June 9, 2008

John Kopcke's Letter to the Hyperion Community

On Thursday night, June 5, 2008, an e-mail titled "An Update for the North America Hyperion Users Communities" went out from John Kopcke (SVP of EPM at Oracle) to 100,000+ Hyperion users (at least, per Oracle). What's strange for something that went out to that many people, is of all the people I've talked to, only one actually received this message and he had nothing to do with Hyperion at his company. Apparently, one has to "opt in" to get Hyperion communications from Oracle, but no one has a clue where the "opt in to Hyperion e-mails" button is on Oracle.com.

Anyway, in the interest of getting this letter out to the masses better than Oracle did, I'm going to reprint it here. The letter is the copyright of Oracle, 2008, reprinted here as part of the whole "Freedom of the Press" thing. The only editing I did was formatting (and removing the name in the header of the receiver). I'm going to analyze this letter in a later blog post, because there are two fascinating announcements buried in this e-mail. See if you can sift through all the PR hype...

Dear [name removed],

What an exciting year for Hyperion! The company and product integration has gone very well. Oracle kept a strategic focus on EPM (and Hyperion), by launching the EPM Global Business Unit and embracing the Hyperion products and concepts for its EPM vision. The next critical step in the integration is the transition of the Hyperion Users Groups (HUG) into Oracle's independent users group model. The following describes which of the Oracle users groups would be best for you to join, based on your interests and installed products.

We saw many of you in Denver at Collaborate08 taking advantage of the Hyperion track and meeting with other users and Hyperion experts, we see that Hyperion developers are still registering for this month's ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 in New Orleans with its special Hyperion track, and we look forward to seeing all of you in September during Oracle OpenWorld 2008 in San Francisco. Perhaps most exciting, however, is the recent creation of the OAUG Hyperion Special Interest Group and the alignment of all North America Hyperion Users Groups with OAUG.

Get Involved
Users groups represent our most active and committed customers. They provide dynamic forums for like-minded customers to share information, experiences and expertise amongst themselves and with Oracle. We encourage you to get involved and stay involved by participating in our users groups across North America.

The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) is one of the largest independent Oracle users groups representing its members to Oracle to influence product direction, share feedback and best practices with Oracle development and strategy managers. The OAUG fosters communication and collaboration between all types of users, including functional and technical users, as well as managers. Now, OAUG extends its network, knowledge, and experience into the world of EPM with the creation of the OAUG Hyperion Special Interest Group (SIG).

The purpose of the OAUG Hyperion SIG is to allow its members to leverage resources to make the most out of their EPM investments. We encourage you to get involved, share your experiences, volunteer for a committee, or simply provide feedback and suggestions. Take advantage of the opportunity to learn, share best practices with your peers, and connect with experts online and at local users group meetings.

The Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) is an independent, not-for-profit global organization providing education, support, advocacy, and networking opportunities for developers. ODTUG's 18,000+ members design applications, model data, write code, manage application systems, maintain legacy code, and more. Next month's ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 conference will be a great opportunity for Essbase developers to become familiar with the ODTUG community. This conference will replace the technical content of Hyperion Top Gun and the breadth of presentations of the Hyperion Solutions conference. Kaleidoscope 2008 is offering an agenda of hard-core Essbase information brought to you by some of the most senior Essbase gurus from Oracle, partners, and customers alike. To coincide with this announcement, ODTUG will reinstate the early bird registration fee for the conference to allow Essbase developers just learning about Kaleidoscope to register at the discounted rate available through June 14th at ODTUG Kaleidoscope website.

For our database professionals there is also the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). The IOUG is dedicated to providing education and access to its membership of more than 20,000 database administrators, developers, architects, technical managers, and other Oracle professionals throughout North America and worldwide.

Stay Involved
If you are already an active HUG member we encourage you to stay involved as the HUGs in North America align with the OAUG. As noted above, the OAUG Hyperion SIG is already in place and looks forward to working with you as you continue your efforts in the Hyperion users community. The benefits of membership are clear, so sign up for a users group today. Please direct your questions to Tina Weiss in Global Customer Programs or Mark Conway on my BI and Performance Management team.

Regards,
John Kopcke
Senior Vice President
Enterprise Performance Management Global Business Unit
Oracle Corporation

2 comments:

Harold Green said...

The Oracle opt-in is at http://www.oracle.com/admin/account/

Edward Roske said...

I found the opt-in page months ago, but nowhere on the entire page does it mention opting-in to Hyperion notifications. There is a checkbox for Fusion which one would think includes Hyperion, but here's how it defines it:
Oracle Fusion Middleware - News and offers for all topics relating to OFM: SOA, BPA, EDA, Identity Management, and more. Quarterly.

If I can't figure out that includes Hyperion, how is a client supposed to figure it out? And for what it's worth, I opted into the Fusion mailings (and most of the others) and I didn't get the Kopcke letter directly.