend Kscope11 from June 26-30, 2011, this is your chance to attend for free. The Kscope conference is looking for presentations in the following areas of Oracle EPM and BI:

Financial Management Solutions

HFM
FDM
Disclosure Management
Financial Close Management

Planning Solutions

Hyperion Planning
Strategic Finance
EPMA
Integrated Operational Planning

Essbase Solutions

Oracle Essbase
ASO (Aggregate Storage)
Essbase Studio
Java API
HPCM

OBIEE Administration

OBIEE RPD Modeling
OBIEE Architecture & Administration
OBIEE Tuning & Optimization
Migration to OBIEE
Oracle BI Applications

Reporting Solutions

BI Publisher
Smart View
Financial Reporting
Answers
Dashboards
Scorecards
Publisher
Visual Explorer
Action Framework

Keeping It All Running

Utilities
Tips & Tricks
Tuning & Optimization
ODI (Oracle Data Integrator)
MDX
Scripting (Perl, JavaScript, MaxL, VBScript, PowerShell, etc.)

As you can see, if you can conceive of a presentation in the areas of Oracle BI and EPM, you should submit it by October 26th. Whether it's sessions for developers, administrators, users, managers, or executives, there will be a great place for it at Kscope11. There's less than a week left, so visit http://www.technicalconferencesolutions.com/pls/caat/caat_abstracts_upd.main?conference_id=81 and submit a couple of possible presentations for consideration before it's too late.

Can't wait to see you at the front of a session in 8 months in Long Beach! It will not only be the greatest educational opportunity you'll see next year, I have it on good authority that it will be one hell of a party (erm, I mean "an excellent networking opportunity").

ODTUG - Board Elections

2010-10-19T21:32:00.000-05:00

Many of you know ODTUG as the home for BI, EPM, and Hyperion content as part of their annual Kscope conference. ODTUG also hosts other content at Kscope like Fusion Middleware, MySQL, Application Express, and more but those aren't as relevant to readers of this blog. What many of you may not know is that there isn't currently a long-term Hyperion evangelist on the board. Luckily, we have an opportunity to correct this by the end of the month because ODTUG is having their annual elections to their Board of Directors. There are 4 open positions and luckily, there are several Hyperion fans running for the board.

If you're a full member of ODTUG, drop what you're doing, visit https://www.odtug.com/apex/f?p=500:250:0,and cast your vote for at least some of the following four people (you're allowed to vote for up to 4 people):

Cameron Lackpour (long-time ODTUG cheerleader)
Eduardo Quiroz, interRel Consulting (co-founder of interRel)
Tim Tow, AppliedOLAP (co-founder of the ODTUG Hyperion SIG)
Angie Wilcox, JCPenney (current President of the ODTUG Hyperion SIG)

All of those individuals have 10+ years of allegiance to the Hyperion community. If you have one more vote, may I suggest you cast it for the person who truly embraced the Essbase crowd into Kaleidoscope in the first place. Mike Riley, current ODTUG President, is running for re-election. I first met Mike 3 years ago when he reached out to offer Kscope as a place for Essbase groupies to congregate following the demise of the Hyperion Solutions conference. Ever since, he has been supporting the Essbase/Hyperion/EPM/BI community in any way he can.

The deadline is only about two weeks away, so if you have a vote, go use it now. The future depends on it.

Becoming an Oracle Essbase Guru

2010-09-24T23:23:00.002-05:00

I give presentations at conferences around the world including over 100 sessions in the last year throughout North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. So it may come as a shock that I don't actually teach that many classes anymore. Usually, it's once or twice a year and they tend to be on advanced topics (unlike my sessions at conferences which tend to be more intermediate and beginner level). It's time for that once or twice a year for me to teach the advanced classes.

I have two classes coming up and both are in November. To register for either, e-mail Danielle White at interRel and I strongly suggest you hurry since seating is very limited. That's not marketing hype. The first one of the classes is literally limited to 12 students. The other one has slightly more capacity since it's more seminar style and less hands-on, but it's limited too.

Becoming an Oracle Essbase BSO Calc Scripts Guru on November 12
This is a virtual class (meaning you can take it from anywhere in the world) and price is $750 for the day. It's designed to teach you all the major points of Essbase Calc Scripts and BSO member formulas in a single day. We'll start off with the basics but we will get to more advanced topics like allocations, goal seeking, multi-pass calcs, and so on. We close the day with an hour of calc script optimization.

The class format is part me teaching and part hands-on labs using the interRel cloud. It will have tons of real world examples (because if it can be done in an Essbase calc script or member formula, I've probably done it) and lots of interactive Q&A as well. As. I mentioned above, because this class will have exercises throughout the day, we are limiting it to 12 students. In other words, drop what you're doing and register now because it'll probably be full by month-end.

I don't know if this is a motivator for anyone, but attendees will all get a copy of the newest Look Smarter Than You Are with Essbase book autographed by the two authors (one of whom is actually a really nice person and looks great in a dress). If you've ever wanted to learn calc scripts or you've wanted to take your knowledge of member formulas to an advanced level, this is the class for you.

Becoming an Essbase Optimization Guru on November 15
This is a class I've been wanting to offer for years. Basically, we'll spend an entire day focusing on designing and optimizing Essbase cubes. It will span both ASO and BSO cubes. It is going to be seminar format so mostly lecturing from me with lots of Q&A by you. Cost is only $375 (that's the good part) but you'll have to attend in real life (IRL, for those who only know text acronyms). The class will be taught at interRel's headquarters at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, TX. Lunch will be included for attendees, so it's a pretty darned good deal. And we're only 15 minutes from DFW Airport and only 20 from Dallas Love Field (for those Southwest Airlines junkies).

The seminar will cover every aspect of optimization and to a far greater level than your standard one hour optimization presentation at a conference. Among other things, we'll cover data loading, dimension building, dimension ordering, outline tuning, caches, config settings, ASO specific tips, BSO calc script tips, and 64-bit optimization too. We'll even cover how cube design and optimization changes when you get to the Essbase 11x world.

I will be using various examples of cubes I've optimized in the past, but iI'm also willing to use attendees' cubes for examples too. As such, if you sign up before the end of October and send me your outline, database settings, and calc scripts, I may use them (sanitized so no one knows it's your company) as examples in the class. In other words, you may be getting free Essbase optimization consulting as part of your $375 too which makes it potentially an even better deal. Even if you don't send in your application, there will be lots of time for questions throughout the day.

Oh, and to spice up the day, i will be sprinkling several of my "Hacking Essbase" tips throughout the class. These are the undocumented, unsupported, void your warranty things I've come up with over the last 15 plus years. I can't put them in writing for fear of being sued but we'll be covering the tricks (both helpful and shocking) whenever we have a break in the class.

There is a good thing about scheduling this for November 15th. Many of you will be coming to Dallas for the EPM Connection Point conference on November 16-17. Since this class will be from 10am-5pm on the 15th, you can just come in a day early and learn some advanced Essbase content before the 2-day conference. And if you do register for EPM Connection Point, make sure you use the InterRel promo code of "interrelclient" so you get invited to our super-blowout party on the night of the 16th.

Registration
Hurry and email Danielle at interRel to save your spot because I won't be offering either of these classes again until 2011 (and that's if I ever get a chance to offer them again at all). I can't wait to see many of you at one of the two classes!

OpenWorld 2010

2010-09-15T23:31:00.003-05:00

I'm getting ready to leave for Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) and I'm mentally preparing myself the same way one would prepare oneself for, say, storming a beach under a steady barrage of heavy machine gun fire: by trying to pretend that my memories of the last time I survived this experience couldn't possibly be as bad as the real thing. No, I'm not a fan of Oracle OpenWorld. It's too many people spread across too many venues with too few hotels and buses to handle them all.

So that probably makes you wonder: why am I going? Because everyone else is, basically. Last year had something like 45,000 attendees and with the addition of the Java users, this year should be more like 50,000 to 55,000. A lot of Hyperion/EPM/BI attendees have stopped going to OOW, so I was hoping my schedule for this year would be lighter. We just finished putting together the interRel Customer Guide for this year (helping our customers with things they might want to see or do), and on the contrary, it actually seems to busier than in prior years. I'm giving four presentations and hosting a Hyperion day on Sunday. Glenn Schwartzberg is giving another 4 sessions, and Eduardo Quiroz (co-founder of interRel, among other things) is giving a session too.

About the only thing cut out from this year is that I'm doing a book signing. We had 2 of the Top 20 best selling books at the OOW bookstore last year, so they asked Tracy McMullen (Best. Co-author. Ever.) and I to do another booksigning. Since Tracy's not going this year due to some family obligations, I just didn't think it'd be the same signing books all by myself. There will still be lots of our books on sale, though.

Like last year, there will be a "Hyperion Pavilion" on the 5th floor of the Intercontinental hotel next to Moscone West. We will have a booth right by the entrance in case you want to come by and say hi to one of the members of the interRel team (Danielle White will be giving away an iPad, so make sure you find her and give her a business card).

In case you want to stalk me (what better way to show you really care?), here's my schedule for the next week:

Thursday and Friday - Oracle ACE Director Briefing

I'm spending the rest of this week at Oracle Headquarters in Redwood Shores, California at an Oracle ACE Director briefing. With all the new products and all the new ACE Directors, long gone are the days when they could fit all of the new information into one day. This two-day session should be an up-front preview of the news going to be released during OOW (except for the really big things that Larry likes to announce himself).

Saturday - Puzzle Hunt

This is a day off for me. I'm joining three of my friends in the area for a puzzle hunt around San Francisco. It's kinda like a scavenger hunt crossed with The Amazing Race except for uber geeks.

UPDATE: My team ended up winning 1st place in the Bang23 Puzzle Hunt. All the heavy mental lifting was done by my teammates: Stephanie, Chris, Dave, and Jeremiah. Thank you for making my first puzzle hunt a memorable one!

Sunday - ODTUG Hyperion Symposium

In addition to setting up the interRel booth, I'm hosting the ODTUG Hyperion/EPM Symposium in Moscone West, room 2018 from 12:30-5:00pm. If you get to OOW on Sunday, make sure you stop by. We'll be talking about recent developments in the world of Oracle EPM and BI (including Hyperion 11.1.2 and OBIEE 11g) as well as the future of EPM & BI at Oracle.

I'm giving the first session of the day from 12:30-2:00pm. It's titled "Oracle EPM (and Essbase): What's New in 11.1.2 in 90 Minutes or Less." Al Marciante will be next with what's coming in the near future and then Rich Clayton (EVP of BI and EPM) will be our keynote speaker from 3:30-4:30pm as he talks about Oracle's long-range plan for the convergence of BI and EPM.

While Al and Rich are speaking in the Hyperion Symposium, I'm dashing down the hall to Moscone West, room 2008 to be the co-speaker with one of my favorite interRel clients, CareFirst. We're giving a session from 3:00-4:00pm on "What is Essbase and Why Should I Care?" to some of the new BI/EPM people in IOUG's room. Glenn Schwartzberg will be giving an "Introduction to the New Essbase Studio" also in room 2008 from 4:00-5:00pm. So if you want to know about what's currently available, go to room 2008 from 3:00-5:00pm, apparently, and if you want the future, go to room 2018. I hope that's in no way confusing.

After the sessions, I'm headed to Moscone North to see Larry Ellison's keynote from 5:30-7:30pm. Larry normally keynotes on Monday mornings, so if he's speaking on Sunday, I'm hoping it's because there will be some big announcement that he's worried will leak out if they wait until Monday. That said, he's also giving a keynote on Wednesday afternoon, so I'm not sure what to make of that. Maybe he's stepping down and announcing Mark Hurd as his replacement as CEO? That would make for a good way to end the week right before the huge blowout bash on Treasure Island.

If I'm still up for partying, I'll head over to Howard Street for the opening night party. As Oracle parties go, the opening night one isn't my favorite. Mostly, I don't like the closed-in tent it's held in. It's always too hot and smothering.

Monday - Customer Appreciation Event

Stop by the interRel booth on Monday and get a ticket to the reception we're co-hosting on Monday night with Star Analytics and AppliedOLAP. It'll be from 5:30-8:30pm right next to Moscone West, so even if you can only stay for a little while, stop by just to say hello, have a tasty beverage, and walk out with some appetizers smuggled in your OOW-branded bag.

You will need to be on the list to get in though, so you really have to come by the booth and check in with Danielle. Again, the booth is on the 5th floor of the Intercontinental in the Hyperion Pavilion. Speaking of the booth, I don't have any sessions on Monday, so I'm probably getting roped into booth duty, so if you want to heckle me one-on-one, your best chance to do so would be on Monday at the booth.

Some high-up person in the Oracle EPM establishment (probably Rich Clayton or John O'Rourke) is going to give a presentation on Monday from 3:30-4:30pm in Grand Ballroom AB of the Intercontinental. The title is "Oracle's EPM and BI Strategy and Roadmap" and while I don't suspect anything earth-shattering, it's always nice to get updates in public forums on release dates and so forth. Maybe we'll find out when the migration patch for 11.1.2 will be coming out?

Tuesday - Sessions

I'm spending most of Tuesday going to sessions and wandering the exhibit hall floor. It's a light speaking day. I'm giving a session from 12:30-1:30pm (during lunch?) in Intercontinental's Ballroom C titled "Oracle Hyperion Planning/Oracle Hyperion Strategic Finance Forecasting Solution." It's basically about using Hyperion Planning and Strategic Finance together to make for a stronger solution. I'll probably also join The Schwartz as he presents "Top 10 Oracle Essbase Optimization Tips That Give You 99% Improvement" so I can offer pithy comments. It'll be at the Hotel Nikko in the Bay View room from 2:30-3:30pm.

Other than that, Tuesday is going to be filled with meetings with various customers and partners of ours. One good thing about OOW is that it's an excellent opportunity to meet with high-level personnel in the Oracle establishment all in one place. Now that I'm also representing the Kscope11 conference, I need to meet with non-EPM/BI people at Oracle too, and OpenWorld makes for an excellent place to do that.

Wednesday - Party at Treasure Island

Before the evening's entertainment kicks in, I have a session from 10:00-11:00am in the Intercontinental Sutter room on "Implementing Integrated Operational Planning (IOP) for Detailed Budgeting." IOP is one of my favorite new additions to the Oracle EPM suite (my other current favorite being HPCM: Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management) and when I noticed no one else was speaking on it at OOW, I volunteered. It'll be my first time speaking on the product publicly, so show up if you're interested in IOP or you just want to see if I turn into a full-on train wreck.

After my IOP session, I get to stay in the same room (thank you, Mr. Ellison) to present "Achieving a Common Goal: Creating an Oracle EPM Center of Excellence at Pepsi" from 11:30am-12:30pm. Actually, I'm just the secondary speaker on this one: the heavy lifting will be done by my friend, Steve Cioffi from Pepsico. I'm there to do color commentary as I talk theory outside of Pepsi before Steve talks about how Pepsi is actually building a real-world CoE (Center of Excellence). This is a subject I've spoken on at least 20 times in the last couple of years, so sorry: no train wreckage in this session.

After the morning sessions, I'm probably heading over to the interRel booth for a bit before I help them pack up before dinner. The interRel folks will probably all get together for a quick bite at one of the over-packed San Francisco restaurants (which are far more over-packed than normal during OOW) before heading over to Treasure Island to listen to join Larry's party. If he does indeed end up turning the reigns over to Mark Hurd, it's going to be quite the party indeed. Musical acts performing this year include Black Eyed Peas and Steve Miller Band. I'm going over if for no other reason than to sing the peach tree line in The Joker at the top of my lungs.

Thursday - Time to Leave

There's no booth on Thursday and no sessions for me, so I'm heading to the airport around lunchtime. Eduardo Quiroz and The Schwartz are staying around to give competing sessions from 1:30-2:30pm, though. Eduardo is at the Marriott in Golden Gate C1 talking about "Replacing 'Sunseted' Oracle Software Like OFA with Essbase" while Glenn is in Ballroom C of the Intercontinental teaching what I'm sure will be thousands of people about "Implementing Effective Configuration Management on Oracle EPM’s Platform."

In all seriousness, everyone I've talked to thought the conference was over by lunch on Thursday, but there are sessions scheduled all the way until 4PM. If there are 15 people in either Eduardo's or Glenn's sessions, I owe them each a dollar.

EPM and BI - In General

All total, there are, per Oracle's EPM & BI Guide to OOW, over 100 sessions at OOW on BI and EPM. If you want to download this guide, go to http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/oow10-focuson-epm-bi-152485.pdf, but I warn you: it's not complete. The first two sessions of the Sunday ODTUG Hyperion event aren't on there, for instance. It does list all the EPM/BI sessions they could find, though, as well as all the hands-on labs, demo stations, and vendors from the EPM/BI world. I'd print their guide out and bring it with you along with the interRel Customer Guide (if you're not one of our competitors).

If you can't make it to OOW this week, don't feel bad. On the contrary: revel in your freedom and take pity on my soul as I get swallowed up in the Normandy Beach Invasion that OpenWorld has become. It can't possibly be as bad as I remember, can it?

ODTUG and OAUG - New Board Members

2010-09-13T00:05:00.001-05:00

Over the summer, the two major Hyperion SIG (Special Interest Groups) held elections to their Boards of Directors (I think I got that pluralization right). Since it's sometimes hard to find out about these elections (making it difficult to congratulate the winners), I thought I'd compile them all here.

ODTUG Hyperion SIG

This is the SIG associated with ODTUG and the Kscope conference. This SIG has 9+ members of their board but there are only two named positions on their board. Their newest members are:

- Joe Aultman, AutoTrader.com

- Alice Lawrence, LSG Sky Chefs

- Glenn Schwartzberg, interRel Consulting

- Brian Suter, Dell Inc.

Glenn is a founding member of the SIG who went away for a year, missed us, and came back to the fold. The other three members are new. As for why 3 of the 4 new people are from customers of Hyperion and not partners, it's actually written into the ODTUG Hyperion SIG bylaws that over half of the members of the board must not be from vendors, partners, or suppliers. It keeps the consulting companies from overrunning what should be fundamentally a user group.

As for those two named positions, Angie Wilcox (from JCPenney) is the new SIG President and Alice Lawrence is the new SIG Secretary. Angie replaces the well-respected, highly regarded, and never duplicated Gary Crisci (though Gary will be staying on the SIG Board). Alice takes Angie in the Secretary role as Angie steps up to wield the Grand Poobah's gavel.

OAUG Hyperion SIG

This is the SIG that basically took over the regional HUGs (Hyperion User Groups). It's closely aligned with Collaborate though as that conference has turned out not to be a good home for the Hyperion community, this SIG has become the driving force behind the regional EPM Connection Point conferences. The winners of their summer elections are:

- SIG President: Andy Jorgenson

- Geo/SIG Liaison: Suzanne Hoffman, Simba Technologies

- Partner Liaison: Darren Grogan, Guidant

- Communication Coordinator: Colleen Pietrobono

Andy Jorgenson (co-founder of Pinnacle who is at the moment enjoying his retirement by skiing damned near every run on planet Earth) is taking over as SIG President from Kristin Newman. We'll all miss Kristin who accomplished a great deal during her tenure including organizing the first of the OAUG Connection Point EPM (AKA "EPM Connection") conferences in New Jersey in early 2010. Andy will fill her shoes well as he is a long-time friend to the Hyperion community and he is also an Oracle ACE for Hyperion.

The OAUG Hyperion SIG has two major organizational differences from the ODTUG Hyperion SIG. First, people run for specific positions on their SIG board. That's why each of the people listed above is listed with a specific position they won. The other difference is that the OAUG Hyperion SIG board doesn't limit their ratio of customers-to-vendors, so they tend to be a bit more partner-heavy.

As of the date of this posting, the Leadership page for the OAUG Hyperion SIG isn't updated with these new positions, but I assume it will be as soon as they appoint a new person to watch over their website.

Send your congratulations over to all the new board members of both groups. I'm extremely glad that there are people who take time out of personal lives to help better educate the rest of us. Thank you!

Kaleidoscope 2010 - Wrap Up

2010-09-06T13:19:00.005-05:00

I'd like to dedicate this Labor Day blog post to Glenn Schwartzberg. He's been pining for a posting for 3 months now and after his Chinese-water-torture-esque never-ending requests to see something other than John Heffron's face at the top of my blog, Glenn buddy, this one's for you.

Yes, I know it's a bit weird to see some highlights 2 months after conference end, but it's been a busy two months.

Attendance

Attendance was amazing. They improved the paid attendance more than 50% from the year before. Considering Kaleidoscope 2009 was one of only two Oracle conferences I know of that grew from 2008 already, 50+% growth in 2010 was pleasantly shocking. The largest growth seemed to be in the EPM/Hyperion and Application Express areas. Those two areas alone accounted for easily over half the conference.

No question about it, this was definitely the largest gathering of Oracle EPM, Hyperion, and Essbase folks I saw at any national conference this year. Hyperion attendance easily surpassed Collaborate and it beat OpenWorld too. As for the regional EPM Connection Point conferences, there were around 3 times as many Hyperion types at Kaleidoscope as at the last NJ Connection Point conference. It's clear that this is the place to be if you live and breathe Hyperion (and I'm saying that from an unbiased standpoint though I am going to be biased in the future which you'll see a little later in this post).

Education

They expanded all the content this year (around 200 presentations total) and the EPM/BI content was over 75 sessions plus hands-on labs and a day-long symposium on the future of Hyperion by the developers at Oracle. There was even a new track devoted to MySQL now that Oracle owns them too.

Overall, I think the breadth of content increased, but there were some definitely areas for improvement in 2011. On the EPM side of the house, there was a need for more sessions geared to financial users. Now that finance users have given up on Collaborate as a possible source of Hyperion content, they're gravitating to Kscope. As such, Kscope has to expand to give more educational presentations to those users.

To that end, next year's conference is retooling around specific product focuses such as Financial Solutions and Budgeting & Planning. There will still be the sessions that the intermediate and advanced Essbase and Hyperion users want to see, but they'll be adding tracks to continue to fill the needs of the non-technical users. Go here for a complete listing of the tracks and type of content they're looking for at Kscope11:

http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/Abstractpage.html

On that note, submissions are already being accepted to present at Kscope11. Deadline is October 26, and I have it on really good authority that they won't extend the deadline for papers like all the other conferences do. If you want a free pass to the conference so you can be part of over 250 sessions, click on that abstract link above and submit something (or multiple somethings) now. Seriously, do it while you're thinking about before you forget that really good idea. They don't come around that often.

Location

Washington, DC has a number of good things going for it: it's easy to get to from anywhere on the East Coast by train or commuter flight, anywhere else in the USA from a jet through Reagan National, and anywhere else in the world from a jumbojet through Dulles. There's a wealth of things to do there when the conference gets boring and they're all easy to get to due to the cleanest subway system in the USA (that I've seen, at least).

Therein lies a problem, though. Because there's so much to do and it's only a subway ride away, people kept disappearing to the National Mall as soon as the sessions were over each night. This led to a busy conference during the day but a feeling of being in a partially full hotel at night. For example, attendance at the Hyperion Monday Madness event was flat from last year even with 50% more people at the conference.

Speaking of Monday Madness, we did an EPM Jeopardy game this year. Glenn Schwartzberg played the role of Don Pardo and Cameron Lackpour helped out as a judge. We did multiple rounds and while we had many great champions along the way, the final Jeopardy winner by a long shot was Australian Hyperion Savant, Ben White. He was impressive with his neverending stream of mostly useless Hyperion trivia that he could recall at the press of a buzzer.

Entertainment

We started the week off with Rock Band during an opening reception in the exhibit hall. We had non-stop participation from the opening band (made up of some ODTUG Board members) through to the end when they finally kicked us out of the room. Eduardo Quiroz and I hosted the Battle of the Rock Bands and everyone seemed to be having a great time either playing instruments or mocking the people playing instruments.

As the evening went on and people had lots of tasty beverages in them, more and more participants started braving harder and harder songs to wildly varying levels of success. On an interesting note, the evaluations of the event were all over the place as it relates to the volume of the music. A large number said that the music wasn't loud enough while many said it was too loud for conversing. I guess it depends on if you were looking for a rock concert or a wine&cheese reception.

Werewolf was on the schedule every single night. There were some nights where so many people wanted to play that they ended up running simultaneous games. We'll definitely be playing Werewolf again next year. There's just something about offing your fellow conference-goers at 3AM that makes for a rollicking good time. On the last night, John Heffron (comedian extraordinaire) came and joined in for some Werewolf and even gave a couple of his new DVD's to the winners of a couple of games.

Speaking of John Heffron, the Wednesday night event was amazing. For the 600+ people who didn't leave for the monuments around town, they laughed constantly through his entire set. I've seen him before on Last Comic Standing, but he's even funnier in person as his jokes build on themselves throughout his act. It was definitely money well spent. Danielle White was the one who really insisted on John for the comedy portion of the night, and I while I normally try to disagree with her on just about everything, I have to grudgingly admit she was 110% correct in this case.

After John Heffron finished up, there was a major rush for the exits. Considering that the 80-90's cover band was tone deaf, this was the smart strategy. I'm not quite sure what went wrong with the band that night. I had actually gone out to Right Food Red's website ahead of time to listen to them, and they're much better in studio. It wasn't so much the fault of the guys playing the instruments as it was the vocalist. He truly was horrendous, and my advice to him in the future is to sing with the auto-tune turned on or the reverb turned way, way up. Next year, we'll make sure we screen the people in-person before booking them.

Next Year: June 26-30, 2011

In case anyone didn't read the note on any other blogs out there, the conference chair for Kaleidoscope is me, Edward Roske. I'm extremely honored to be selected and I'm going to focus next year on improving and growing the conference to make it not only the home for Hyperion but the other Oracle Developer products as well. My content chair is former ODTUG Volunteer Award Winner, Monty Latiolais, and my co-chair is the eternally awesome Danielle White.

The first thing I changed was to shorten the conference name to Kscope11 simply because no one could never remember how to spell Kaleidoscope and people also kept confusing it with Collaborate. So if you're looking for information on next year's conference, just visit Kscope11.com.

When I was announced as conference chair, I jokingly threw out some proposed conference slogans for Kscope11 and asked the attendees at the General Session to vote on them via text message. My personal favorite not-very-serious suggestion was "Where all the cool kids would be if they understood what the hell we were talking about" but it turned out to be too long to print on all the marketing material so it was shortened to "Where the cool kids are." Much easier to fit on a business card, that's for sure.

The conference next year will be June 26-30, 2011 in Long Beach, California. There are two advantages to these dates versus some conferences in the past: it's the week after Father's Day in the USA so no families get upset by daddy being gone and it's over before month end close so no companies get upset by finance being gone. It will start bright and early Sunday morning, so I'd advise everyone to fly in Saturday night and not plan to fly out until later in the afternoon on Thursday.

The presentations will be held at the Long Beach Convention Center. The host hotels will be the Hyatt Regency and the Renaissance. The Hyperion Midnight Madness event (and many sessions of Werewolf) is most likely going to be held at the Renaissance, so I'm guessing that will turn the Renaissance into the default host hotel for the Hyperion attendees (Kscope rate is the same at both).

Both hotels are less than 2 minutes walk from the Convention Center. Attendees can also easily stay at the Westin or the Courtyard, but they're more like a 5 minute walk, and if you're like me, exercise is something best left to those already in shape. My advice would be to book the Renaissance (especially if you're a Hyperion attendee) and the Hyatt soon before they fill up, but I've seen the Westin and Courtyard and they're both very nice hotels too. I'm also excited to announce that if you're staying under the Kscope code, internet is included in the room rate. Hurray for free high-speed downloading of totally not inappropriate things at 3AM!

The Wednesday night closing event will be held on the Queen Mary. What we'll be doing on the boat is a surprise, but I'll definitely let you know as we get closer to the conference. I'm particularly excited about having our event on the Queen Mary, since it fulfills my life-long dream of having a party on a big boat for more than 1,200 of my closest friends. As this will take one more item off my bucket list, Kscope11 will mean I'm one step closer to dying (and a cheer goes up from the crowd).

Submit a Paper Now

So the cheapest way to join us at Kscope11 is by submitting a presentation since speakers get in for the low, low price of free. As I mentioned above, the deadline to submit an abstract is October 26, and speaking as conference chair, it will not be extended. If you want the possibility of a free pass, start by visiting the abstract page to get an idea of what we're looking for and then go the submission page to put in your title, abstract, and so forth. With budgets ever tighter these days, it makes a much more convincing conference pitch to your boss when you point out that the biggest cost, the conference admission, is already paid for.

Even if you don't want to speak at Kscope11, make sure you put money into your 2011 budget now for attending the conference. I look forward to seeing every one of you and several (both?) of your friends at Kscope11. It'll be the most fun and educational thing you do in 2011 while remaining completely clothed. You can quote me on that (although it's not legally binding, of course, since I actually know very little about your personal life and what you consider to be both fun and educational).

ODTUG Kaleidoscope Scores John Heffron (and other social events)

2010-06-04T16:11:00.002-05:00

There's a ton of new social news for ODTUG Kaleidoscope this year, but let's not bury the lead:

John Heffron to Headline Wednesday Night

I don't know about you, but after the nature-assisted disaster that was Collaborate's "Beach Party Except In a Ballroom" event, I'm glad to see someone step up and spend some money on some A-list talent. John Heffron, winner of the second season of Last Comic Standing (and in my opinion, the funniest winner by far with only Alonzo Bodden coming close), will be the featured act at Wednesday night's closing celebration.

While John Heffron isn't quite Aerosmith, he's the biggest name I've seen performing at a conference in a while outside of OpenWorld. I'm about to make myself sound pretentious by saying that I liked John Heffron since back before he skyrocketed to fame on Last Comic Standing. He did a lot of college campuses. Ya, I'm basically trying to say I knew (of) him way back when he was a nobody. Trust me: if you like geeky humor, if you've ever gone to school, or you've ever been married, you'll love him. Beware: you may laugh so hard you wet yourself.

My company did agree to foot part of the bill to afford him, so I'm hoping to get a decent seat. If you're coming to Kaleidoscope, make sure you get to the event early or you'll be standing in the way back. If you haven't signed up yet, the advance rate expires on June 9th, so hurry up. Attendance is up more than 40% over last year and rumor has it that the hotel is almost booked up. If the hotel is booked up by the time you sign up, the good news is that the Marriott Wardman Park is right on the Metro line so lots of other hotels are a nice subway stop away.

There's also an awesome band playing before and after John. They're covering '80s and '90s songs so there will doubtless be much dancing and signing along too before the party breaks up to play all-night games of Werewolf. Wednesday's fun (not including Werewolf) is from 6:30-10PM.

World Cup Soccer/Football To Be Broadcast

For anyone who doesn't know (which probably means you live in the USA and think soccer is a horrible sport because it can end in a fraking tie), the FIFA World Cup will be held in South Africa from June 11 - July 11. That means the final 16 teams will be vying for the World Cup right smack in the middle of Kaleidoscope. The schedule is at http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/matches/kostage.html.

Rather than ignore the hooligans cheering on their countries (did I mention that Team America is so much better at soccering stuff than your stupid fill in your country here banana republic?), Kaleidoscope will be embracing them. That's right: they'll be showing all the games during the week on large-screens and then assuming the right team wins, they'll be replaying the games too. In all seriousness, wear your favorite team's jersey all week and watch the games live and just a little bit later than live (if you want to actually attend the sessions).

I don't think they have the World Cup screening location announced yet, but there will definitely be some World Cup action being broadcast at the conference. America, f*@% ya! U-S-A...U-S-A... Note that I find it highly unlikely that the USA will still be playing at that point, but I figured I'd practice my chanting just in case.

Battle of the Rock Bands

If you're already planning on playing lots of rock music during your opening night reception, what are two ways to possibly improve? Easy: add technology and the potential for major public humiliation. That's right, we're playing Rock Band on the PS3 on stages high above the exhibit hall floor and everyone is invited to participate and cheer along. Here's the description from the ODTUG website:

We’ll be rocking while talking...

Traditionally, opening receptions at conferences have string quartets or jazz trios soothing you to sleep with every note. ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 will bring you non-stop rock brought to you by… you. That’s right, we have two Rock Band PS3 setups on stages high above the reception crowd and the exhibit hall floor. Participants will be able to choose from hundreds of downloaded songs from Rock Band and Rock Band 2 as bands, made up of Kaleidoscope attendees, go head-to-head on drums, guitar, bass, and vocals. We only have one rule: the vocalist picks the song, but beyond that, anything goes as long as it won’t get us arrested.
Rockers wearing appropriate concert attire (still have your ’87 Guns ‘N Roses black tee lying around?) will be given preference as we form lines to rock out in front of God, country, and your fellow K’Scopers. Prizes will be awarded to the best performers, which are far more about impressing the crowd than it is playing the right notes, since we’ll have “No Fail Mode” turned on. Come one and all as you wow us with your rock and roll acumen, and yes, our amps do go all the way to 11. If you wish to sign up for your place in rock history ahead of others getting talked into it on-site, e-mail events@odtug.com. We who are about to rock, salute you.

Yes, that's a picture of me above playing Rock Band at the interRel booth at Kaleidoscope 2009 and I'm wearing a totally inappropriate interRel shirt. Who rocks out wearing a polo? Make sure you bring some good rock concert t-shirt apparel to the Sunday event. You don't want to be the only one wearing a suit when you're in the rocking out in the presence of rock gods. My good friend, Gary Crisci, and I are agreeing to go in full KISS makeup if we can get two people to join us, so bring your camera phones too.

If you want to sign up ahead of time to get your place in line, e-mail events@odtug.com with your name, your song you want (so we can make sure to have it downloaded), and what instrument (guitar, bass, drums, or mic) you want to play. We'll make sure to put you in a band.

Werewolf Every Single Night

I know what you're thinking: how could they possibly cram anymore fun, ODTUGy goodness into one week? By starting some activities at midnight and going until dawn. That's right: Werewolf, which swept the conference last year and is becoming the biggest thing since the iPad in the tech world, makes it on to the official schedule this time around.

For anyone that doesn't know, Werewolf (the "game of mob rule") is a party game for 8-68 players. It's done in a circle and basically, you have a few werewolves and a whole lot of villagers. Each night during the game (a day typically lasts 10-15 minutes), the werewolves pick a villager to devour (at which point, that villager is out of the game). Each day, the villagers try to figure out who in their group is not really a villager but is actually a dirty, stinking werewolf. Once they've picked someone out, they vote to lynch the person at which time we find out if he was really a werewolf or just a villager looking suspicious.

The majority of the time, the villagers are wrong, so they lynch one of their own and then go to sleep so the werewolves can pick off another villager. The villagers win if they find all the werewolves and the wolves win if they eat all the villagers. That's the big picture in a nutshell.

So what makes it so fun? Simply put, watching the werewolves lie through their teeth while the villagers try to decipher the lies makes for a fascinatingly hilarious look into human psychology. It's quick to learn and really fun to play. Games will be held every single night of the conference starting at midnight for those who think sleep is something best saved until you're dead. Oh, and we're holding a beginner game a little earlier on Sunday night for those who haven't played before but want to learn without the experienced people eating them alive.

Oh, if anyone wants a copy of the game, there are a ton of editions out there. My personal favorite is made by my Facebook friend, Ted Alspach. It's called "Ultimate Werewolf: Ultimate Edition" (Ted has a flair for marketing) and it's the best version I've seen bar none.

Party on, Edward.

This is probably my last Kaleidoscope update before the conference. As I've said above, attendance is way up over last year, so if you haven't already signed up, make sure to do so by June 9th. It's a huge educational opportunity for those in the Hyperion/EPM community and beyond, but it's also gore fun than a barrel of werewolves. Hope to see you in a few weeks!

EPM Connection - Dallas in November

2010-04-29T23:16:00.003-05:00

Per Doreen Fox-Dwyer from the OAUG Hyperion SIG, the dates (and location) have been announced for the next EPM Connection conference. It's going to be November 16 & 17 in Frisco, Texas at the Westin Stonebriar.

While I'm thrilled to see it's going to be in the DFW area (where I live), I'm not thrilled to see it will be held in Frisco. It's more than 20 miles from either DFW international airport or Dallas Love Field airport. Basically, it's up in the upper-Northeast corner of the Dallas area, so it's not really close to most people living in Dallas. That said, I think most people will be planning on staying at the hotel overnight (it has 300+ rooms), so I guess commute doesn't matter. On a personal note, it's really close to my house (I live in the middle of nowhere), so I'll be happy and bright-eyed during the conference! The Westin Stonebriar is a nice new property (with an attached 18-hole golf course).

I think that the event will go quite well. There's a vibrant user community in North Texas (though they're used to getting their Hyperion content at user groups for free) and it's cheap for people to fly into DFW. If they add an Essbase track (maybe replacing some of the Enterprise and Strategic Finance presentations), they'll have attendance mirroring what they saw at the well-organized event in New Jersey (thank you, Kristin Newman!).

Keep an eye out here and I'll announce as they put out their call for papers and start allowing registrations.

UPDATE:

Papers are being accepted through July 30, 2011 at:

http://connectionpoint.oaug.org/conferencesandeducation/conferences/2010/cpepmnov/callforpres.php

Also, registrations are now being accepted on the EPM Connection (also known as OAUG Connection Point EPM) website. Prices vary wildly depending on when you register, whether you're staying for both days, and if you're an OAUG member. The lowest price of $275 is for a one-day, OAUG member who signs up by October 9th. If you're not an OAUG member and you wait to sign up for both days on-site, the price skyrockets to $695. In other words, if you plan on going, don't wait. Go here now and don't forget to use interRel's promo code (interrelclient) if you want to be invited to our client appreciation event on Tuesday night:

http://connectionpoint.oaug.org/conferencesandeducation/conferences/2010/cpepmnov/registration.php

Oracle EPM 11.1.2 - New Financial Close Applications

2010-04-28T00:14:00.003-05:00

Part of the awesomeness that is EPM 11.1.2 includes the release of some new stand-alone applications particularly Hyperion Financial Close Management (HFCM) and Hyperion Disclosure Management (HDM). These products are designed to improve financial close and reporting capabilities. Note that unlike Hyperion Public Sector Budgeting (which is really just a new module for Hyperion Planning), these new applications are exactly that: new applications. They don't require any existing applications to run them.

That last sentence may surprise some people who thought that these two new applications would end up being modules inside of HFM (Hyperion Financial Management). On the contrary, Disclosure and Financial Close Management do not need HFM at all (though they do integrate with HFM). This means you'll see, say, Oracle PeopleSoft clients with Disclosure Management that don't even own any other Hyperion products.

Frankly, I'm thrilled to see the Hyperion name in these two brand-new products. It shows that not only is Oracle not killing the Hyperion name, they're realizing its brand recognition in the financial community.

HDM = Disclosure Management

Quite simply, Hyperion Disclose Management makes it far simpler to generate XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) files which are basically XML files with some business-specific information in them. As standards and organizations like IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and our very own American SEC start requiring more and more information in XBRL format, we're going to need help generating all those XBRL-tagged files.

Enter, Hyperion Disclosure Management. Using Microsoft Word (interesting idea, by the way), it helps apply XBRL tags/taxonomies to financial reports. Further, the tagging can be done at the report-level (which is to be expected) but it can also be done at the application level. For instance, let's say you tagged an account with a certain type. Then any report accessing that account automatically picks up that taxonomy. The product also does a nice job of validating your XBRL taxonomy before you finalize it.

While there's an Oracle webpage on Disclosure Management, there's a lot more detail in an Oracle whitepaper if you're looking for greater information. For instance, this whitepaper mentions the direct integration of HDM with Hyperion Financial Reporting and Smart View (which I didn't see mentioned elsewhere).

HFCM = Financial Close Management

The point of Hyperion Financial Close Management is to convert all those lists of tasks that have to be done every month to close the books into dashboards where we can monitor the close process throughout the close cycle. It lets you track (and manage) activities such as:

entity-level close of ledgers and subledgers
data transformation
data collection and loading
consolidating the books
reconcilations
creating and publishing reports
just about any other financial close-related activity you can imagine

And while the dashboards & calendars are nice for letting you see what's going on, the nicest part of HFCM is that you can automate and track many activities that used to be manual. If you want more information, go to Oracle.com for a nice HFCM whitepaper.

Oracle EPM 11.1.2 Is Available - But You Can't Get There From Here

2010-04-27T13:13:00.005-05:00

Well, this is interesting. I've been critical in the past of Oracle releasing a version of EPM, Hyperion, or Essbase (like 11.1.1.3 for instance) to edelivery.oracle.com and then not letting anyone know. It was weeks after 11.1.1.3 was released before Oracle finally acknowledged it's existence.

Fast forward to Oracle EPM 11.1.2 (AKA the most significant release feature-wise to the former Hyperion products since the Oracle acquisition back in 2007). In this case, Oracle was kind enough to issue press releases, webcasts, and briefings about the wonderousness of 11.1.2 back at the start of April... and then didn't post the programs for download until the 21st of April. A couple of people (Mark Rittman and Tim Tow, among others) have already mentioned the release, but I'd like to take some time to deep-dive into the new features (and concerns) with 11.1.2.

I've also complained in the past about Oracle releasing a version for Windows before releasing the versions for other operating systems. Not so in 11.1.2: there are versions out there for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), HP-UX, AIX, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit), and Solaris. This is also an international version (that is, it's not an "English Only" release) that can be used in over 15 languages (depending on the product because some aren't quite as international as others).

Installation

To be clear, don't install this release for production. It's been out for less than a week. While this version was in beta for around a year (at interRel, we first started testing it in the summer of 2009), you need to wait for the first service pack to work some of the known issues out of the system. Based on what the Oracle speakers at last week's Collaborate conference were saying, EPM 11.1.2sp1 will be out in either Summer or Fall. I have heard in the past June or July, but the "could be fall timeframe" wording for the patch is new. It might be delayed because of the need to add migration functionality to the service pack (more on that in a bit).

Note that one the only supported Web Application Server supported in this release is Oracle WebLogic Server (10.3.2, specifically). Sorry, Tomcat and WebSphere users, for the moment you're out of luck. That said, Oracle is being kind enough to give out a limited use copy of WebLogic for use with all the EPM products that need an application server.

If you're going to try to install all the Oracle EPM 11.1.2 products, be aware that three products have their own installer (rather than using the common installer):

Smart View
Essbase Excel Add-in (yes, there is a version 11.1.2 of the add-in)
Disclosure Management (one of the new applications)

Can't Upgrade to 11.1.2

Now for the really bad news. This release (for the moment) is not supported as a migration from an existing release. That's any release (11.1.1.3, System 9, anything). If you are an existing customer of Oracle's EPM products, then 11.1.2 can be installed on a development server, but you can't move your existing release to 11.1.2 in development. In case you don't believe me (I was shocked when I first heard, frankly), here's the exact quote from the 11.1.2 EPM System Installation Read Me (epm_1112000_readme.pdf):

This release is intended for new deployments only. Upgrading or migrating from previous EPM System releases is not supported. In addition, products from this release are not compatible with products and applications from previous releases.

In other words, new customers, have a ball. Existing customers, wait for fall when they get the migration patch out there. I do have my infrastructure consulting team seeing if they can do manual export and imports to get around this, but even if they do, it won't be officially supported.

Watch This Blog

Over the next few days, I'll be posting additional entries around specific products rather than try to mention them all in one entry. There are over 25 product-specific Read Me files I have to make it through and that's before I ever try installing everything and playing with it live. It'll be fun!

Top 10 Hyperion Events of the Decade is Over

2010-03-09T00:03:00.001-06:00

Frankly, I find it hard to believe I started this series 2-and-a-half months... and then managed to stick with it. Part of it is that I've been watching the readership of this blog and it's been growing week-over-week all year. Either this means you like what you've been reading, or you've invited your friends to join you in mocking my blog (including my frequent use of parenthetical expressions, my extreme overuse of the phrase "That said" whenever I want to argue with myself, and my annoyingly self-referential & self-deprecating prose).

That said, I’m sure every single person who read this series disagreed with at least part of it. I’m suspecting that with the exception of the #1 event being the Hyperion/Oracle merger (I reject your reality and substitute my own!), you probably don’t like the order, you can’t believe I included some of these items, and you’re shocked I forgot a few events. Feel free to eviscerate me in the comment section of this blog. Not to say I enjoy that sort of thing, but at least it shows you care enough to flame.

Hopefully, the next ten years will bring even more innovation while providing far less upheaval. Unless Oracle wants to buy up SAP and sell them off for parts...

#1. Oracle Acquires Hyperion

2010-03-08T00:03:00.000-06:00

Was there any doubt about number one? By far the most significant event of the last ten years if not the entire history of Hyperion was announced in March of 2007: Oracle was buying Hyperion for $3.3 billion US dollars. It led to a wave of consolidation activity within the next few months: SAP bought Outlooksoft (and then Business Objects when the world was underwhelmed with the Outlooksoft purchase) and IBM bought Cognos. In 2007, the three largest BI/EPM vendors were gone.

The Hyperion acquisition was one of the smoothest I’ve ever seen thanks to a couple of factors. Oracle extended offers to 92% of the Hyperion workforce so all the key personnel made it into Oracle. Oracle also put some great Hyperion people in charge of BI and EPM at Oracle including John Kopcke and Robert Gersten. While the old Oracle BI/OLAP guard was not amused, I’m sure, Hyperion provided new life to the BI group at Oracle when they were put over the top of the existing leadership (rolling up to Thomas Kurian in Fusion Middleware).

Oracle has made some great decisions since the acquisition: Essbase got its name back (may “Hyperion System 9 BI+ Analytic Services” burn in the 7th circle of hell for eternity) as simply Oracle Essbase, Smart View became the Office standard for BI products, Hyperion Planning became the standard for budgeting at Oracle, Financial Management became the strategic direction for financial consolidation, and more. The only negative things I can really say about the acquisition are the loss of the annual Solutions conference and the disappearance of the Hyperion User Groups, and by this point, I’m almost nitpicking.

Like it or not, Oracle’s acquisition was by far the most significant event in Hyperion’s decade. While I never thought I'd say this, I thank God that Larry Ellison decided to forgo buying a bigger yacht in favor of a $3.3BB EPM software firm.

#2. Hyperion Creates BPM Out of Thin Air

2010-03-01T00:03:00.000-06:00

In 2002, Hyperion realized that though they had the best budgeting, scorecarding, and financial consolidation products in the industry, their competitors were still lumping them in the BI (Business Intelligence) category. So Hyperion simply decided they would create their own category: BPM (Business Performance Management). BPM was created to include BI but also add in applications that sat on top of BI. Gartner picked up the ball and ran with it creating their CPM (Corporate Performance Management) magic quadrant and placing Hyperion firmly in the leadership quadrant.

Cognos, Business Objects, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and the rest were left playing catch up as they stuck with BI a little too long giving Hyperion a 2-year head start. When Oracle acquired Hyperion, they renamed CPM to EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) but the entire xPM acronym can be traced back to the excellent work of Hyperion’s product marketing group.

#3. Purchase of Brio, Razza, Upstream…

2010-02-22T18:59:00.000-06:00

Though everyone agrees that Oracle is much better at acquiring companies than Hyperion, Hyperion didn’t do such a bad job itself once it learned the lessons of the Arbor merger. Hyperion bought Brio in 2003, Razza in 2005, Upstream in 2006, and Decisioneering in 2007. Those acquisitions significantly expanded the Hyperion suite with products now called Hyperion Interactive Reporting, SQR Production Reporting, Data Relationship Management, Financial Data Quality Management, and Crystal Ball.

Star Finance Command Center Meets the iPhone

2010-02-21T22:39:00.002-06:00

This past week, I got to play with one of the coolest iPhone apps I've seen in a long time. Why is it cool? Because to the best of my knowledge, it's the first generally available, Hyperion-centric application for the iPhone. Well, technically it's a web app that's optimized for viewing on smartphones, but it has all the look-and-feel of an iPhone app.

Sometime soon, Star Analytics is going to be releasing the newest version of their Star Finance Command Center and it's targeted for smart phones (UPDATE: press release is now out). Here's a shot of an iPhone taken with an iPhone (meta, I know) showing the new Star app:

For those of you who are not familiar with Star's Finance Command Center, I encourage you to check out their website (and don't confuse it with Star Integration Server). Suffice to say, it lets you manage all of your financial processes and data flows whether they're from a general ledger, Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Essbase, a relational database or just about any other data source you can imagine. Until recently, you had to be sitting at a desktop to manage your processes, but the newest release should change all that.

In the interest of full disclosure, I got such a kick out of Star's smartphone app that I did agree to be quoted in their press release when it eventually comes out. I'm not being compensated for it: I just think that it's a really cool product and I can't wait to get it in the hands of all the finance departments I know. (I suppose that since I'm breaking the story of the app here before the press release comes out, it's possible that this will be the last press release Star Analytics ever asks me to participate in.)

I did manage to talk one of the developers into giving me a cleaned up picture since I know my pic above is a bit amateurish:

Finance Process Management?

Yes, there's finally a web app for that.

#4. Microsoft Analysis Services is Released

2010-02-15T00:03:00.001-06:00

In 1998, Microsoft released OLAP Services as their first foray into competing with Essbase. It was enough to scare Arbor into merging with Hyperion, because they feared Essbase would turn into a commodity since Microsoft was now basically giving away “OLAP” with SQL Server. But it wasn’t until 2000 when Microsoft released Analysis Services that they had a product that even began to compete with Essbase.

Why is this the 4th most major event of the decade? Because it led to Hyperion taking its focus off Essbase (how could you compete with something free?) and moving its attentions to building applications that Microsoft didn’t have. The good news is that while Microsoft had a good run in the last millennium, companies now know that you buy the best product not the one with the Microsoft name. Like Microsoft lost the search wars, they lost the OLAP wars to Essbase, Cognos, and Business Objects. Simply put, companies would rather pay for a better product than use a free one. Essbase never became a commodity (despite Hyperion’s own attempts to marginalize it by renaming it Hyperion System 9 BI+ Analytic Services) and under Oracle’s leadership, it’s a flagship product again.

#5. Release of Hyperion System 9

2010-02-08T00:03:00.000-06:00

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Through acquisitions, mergers, and a lack of forethought, Hyperion had developed several products that didn’t talk to each other, didn’t share security, didn’t look anything like each other, and in general looked like they were designed by several, independent companies. System 9 was supposed to solve all of that.

While it eventually did, the original release had three major flaws: it was so full of bugs that it was virtually unusable, it was impossible for anyone other than a trained infrastructure consultant to install, oh, and they thought it’d be a good idea to charge for upgrading to it. By the end of System 9’s lifespan (9.3), it was relatively bug free, easier (but by no means easy) to install, and the price of the upgrade went down. Love it or hate it, System 9 was definitely a game changer.

EPM Connection New Jersey - Agenda and Single Day Rate

2010-02-05T09:49:00.003-06:00

The EPM Connection conference (also known as "OAUG Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management") in New Jersey is less tha 3 weeks away (Feb. 23-24) and there are two developments of note.

Finalized Agenda

The agenda is ready in PDF form (ignore the fact that it says Dubai in the page header). The festivities kick off at 8:30AM on Tuesday, February 23 with a keynote from John O'Rourke on "Smart EPM Strategies for 2010." It then breaks into 5 different tracks covering a range of mostly business topics until 3:30PM. There's a vendor-paid commercial from TUSC that afternoon and a reception that evening.

I'm doing one presentation on the first day along with Steve from Pepsico titled "Achieving a Common Goal: Creating an Oracle EPM Center of Excellence." Tracy McMullen from interRel (Best. Co-author. Ever.) delivers "Day in the Life of a Planning Admin" on the second day. I'm also doing "Finding Profitability in 8 Weeks or Less: An Intro to HPCM" on day two.

Speaking of the second day, John O'Rourke kicks off with another keynote at 8:45AM on what's coming in Oracle EPM in 2010. There are then three more breakout sessions until 1PM. There are a couple of general session things happening from 1-2:30PM before the event wraps up, but I honestly can't tell at the moment what's really going on during that 90 minute period.

The agenda seems to cover a lot of products (though Essbase is woefully underrepresented at about 3 presentations) and a number of good business topics. Total, there are 35+ sessions to choose from which for $495 is a pretty good deal.

One-Day Pass for $350

The conference is two days long, but there's definitely more content on Tuesday, so some might only want to go for the first day. Realizing this, the kind folks at OAUG added a one-day pass for a reduced charge.

The rate is $350 which is around 30% less than the two-day rate. Since Jersey City is nicely located near New York City, I expect that this one-day pass will allow some regional Hyperion users to go who otherwise could not break away for a couple of days. I hope to see you at least one of these days at EPM Connection.

Oracle - Best Ability to Execute Among EPM Suites

2010-02-04T23:27:00.000-06:00

Gartner has released their annual "Magic Quadrant" report on CPM (Corporate Performance Management also known as EPM) suites. To the shock of almost no one, there are only three vendors in the "Leaders" quadrant which means they have high ability to execute and completeness of vision. Those three are IBM (with the Cognos products), SAP (with the Business Objects and OutlookSoft products), and of course, Oracle (with the Hyperion products).

Oracle EPM scored higher in "ability to execute" than any other vendor although SAP did rank higher in terms of "completeness of vision." The "ability to execute" category is determined largely by a customer survey, and it's interesting to note that Oracle had the largest improvement in execution of any vendor Gartner surveyed.

One might wonder why Oracle didn't fare above IBM and SAP in terms of vision, considering those vendors seem unsure as to what they're doing with their long-term EPM strategies. A clue can be found in the comments at the end of the article where Gartner mentions that no major increases in functionality were released in 2009. Further:

...There has not been any major advancement in product vision during the same time frame, and Oracle needs to show evidence of thought leadership in CPM to maintain its position relative to other megavendors and some of the CPM specialists. Its IP functionality and planned financial-close functionality partly address this.

In other words, Oracle had better keep advancing (rather than focusing on just integrating Oracle EPM with the existing Oracle products) or risk falling significantly behind on the vision front. The release of 11.1.2 (Talleyrand) and hopefully, OBIEE 11g will surely help.

#6. The “Invention” of Essbase ASO

2010-02-01T00:03:00.000-06:00

Essbase 7.1.2 provided a new method for storing data: Essbase ASO (Aggregate Storage Option). Whether the idea came from Hyperion or was borrowed from HyperRoll (Patents? We don't need no stinkin' patents.) was a matter of speculation and a court ruling or two, one thing was for sure: no one (Hyperion included) quite knew what to do with ASO.

It was not only a new way of storing data, but it was also a far faster method of aggregating data. It even allowed both more dimensions and larger dimensions than traditional Essbase block storage databases. At the start of the decade, people were asking themselves “should I convert this application to ASO” but by the end of the decade, it was the default method for building cubes in Essbase 11x. With most of the R&D and new features going to ASO, block storage is definitely the way of the past.

#7. Consulting Company Consolidation

2010-01-25T00:03:00.003-06:00

When the decade started, the Hyperion consulting world was dominated by niche companies that only did Hyperion (and sometimes, its competitors like Cognos and Business Objects). Some of the big names included Application Partners, Beacon, Ranzal, ThinkFast, Painted Word, Navigator, Vertical Pitch, and WhittmanHart Consulting. By the end of the decade, not one of those firms was still standing.

Starting in about 2003, the value of BI/EPM really started taking off, and the merger/acquisition of the independent firms began. The first to go was Beacon (acquired by what’s now called Hackett in 2003). The next year, Edgewater gobbled up Ranzal and then in 2007, it also ate Vertical Pitch. ThinkFast and Painted Word merged with Balanced Scorecard Collaborative in 2005 to form Palladium (raise your hand if you think that was a good idea in retrospect). Hitachi acquired Navigator Systems in 2006, WhittmanHart was acquired by Rolta (an Indian conglomerate) in 2008, and the list goes on. Oh, and Application Partners? They just disappeared.

While the landscape was once dominated by focused BI/EPM firms, by 2010, only a handful remain. Yes, as of this writing, interRel is still independent, and you'll get this company out of my (and my co-founder, Eduardo's) cold dead hands. I think I sounded a little like Charlton Heston right there (when he was alive enough to say things like that).

#8. Release of Hyperion Planning and HFM

2010-01-18T00:03:00.000-06:00

Remember Pillar and Enterprise? When the decade started, those were all we had for budgeting and financial consolidation & reporting. By the end of the decade, Pillar was dead and Enterprise though still on the price list was on intensive care. Their replacements, Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management, were built at the start of the decade by the recently combined Hyperion and Arbor Software teams (remember that merger?).

Less than 10 years later, Oracle adopted Hyperion Planning as its strategic direction for budgeting and planning. It also adopted HFM (Hyperion Financial Management) as its strategic direction for financial consolidation, reporting, and management. While there are those who fondly remember Pillar (and even more who fondly remember Enterprise), everyone acknowledges that Hyperion Planning and Financial Management are the way of the future.

#9. The Rise of EAS and MaxL

2010-01-11T00:03:00.000-06:00

It may be hard to fathom, but when this decade started, we were all developing Essbase cubes in Application Manager and automating them through EssCMD. While we all had our reasons for loving Application Manager (I still miss being able to paste members from Excel right into an outline), the simple fact is that it looked like a Windows 3.1 application. EssCMD was getting so complicated that it was turning into a programming language in its own right yet it couldn’t do a lot of the things a real programming language could.

EAS (Essbase Administration Services which replaced Application Manager) and MaxL (which replaced EssCMD) were first released back in the Essbase 6.5 days and predominantly due to their lack of functionality, the adoption rate was slow at first. By the end of the decade, though, no one would think of going back to AppMan and EssCMD.

Oracle Gets Sued Over EPM Workspace (among other things)

2010-01-05T19:45:00.000-06:00

The Story

Let's hit the high points. In 2005, a company called MB Technologies started licensing a technology called "Bindows" to Hyperion. Bindows (to way oversimplify which I'll be doing a lot of in this post) allows a Microsoft Windows like interface but over the web. The negotiations actually dated back to 2004 when Hyperion wanted to give Hyperion System 9 a "Windows on the Web" like experience.

It's my understanding (if I'm wrong, let me know via comment or personal e-mail and I'll correct happily) that this technology was used in pretty much every Hyperion web-delivered application including Hyperion Workspace, Hyperion Planning, and so on. If you login to Workspace, you'll notice menus, toolbars, and more that parallel remarkably the look-and-feel of Windows: that's Bindows technology at work.

Now fast-forward to 2007. Oracle acquired Hyperion and they obviously didn't want to rewrite all the Hyperion front-ends to not use Bindows, so they sought an addendum from MB Technologies allowing Oracle to keep using Bindows for Hyperion products that existed at the time of the acquisition. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, let's say Oracle decided to use Bindows for non-Hyperion applications in the Fusion product arena. Would Oracle ever do such a thing and if so, would they ever admit to it? Here's what MB Technologies claimed Robert Gersten (head of Oracle's EPM and BI development) wrote to them:

Bindows is used in three EPM components that are add-ons to the Fusion applications... We believe it would be better for my group to not re-write these GUIs of these components. It would be nice to work out something that is favorable to both parties.

Well, there's not a lot of wiggle room in that first sentence. Clearly, Bindows is being used in other Fusion apps (at least as add-ons). After some protracted negotiations, MB Technologies filed a suit on December 22, 2009 for fraud and copyright infringement.

So Who Cares?

That's fascinating and all, but isn't this a little inside baseball? Isn't the most likely outcome that Oracle has to pay some more money to MB Technologies?

Yes and no. While the likelihood of an out of court settlement is huge, long-term, Oracle won't want to remain tied to a third party company for licensing their core EPM interfaces. As Oracle stated at the time of the merger, they will eventually rewrite the front-ends to not use Bindows. While this won't necessarily mean a major change to the look-and-feel of products like Workspace and Planning (since Oracle could write their own "Windows on the Web" interface), it will mean that products which have spent years maturing are suddenly back to version 1.0 as the code bases start over again at ground zero.

I'm hoping that Oracle pulls an Ellison and just buys MB Technologies outright. Since they'd then own them, they could keep Bindows around for as long as they'd like. Since I don't see that as very likely, though, don't be shocked if you see a brand new front-end on several of the former Hyperion products (and some new Fusion EPM products just being created) in the next year or two as the GUIs get rewritten to remove Bindows. If so, prepare for bugs. But since this all just speculation, just sit back for the moment and hope for the best.

#10. Release of Version 11

2010-01-04T00:03:00.001-06:00

First in the Series

This is the first in the "Top 10 Hyperion Events of the Decade" series. Remember to check back every Monday as we countdown the Top 10. Feel free to comment, discuss, or debate these items in the comments. Hurray for free speech and all that jazz.

#10. Release of Version 11

Oracle wanted their first major post-acquisition release of the Hyperion product line to be more enterprise friendly while adding features across all the products. In the summer of 2008, almost exactly one year after Hyperion ceased its independence, Oracle released "EPM System, Fusion Edition" and the world was impressed.

Oracle EPM 11x was the most revolutionary version of Hyperion in many years. While all the products were extremely enhanced, Essbase in particular was substantially improved to include text & dates inside the cube, attributes that change over time, and the new Essbase Studio product. Oracle even introduced a new application: Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management application.

While all was not perfect with the release (it was definitely not bug-free and the first version of EPM 11 was English- and Windows-only), it showed that Oracle would be investing a great deal of research and development into the former Hyperion products.

Top 10 Hyperion Events of the Decade

2010-01-01T09:53:00.002-06:00

As I was enjoying the New Year's festivities at 3 o'clock this morning, it occurred to me that we're not only ringing in a new year, we're welcoming a new decade. Last year, I did my "Top 10 Hyperion Stories of the Year" but this time, I'm going to go for the gusto: "Top 10 Hyperion Events of the Decade."

A lot can happen in 10 years. For example, at the start of the 2000’s, HAL (Hyperion Application Link) didn’t even exist, but by the end of the decade, it was gone only to be replaced by DIM (Data Integration Manager). Oh, wait. DIM was itself replaced by ODI (Oracle Data Integrator) so two technologies effectively came over the last 10 years.

The Top 10 of the Decade series seems like it should be more major than 10 daily back-to-back postings, so I'm going to release an item each week on Monday. Since today is Friday, January 1st, that means the first in this series will be Monday, January 4th. Come back then as we countdown the decade's most important Hyperion stories.

Oh, and one minor change to this blog itself. Historically, I tagged all of my posts related to Hyperion with "Hyperion" and Oracle with "Oracle". I realized recently that ALL of my posts are about Oracle and Hyperion, so I'll be dropping those tags henceforth. Just assume that everything you read is Oracle- and Hyperion-related.

Happy New Year/Decade, readers, and remember to check back every Monday from now through, yeesh, mid-March for the "Top 10 Hyperion Events of the Decade." Now get back to bed and enjoy your hangover.

Kaleidoscope - Hyperion/EPM Agenda Approved

2009-12-27T16:28:00.006-06:00

Cameron and Gary Beat Me To It

At least two of my fellow ODTUG Hyperion SIG members (and so called "friends") broke the story first, but allow me to elaborate as the Hyperion/Essbase/EPM content chair on the agenda for ODTUG's Kaleidoscope 2010.

Before I continue, as you've read previously on this blog and others, the only national conference with a major Hyperion presence in 2010 is Kaleidoscope. If you're looking for the best parts of the old Hyperion Solutions conferences, come to Kaleidoscope. Ask anyone who went in 2009 and they'll all agree that it was the best training money they spent all year.

The conference is June 27 to July 1 in Washington DC. Unlike some conferences, the content starts first thing in the morning on Sunday and goes through lunch on Thursday, so make sure you fly in on Saturday and don't fly out until Thursday afternoon or evening.

Sunday Developer's Symposium is Back

The opening Sunday in 2010 (like in 2008 and 2009) will be turned over to the Oracle Product Managers to tell us everything that they have planned that hasn't yet been released. This is, for most people, their one opportunity each year to really talk to the people responsible for development to see what's about to be released, what's in beta, and what's a twinkle in the eye of Oracle EPM product management.

The Sunday "Oracle EPM Developer's Symposium" goes well beyond PowerPoint slides. The day is organized by my long-time friend and Oracle Sr. Director, Al Marciante, and he will make sure that see actual product in development.

The day is also designed to be interactive. Part of why the Product Managers are coming is to hear what you think about what they have in mind. For Sunday, all the Hyperion attendees get together in one really large room. Monday through Thursday, the attendees break out into several tracks.

5 Tracks for the Hyperion Attendees

There are five major tracks that you'll find interesting:

Essbase. There is an entire track devoted to Essbase content and each day is themed to a different aspect of Essbase. Some of the days include Aggregate Storage (ASO), Essbase Utilities, Essbase Under the Covers, and Advanced Essbase. There will be no conference (including OpenWorld) in 2010 with more Essbase sessions.
Hyperion Applications. One of the comments from last year was that there weren't enough presentations on Hyperion Planning and HFM, so this year, we devoted an entire track to them. This track also has sessions on some of the lesser known products like Life Cycle Management, EPM Architect, Hyperion Strategic Finance, Integrated Operational Planning, and FDM. We also devoted time slots to some of the modules that haven't even been released yet (but will by Kaleidoscope 2010) like Disclosure Management and Financial Close.
Hyperion Hands-On-Labs. There will be a series of 3+ hour hands-on labs to give you real-world experience in Hyperion. Some of the classes include Essbase Studio and Integrating OBIEE with Essbase. If you learn more by doing than hearing, this is the track to park yourself in. There will be plenty of power outlets, don't worry.
BI, DW, and Hyperion Reporting Tools. As we all know, some of our favorite products are being phased out in favor of some OBIEE products like Answers, Dashboards, and Publisher. If you want to learn more about the Oracle Business Intelligence side of things, then this would be the place to find it. For what it's worth, I'm not the content chair for this track, but the awesome Mark Rittman is, so I know it will be good (or I'll eviscerate him on my blog ;-).
Hardcore Hyperion. One of the things people liked at previous Kaleidoscopes was the advanced/guru/hardcore content that conferences tended to omit. Even the late/great Hyperion Solutions conference had stopped doing sessions for the true Hyperion expert. We've expanded these "Top Gun" presentations into an entire track in 2010 and it's not just Hardcore Essbase. In addition to Essbase, there are entire days devoted to advanced HFM, Planning, and even Smart View. If you don't go to classes on Hyperion anymore because there's nothing you don't already know for your chosen product, come to this track. It's where I plan on spending most of my time, so pull up a chair next to me. I'm usually in the back row near the power outlets.

Business Users are Welcome Too

The number one request from last year was that add even more Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management content. Apparently, the Planning and HFM users, developers, and admins were not finding a home at any other conference. We've solved this by adding an entire Hyperion Apps track and also devoting days in the Hardcore Hyperion track (see above).

The other request was for more beginner and intermediate level content. In 2008, we only had Essbase content and it went great (though it did tend to skew to the more advanced users). In 2009, we added some content on the other applications (like Hyperion Planning) but again, we tended to skew to the intermediate to advanced users. Our theory was that beginner and business users would be going to the Collaborate conference.

Well, with the scarcity of Hyperion content at Collaborate 2010, we felt that we had to provide a home to those more functional users (with non-technical backgrounds). To that end, we added beginner, intermediate, business, and functional content to both the Essbase and Hyperion Apps tracks. This way if you miss one of the OAUG EPM Connection conferences (or you want more than 2-days of information), you'll be quite satisfied with Kaleidoscope.

For those of you still wanting the guru content, never fear. We didn't want you to think that we were going all soft, so that's why we spun out or guru-level technical content into its own Hardcore Hyperion track.

See the Agenda Visually

Gary Crisci, President of the ODTUG Hyperion SIG, was kind enough the put the agenda into a Google Doc. Hopefully, Gary will keep this updated so that if speakers don't accept their invites or sessions get added, you'll be able to get an updated agenda.

You should also visit ODTUGKaleidscope.com. This will not only have the most recent list of accepted presentations, it's also where you'd go to register. They're already accepting registrations if you have some budget money left and only a couple of days left in 2009 to spend it. I'm signed up to deliver either 3 or 4 presentations at Kaleidoscope (mostly in the Hardcore Hyperion track), so I'll definitely see you there.

On a vaguely related note, for those of you who played it at Kaleidscope 2009 and for those of you feeling bad that you missed out, there will be multiple midnight sessions of Werewolf. For what it's worth, my name is Edward Roske and I'm a villager. Gary on the other hand? Obviously a werewolf.

Collaborate 2010 - OAUG Presentations

2009-12-22T13:05:00.000-06:00

The next Collaborate conference is April 18-22, 2010 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. This is a joint conference of three large Oracle user groups: OAUG, IOUG, and Quest.

There were some people (I was one of them) who were wondering if Collaborate would be the successor to the Hyperion Solutions conference just with a lot of other Oracle products thrown in. The Hyperion attendance fell from 2008 to 2009, so it wasn't surprising when the Collaborate organizers decided to cut the Hyperion/EPM presentations at Collaborate 2010.

While IOUG historically has some Essbase and OBIEE presentations (and in 2009, Quest had a couple of general EPM sessions), the main Oracle EPM/Hyperion/Essbase group at Collaborate is OAUG since they inherited the mantle of the old HUGs (Hyperion User Groups). Everyone was curious as to how many presentations OAUG would allot to Hyperion in 2010.

Looks Like About 35 Sessions from OAUG

Not including the ones from IOUG and Quest (because it's way too hard to figure out from their sites which ones are Oracle EPM specific), OAUG has approximately 35 sessions devoted to Oracle EPM (Hyperion and Essbase). I got this number by going to the OAUG Presentation Search and selecting "Hyperion EPM" (which doesn't make a lot of sense product naming wise, but whatever). It gave me the following list:

"How Workforce Planning and Oracle Data Integrator restored sanity" by AdvancedEPM Consulting, Inc.
"Sub Ledger Accounting in Release 12 Technical Perspective" by AST Corporation
"Creating a Hyperion Planning Solution with Full PeopleSoft Integration in Under 90 days" by Berlin Packaging
"Soaring through Economic Turbulence with Oracle's Strategic Finance and Crystal Ball" by Blue Stone International, LLC
"Product Cost Modeling Using Oracle Business Intelligence and Hyperion Planning" by Calix Networks, Inc.
"Becoming The Cube Whisperer" by Catholic Health Initiatives
"Implementation of Hyperion EPM Systems Integrated to Oracle EBS" by Coherent, Inc.
"Consolidate Oracle EBS, Hyperion EPM and other Apps onto one set of hardware by virtulization" by Cricket Communications
"Integrated Business Planning" by Emerson
"Hyperion Financial Management(HFM): Design Considerations in HFM for External & Management Reporting" by Hess Corporation
"Using the Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) API to Create Custom Solutions" by Interpublic Group of Companies
"Best Practices in Consolidations" by interRel Consulting
"Introduction to Hyperion Financial Management and FDM" by interRel Consulting
"Finding Profitability in 8 Weeks: An Introduction to Hyperion Profitability & Cost Managemen" by interRel Consulting
"Using Essbase Outside of Finance: Challenging Requirements for Performance Accountability" by interRel Consulting
"Oracle Hyperion Smart View For Office New Features & Integration Points" by Kerdock Consulting
"Revenue Planning: When is detail it appropriate and how will it impact my Planning implementation" by Kerdock Consulting
"What's New for Version 11: Hyperion Financial Management" by Kerdock Consulting
"Hyperion Planning for Higher Ed: Business Considerations at Rice University" by Kerdock Consulting
"Advanced Financial Master Data Management with Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management" by Key Performance Ideas, Inc.
"Cash Flow Reporting Within Hyperion Financial Management" by Laureate Education Inc
"Leveraging Your Hyperion Investment for Non-Financial Operations" by Linium
"Enterprise to Hyperion Financial Management: Improving efficiencies and reporting at TSYS" by MarketSphere Consulting
"Security in Hyperion Fusion 11" by MindStream Analytics
"Be "Productive Day One and Ensure User Adoption with Oracle User Productivity Kit and Oracle Tutor" by Oracle
"Oracle's Strategy and Roadmap for Oracle's Hyperion Performance Management Applications" by Oracle
"Integrating Risk and Compliance Strategies The Latest in Oracle GRC Applications" by Oracle
"Introduction to Hyperion Enterprise Planning Solutions" by Oracle Corp Inc., Boston
"Integrated Operational Planning - Bridging The Gaps Between Finance, Operations, And Sales" by P3 Solutions
"Key Success Criteria for Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle HFM Integration" by Ranzal
"Mission Critical! Implementing Highly Available Global Oracle-Hyperion EPM Installations." by The Hackett Group
"Strategies for Helping Government Agencies Optimize Oracle BI Tools and Processes" by The IRUS Group, Inc.
"Optimally Leverage your Oracle Hyperion Investment" by TUSC
"Essbase Tuning & Optimization at USADrug" by USADrug
"Financial Reconciliation to Reporting (RTR) Town Hall Meeting" by VeriSign Inc

Now the reason I'm saying that there are "about 35 sessions" is that some of the ones listed don't really seem like EPM presentations (like #2, #25, and #35 above). Keep checking http://oaug.collaborate10.com/agenda/search because I'm sure they'll reclass everything correctly at some point.

There is a major scarcity of Essbase presentations. There are two that mention Essbase in the title and judging by the abstract, #6 is also an Essbase presentation. That means OAUG will have just 3 Essbase presentations. Of course, you can't really expect all the products to be covered well with only 35 presentation slots.

I also find it really interesting that Oracle was only given 3 presentations and that's 3 if you include #25 above which really isn't related to EPM. That puts interRel in the peculiar spot of having more Oracle EPM presentations than Oracle does. If anyone from Oracle would like to co-present one of the interRel ones with us, send me an e-mail and I'll be happy to split the presenting workload with you.

Should I Bother Going?

It's quite clear that Collaborate is no longer trying to be a national conference for Hyperion. Even once you add in the content from IOUG and Quest, it's clear that Collaborate seems to be aiming to provide just enough Hyperion content so that people going to Collaborate for other products can feel happy if they also own Hyperion. If you are primarily interested in learning about Hyperion, skip Collaborate in 2010 and go to either one of the regional OAUG EPM Connection conferences or the national ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference. It's not worth it to spend between $1,385 and $2,125 on Collaborate for this little content.

Is there any reason to go to Collaborate 2010 if you only care about Hyperion and Oracle EPM? Well, it is in Vegas, and for some of us, that's the only reason we need.

A Word to Hyperion Vendors

And some free advice to Hyperion-centric consulting firms: if your company primarily does Oracle EPM, I'd save the money you were going to spend on a Collaborate booth and exhibit at Kaleidoscope and EPM Connection. There just won't be enough Hyperion attendees to make the ROI worth it to have a major presence at Collaborate. Ignore this advice if you want, but don't complain when the majority of the Hyperion attendees at Collaborate are other Hyperion partners who made the same mistake.

EPM Connection New Jersey - Update

2009-12-19T00:43:00.000-06:00

This is an update to my posting from last month on the first of the EPM Connection regional conferences (also known by the easy to remember name "OAUG Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management" regional conferences). It looks like this conference will definitely be

February 23-24, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency

The dates are definite now (there was some slight confusion before). It's definitely Feb. 23-24 in Jersey City, NJ. The host hotel is the Hyatt Regency in Jersey City. Right now, rooms are blocked at the conference rate for $139/night until the room block is filled. To find more about the conference lodging, visit http://oaug.org/conferencesandeducation/conferences/2010/cpepm/travel.php.

Educational Content

Some of the sessions are already approved and posted on the EPM Connection website. (No, I'm not one of the pre-approved speakers, Mom.) Here is the presentation list as of December 19, 2009:

"Upgrading HFM to Fusion 11.x — Introduction to New Functionality and Upgrade Considerations" by Rob Cybulski from Finit
Converting from Hyperion Enterprise to HFM: Design Considerations and Best Practices" by Rob Cybulski from Finit
"Global insurer, Marsh and McLennan, moves Long-Range Strategic Plan to Hyperion Strategic Finance from spreadsheet models" by Tom Gibbons from Marsh & McLennan with Hanyul Lee from Bluestone
"I Know How to Spell HSF … Now What? The Hyperion Product You Never Realized You Always Needed and Probably Already Own" by Jay Laabs from Bluestone
"Oracle EPM 11 system administration — under the covers!" by Eric Helmer from Hackett
"Achieving a Common Goal: Creating an Oracle EPM Center of Excellence" by Laura Gregor from Pearson
Validating Your Financial Information Using Financial Data Quality Management (FDM)" by Laura Gregor from Pearson

It's interesting to note that of the 7 presentations selected so far, 2 are on HFM, 2 are on HSF, 1 is on FDM, 1 is high-level on EPM, and 1 is very techie-level on EPM. What we don't see are any presentations on Hyperion Planning or Essbase, the two best selling Oracle EPM products. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't preselect any in these categories.

There will eventually be 35+ presentations (not sure if this includes the vendor presentations or not) so I'm guessing this is just a temporary scheduling quirk. The deadline for abstract submission was December 15, and when the rest of the presentations are selected, we'll have a better idea of the product coverage of the conference.

With the exception of Eric's (which really doesn't seem to fit with the above sessions), all of the above also seem to be very introductory presentations. Again, I'm not sure if this is a temporary quirk or if it's the aim of the conference to have more beginner-level content.

Registration

We only have 2 months to the conference, and since the schedule's not posted yet, time is rapidly running out for people to determine if they want to go and then register to do so. To help make it easier to get approval in this short time frame, the nice people at OAUG have made the cost of the conference an affordable $495 (if you register by February 16). After that date, the rate goes up to $595 for what is basically an on-site registration rate.

You'll notice that the rate of $495 doesn't go up until a week before the conference. In my opinion, this is bad for the conference organizers, because they really won't have any idea of the expected conference attendance until a week or two before the conference. People will procrastinate until February, because they really don't have any incentive to sign up early.

Because people will be signing up at nearly the last moment, I expect attendance numbers to be minimal until February. Correspondingly, don't be surprised if the conference organizers get spooked when they see those very low pre-enrollment numbers and start doing things like offering discounts. Note that I have no actual knowledge that this will happen (I'm no longer involved with the OAUG Hyperion SIG), it makes logical sense.

If you want to be a kind soul and sign up now to give them a better idea of their conference size, stop procrastinating and visit this link:

http://oaug.org/conferencesandeducation/conferences/2010/cpepm/registration.php

More Information

If you want to stay abreast about the conference, bookmark the following link:

http://oaug.org/conferencesandeducation/conferences/2010/cpepm/

They seem to be updating it very regularly. It's actually changed since the beginning of this week, so make sure you check it frequently. Assuming I get a presentation selected, I will be at "EPM Connection NJ," so if you're going, I'll see you there.

ODTUG Board - Elections

2009-11-20T00:03:00.000-06:00

The elections are over for the ODTUG (Oracle Development Tools User Group) board of directors. Here are the new board members that will be serving in 2010-2011:

Jeff Jacobs
John King
Monty Latiolais
Bambi Price
Mark Rittman

They join the carry-over board members who were serving in 2009-2010:

John Jeunette
Barbara Morris
Marc de Oliveira
Mike Riley

What the keen eyed among you will immediately notice is that Tim Tow was not re-elected. Apparently, it was a very close election and Tim fell just a couple of votes shy. Oracle EPM fans should not be totally disheartened, though, because Mark Rittman was newly elected. Mark is well known in the EPM/BI community. He will do a fine job representing the EPM/BI/Hyperion needs on the board. I've known Mark for a couple of years and I can vouch that he's a decent human being. (I refuse to be friends with anyone who kicks puppies or kittens. Well, okay, I'll be friends with them on Facebook but not IRL. Point is, Mark doesn't kick any small mammals.)

Tim Tow will serve out the rest of his term through December of this year. I know I speak for not only myself but the entire Hyperion community when I say, thank you, Tim, for all the hard work you've put into ODTUG. Hyperion developers, administrators, and users finally have a place to call home again, and it was your tireless service that helped get us there. Sincerely, we appreciate it.

If you want to say thank you to Tim as well, nothing says you appreciate his service like buying a copy of Dodeca from AppliedOLAP.

Regional EPM Connection Conferences - Update

2009-11-15T23:15:00.001-06:00

OAUG Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management

Back on October 30, I wrote about what little information I had on the upcoming regional OAUG conferences on Hyperion and EPM. The name that OAUG is giving to these conferences is way too long and way too hard to remember, so I'm going to start calling them "EPM Connection" conferences. If OAUG doesn't like it, they should come up with a shorter, catchier, more marketable name (like Dimensions, Solutions, Collaborate, Kaleidoscope, or OpenWorld).

I have some new information to impart compliments of the OAUG eNews from November (scroll way to the bottom):

http://www.oaug.org/communications/publications/enews/2009/2009-11.htm

Date Change: February 22-23

Contrary to earlier information that put the dates slightly later, the conference is now going to be held on Monday and Tuesday (Feb. 22-23) in Jersey City, NJ.

Tracks Revealed

There are going to be 5 tracks at the first EPM Connection conference:

Budget, Forecasting & Planning
Financial Consolidations & Reporting
Business Intelligence & Analytics
The Office of the CFO
EPM Product Roadmap

The non-product orientation of the tracks seems to imply that this will be more of a business-oriented rather than technical conference. Considering that this is put on by OAUG, we sort of expected that though. To drive this point home, OAUG had this to say about their desired audience:

This event is ideal for accounting and finance professionals of all experience levels, internal audit staff with a focus on external and compliance reporting areas, and IT professionals who need to understand what the accounting and finance groups need to achieve.

I don't like how EPM is getting pigeonholed as only applicable to finance/accounting types, but you can't win 'em all.

More Information

OAUG is telling people that more information will be coming soon to this website:

http://oaug.org/conferencesandeducation/conferences/2010/connectionpoint/

At the moment, there is less at that link than I just discussed in this blog posting, but I'm sure more will be posted soon since EPM Connection is now just 3 months away. They'd better hurry with their call for papers (if they're even going to have one).

Acquisition of Hyperion Consulting Partners Continues

2009-11-12T23:19:00.000-06:00

Back in January, I wrote a blog posting about all the Hyperion consulting firms that got gobbled up in 2008. I fearlessly predicted more acquisitions in 2009... and there were none of note for over 9 months. The last month has seen two acquisitions.

October 16: Prithvi Buys Percentix

Prithvi Information Solutions bought Southern California-based Percentix on October 16. If you're outside of SoCal or Colorado, you may have never heard of Percentix. They only had 10-20 employees, but they were developing a reputation out West. Prithvi, a major India-based IT services firm with sales in excess of $250 million, bought Percentix for an undisclosed amount.

This was definitely a stealth purchase. There were no press releases that I could find and Percentix's own website doesn't even mention that they were acquired. The only place I could find it mentioned officially was on LinkedIn. Look in the top-right corner for the new "Parent Company" information:

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/percentix-inc.

Why would a $250MM company bother buying a company with 10+ employees? I honestly have no idea. Feel free to speculate in the comments.

November 10: Hackett Buys Archstone

Per Archstone, Archstone has been implementing Hyperion since at least 2004. I first ran into them at Solutions 2007 at a presentation they were giving with CVS (I think), but their website claims they have a significant number of HFM and Planning implementations dating back 5+ years. Archstone even has a press release on their website saying that they were Hyperion's "Partner of the Year" in 2007, but since the press release also says that Hyperion is based out of the Netherlands, I don't put a ton of faith in it:

http://www.archstoneconsulting.com/uploadedFiles/Newsroom/Press_Releases/Hyperion_Award_Final_rev.pdf

What's definite is that Archstone is a well-known player in the Hyperion space that's fallen on hard times as of late. At their peak in 2007, they had over 250 employees and revenue of close to $70MM. Now Archstone is around 130 consultants with revenues of about $35-40MM per Hackett's press release on the acquisition.

There are two very interesting things about this acquisition. First, Archstone didn't get very much for their company. It seems to be an all stock deal valued (depending on who you talk to) between $13.5 and $23MM. That's about 50% of one year's revenue which is what we in the USA call a "fire sale." Considering that EPM is a hot place to be right now, Hackett seems to have gotten an amazing deal.

What really puzzles me is that I can't believe Hackett is in a position to buy anyone at the moment. The same day that they announced the Archstone acquisition, they also announced that they missed their earnings and revenue expectations for Q3. Revenue was off 33% from a year earlier and net income was down over 80%. Further, Hackett forecasted a weak fourth quarter. Hackett stock (NASDAQ: HCKT) was at $3.76/share on Tuesday. At the time of this writing, Hackett stock is below $3.00/share. In other words, this doesn't seem like a good time for Hackett to be buying anybody. Get your house in order before you decide to take on someone else's housecleaning too.

What's Next

A lot of the acquisitions in 2008 were by companies looking to acquire an EPM partner to get into new customers. Neither of the acquisitions above seems to fit that mold. This begs the question: are there other Hyperion partners out there that are hurting? Considering that the EPM space is doing quite well, while there may be one or two more troubled firms out there, I just don't see a lot more fire sale type deals anytime soon.

However, I do still foresee more acquisitions in the next few months. As for who will be acquired, I'll quote my own posting from January:

...there aren't a ton of pure-EPM partners left. One could speculate that it might be interRel, PII, Kerdock, Global Analytics, US-Analytics, Analytic Vision, HCG, TopDown, or even the Hyperion arm of Palladium, but it could just as likely be some other tiny Hyperion vendor that's not on anyone's radar screen right now.

Well, Percentix definitely fell into the "tiny Hyperion vendor" category, but I would still look to one of those companies (other than interRel) I listed in January to be acquired next. Personally, I hope that either Global Analytics, US-Analytics, Analytic Vision, or Analytica (out of the UK) get bought simply because the Hyperion world could use fewer consulting companies with "analytic" in their names. Next time, try to be a little more creative, people.

Collaborate Regional Conferences - First is Feb. 23-24 in NJ

2009-10-30T01:34:00.001-05:00

OAUG Connection Point - EPM Regional Conferences

There is apparently a name for the 3 regional 2-day conferences on Hyperion/EPM/BI that OAUG is putting on in 2010. It's "Oracle Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management" regional conferences. The first one of these (per Kerdock Consulting's blog) is going to be held February 23-24, 2010 in Jersey City, NJ at the Grand Hyatt.

I don't know any details yet on when the call for speakers is going out nor when they'll have more details on vendor information. As soon as I know it, I'll do an update. It can't be far off, because the conference is less than 4 months away.

There are supposed to be 2 more of these regional conferences in 2010, but I have no details at present on where or when these will be. I get the impression that OAUG is waiting to see how well the first one goes before making a commitment to the others.

Kaleidoscope Speaker Submission Extended to November 10

2009-10-28T15:43:00.006-05:00

ODTUG Kaleidoscope is, as mentioned previously, the main national Hyperion/EPM conference for 2010. It will have content for all types of users on Essbase, Hyperion Planning, HFM, the Hyperion & OBIEE reporting tools, and more. There are 4 tracks entirely devoted to Hyperion & Essbase and as this the replacement (at least in 2010) for the old Hyperion Solutions conference, you'll definitely want to be there.

So since you're going, let's get you a free pass if we can. The easiest way to get a pass to K'Scope is to speak at the conference. Though the original deadline was October 27, they've just extended the deadline to November 10. Visit http://odtugkaleidoscope.com/ if you want to submit something by the 10th. The two tracks that could use more submissions are the Essbase and Hardcore Hyperion areas but also feel free to submit more in the Hyperion Applications and Hyperion Reporting Tools tracks as well.

While K'Scope is still looking for the advanced/guru/expert content they've offered in the past, this year they've expanded their tracks to have enough rooms to also have some more introductory and intermediate content. So if you want to present on something at a beginning level like a case study or success story of Hyperion or EPM at your company, please feel free. There will be room for all levels at K'Scope 2010. I hope to see you there even if you're not accepted as a speaker.

2010 Conferences - Speaker Deadlines Coming Up

2009-10-19T01:14:00.003-05:00

If you want to be a speaker at either Kaleidoscope or Collaborate in 2010, the deadlines for submitting session topics for consideration are almost up. I know, it seems way too early to me too, but I guess Collaborate is only 6 months away.

Like most conferences, Collab & K'Scope will give a free pass to the conference to any accepted speaker. This makes it a lot easier to convince your boss to send you since these national conferences usually run upwards of $2,000 USD per person.

OAUG/IOUG/Quest Collaborate: Deadline is October 20

Collaborate will be held April 18-22, 2010 in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay. Yes, the deadline is tomorrow. Don't feel bad if you don't have time to get a paper together. Word on the street has it that OAUG (the main driver of Hyperion and Oracle EPM content at Collaborate) has reduced the number of Hyperion presentations to only 30. So not only are the odds of getting one of the slots pretty slim, most Hyperion attendees will be avoiding Collaborate in 2010 in favor of one of OAUG's regional Hyperion conferences (which will have more content than the national one anyway).

There are two good reasons to go to Collaborate: either you like gambling in Vegas (and face it, who doesn't?) or you're going for non-Hyperion content too. If you are going, you might as well get a free pass, so submit a presentation and hopefully get a free pass. The track you'll want to submit under is "BI/Data Warehousing/EPM":

http://oaug.collaborate10.com/presenterinfo/

The call for papers for the regional conferences isn't out yet, but I'll blog it when it's announced.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope: Deadline is October 27

Kaleidoscope will be held June 27-July 1, 2010 in Washington DC at the Marriott Wardman Park. As I mentioned in an earlier post, this is the national conference you'll want to be attending in 2010 (and I'm not just saying that because I'm the Essbase/Hyperion Content Leader for Kaleidoscope '10). The call for speakers for Kaleidoscope has been going on since the end of September, but the deadline for submitting your abstract is Tuesday of next week.

There are 4 topic areas with Hyperion and Oracle EPM content in them at Kaleidoscope:

Essbase. Looking for Essbase content? Whether you’re a developer or an administrator, a novice or a guru, this track will is your home for Essbase information in all forms. Whether it’s sessions on tips and tricks, optimization, Essbase ASO, calc scripts, workarounds, Essbase success stories or Essbase esoteric, the “Essbase track” is your Essbase home.
Hyperion Applications. Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, Hyperion Strategic Finance and the rest of the Oracle EPM (formerly Hyperion) packaged applications are found in the “Hyperion Applications” track. Everything from case studies in implementing specific applications up through tips, tricks, and best practices for developing, administering, or using the Hyperion applications will be covered here.
Oracle Business Intelligence & Hyperion Reporting Tools. The Hyperion community is used to Financial Reporting, Web Analysis, Interactive Reporting, SQR Production Reporting, Smart View, and Workspace. The Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition developers have been using OBIEE Answers, Dashboards, Publisher, Delivers, Business Indicators, and the OBI Server. Oracle is bringing these products together, so we’re merging the content. Whether you’ve been doing OBIEE or Hyperion front-end development, this track will show you the future of Oracle’s combined reporting technologies.
Hardcore Hyperion. If you’re looking for case studies, then this is not the track for you. You’ve asked for even more advanced, guru, hardcore, expert, “Top Gun” Hyperion content, and your wishes have been answered. The “Hacking Hyperion” track is your home for content that you won’t find anywhere else the entire year. If you have secret optimizations, ideas for modifying underlying tables and source code, tuning tips that you haven’t heard anywhere else, or any other content that would tickle the fancy of a seasoned Essbase, Hyperion Planning, HFM, or other Hyperion app developer, then join us as we enter the undocumented (and probably unsupported) world of Hyperion.

If you want to speak at Kaleidoscope, visit:

http://www.technicalconferencesolutions.com/pls/caat/caat_abstracts_upd.main?conference_id=68

You don't need to go to Oracle World ever again and death to SAP!

2009-10-15T20:00:00.002-05:00

Usually, you schedule out your trip and haul a bunch of stuff across the country and cope with jet lag, an unfamiliar bed, continental breakfasts and long lines to everything from registration to shuttles. You spend 3-5 days traveling, scheduling and sitting in sessions. Typically you walk what seems to your unsuspecting arches and heels hundreds of miles and sleep little either due to what you picked up probably on the airplane over or from being hosted by eager sales reps hoping to influence you into agreeing to the next big sale for the next quarter. Inevitably there is a moment one morning where you wake up and realize you are not sure what city you are in but you are sure you had a few drinks too many last night. Finally, when all this is done and over you need to get back into the rat race and likely are expected to deliver a report over what happened and catch up on all the work you missed while you were gone.

Well now there is a solution; Oracle OpenWorld Live!
Actually, Oracle has really embraced social networking and messaging technology in an unprecedented way.
You can live stream a video feed and watch sessions from any decent internet connection. You can Tweet with attendees and fans about the feed and other events. You can even join a Facebook group for Oracle open World fans. Not to mention integration and links with Linkedin, YouTube, OracleMix and RSS feeds.

After the show, popular presentations can be viewed by attendees by simpy logging back into the Oracle Open World site and for those that could not attend, they can access the presentations for a small fee and receive full access to all the recorded presentations.

So why attend the conference at all? Well, the truth is that there are still many reasons to continue attending the show in person, but for those of us that can't. This is much better than waiting another year or getting second hand stories of what happened from your peers and reading Blogs. There is still no technology that replaces the human need to connect completely. This is pretty close though and definitely effective. I plan to go back and sit in on the sessions I missed and a few that I liked to make sure my notes are complete and accurate.

A sign of what is to come with more and more conferences and such. I promise, I'll still be there even when it's considered "old school" to attend in person when at Oracle Open World 2025, Larry announces Oracle's latest acquisitions. Quite possibly something like the Moon itself or Air. We will all cheer since everyone attending will be an Oracle employee anyway and drinking Kool-Aid will be encouraged since it's an Oracle product. This will be announced as the final death blow to SAP by finally executing their strategy and refusing to Post Optionssupply Air to SAP and it's users and not allowing them to flee to the moon since we own it too. Check mate SAP in 2025.

Oracle Announces Availability of EPM 11.1.1.3 - Two Months After It's Released

2009-10-12T23:56:00.001-05:00

It must have been a slow news day at OpenWorld for Oracle EPM. Though 11.1.1.3 was released on August 6 and I blogged about the new 11.1.1.3 features a month ago, Oracle decided to put out a press release on the new functionality on October 12. Well, better late than never.

If you want to see Oracle's comments on what's new in 11.1.1.3 and a brief discussion of the new HFM Financial Close module they're developing, visit here:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Oracle-Corporation-NASDAQ-ORCL-1058232.html

In related news, I heard that tomorrow Oracle will be announcing the release of a brand-new product called Essbase (pronounced S-base) that's supposed to be some sort of "multi-dimensional database." I guess it's been in beta since 1992. Multi-dimensional databases? Could these be the next big thing? Discuss in the comments.

interRel Repeats as EPM & BI Partner of the Year

2009-10-12T03:52:00.007-05:00

Wow, back-to-back wins. I am seriously stunned. Earlier this evening in Moscone South at the Oracle Partner Network Titan Awards, interRel won the award for "EPM & BI Solution" of the year.

Last year at Openworld was the first time they've given this award out and we were honored (and surprised, frankly) to win it then. We had zero expectation at interRel of being able to repeat as winners. Don't get me wrong: we do consistently good Hyperion and Oracle EPM implementations at interRel, but the odds of repeating seemed astronomically stacked against us. I didn't even know if you could or if Oracle liked to spread the wealth around to multiple partners.

This year, so we were told, the competition for this award was far more fierce than in 2008. We are ecstatic to have won it again making us the only company ever to have received the EPM Solution of the Year award. I am so amazingly happy right now that it's difficult to put into words. We're putting a press release together that should come out this morning.

UPDATE:Press Release has been rapidly assembled (good job staying up all night, Danielle):

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20091012005260&newsLang=en