Whatever Happened to Edward Roske?

Where have I been for 8 months?

Answering that could take a while.  Suffice to say, it's been a busy year.  The largest amount of time beyond my normal job was spent being Conference Chair for the last two years for ODTUG's Kscope conference.  If anyone ever offers to let you chair a conference and then tells you "it's mostly a symbolic position that doesn't require much work," they're lying.  Run away quickly.  Chairing these things is a lot of work, and I am happy to say that my replacement as Conference Chair, Mike Riley, will doubtless put my conference chairing to shame as he carries on the good I did and takes it up a notch from good to great.

While running Kscope was an amazing lot of work, it was definitely worth it.  I encourage every one of you to make it to Kscope13 in New Orleans, LA from June 23-27 in 2013.  Kscope13 will continue to be the home for Hyperion, Essbase, Oracle EPM & BI (in addition to ApEx, Oracle RDBMS, Fusion, and lots more) and it's adding content in those areas including entirely new tracks around EPM.  Side note: abstract submission is open through October 15, so if you want to get a free pass to Kscope13, now's your chance: http://bit.ly/Content13.

Kscope kept me busy from early in 2010 until the summer of 2012.  I then took a month off to recuperate (in other words, focus on my actual duties at interRel which apparently include CEO: who knew?) and now I'm back to blogging.  I'm sure you're shedding a single tear right now and I'm choosing to believe it's because you're so choked up with emotion.

The next few weeks are going to be filled with a great deal of travel as I'm presenting at several conferences.  I'm hoping to be able to blog from a few of these conferences.  If you're at any of them, be sure to find me either up on stage somewhere speaking or at our booth.  If you want to know more about any of these conferences, you can always send an e-mail over to the intelligent, beautiful, and obscenely overworked Danielle White at info@interrel.com.

September 11
Hyperion Solutions Road Trip to Denver

Oracle and interRel put on a series of free, multi-track training days around North America each year.  We have one on September 11 at the Grand Hyatt in Denver and like most of the Roadshows we do, it's open to both current and prospective customers of Oracle EPM & BI.  I'm giving three sessions at this conference including the keynote on the future of Oracle EPM (11.1.2.2 and beyond).  If you're anywhere near Denver (or could fly there easily), there's a great half-day agenda followed by free tickets to a Colorado Rockies game afterwards (they're playing the San Francisco Giants).  My good buddy, Glenn Schwartzberg, will also be presenting along with a few Oracle speakers talking in detail about 11.1.2.2.

September 30 to October 4

Oracle OpenWorld
San Francisco, California

If you don't want to miss your annual chance to hear Oracle talk about Oracle, you'll want to come to a city vaguely resembling San Francisco during the first week of quarter close for most companies.  That's right: in what is, I'm sure, not a big "sod off" to finance and accounting users everywhere, Oracle has decided to hold their annual Oracle awesomeness conference during the first week of October.

To be completely honest, I actually like being able to hear once per year directly from Oracle their stance on recent releases and future plans. While it's huge, overcrowded, 90%+ marketing, and expensive, there are great networking and educational opportunities to be found if you know where to look.  Word of advice, though: don't ever try to stand in a cab line; you'll be there for 2 hours and it's probably quicker to just walk wherever you're headed.

I've got 3 or 4 sessions at this year's conference including a non-Hyperion one on the Fusion User Experience.  Most of my sessions will be part of the ODTUG's EPM Symposium at Moscone West in room 2008 on Sunday afternoon.  interRel also has a kiosk in the Hyperion Pavilion on the 5th floor of the Intercontinental Hotel.  Make sure you stop by and see us at one of those locations.

Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon will be performing at the Wednesday night party on Treasure Island, so bare minimum, you can get in touch with your alternative side.  There's also free booze, so ya, you got that going for you.

October 16

Hyperion Solutions Road Trip to Seattle

This conference is similar to the one in Denver except for three important differences:

1. It's in Bellevue, Washington on a different date.
2. The keynote speaker is the VP of Oracle EPM Development, Matt Bradley.  He's a great speaker and this is an excellent opportunity to hear from development themselves about all the great things they have planned for the next year.
3. The after event is at Lucky Strike instead of at a baseball park, because let's face it: there's no way in Hell that the Seattle Mariners will still be playing baseball in mid-October.

This event, like the other road trips, is free.  You just have to get yourself to Seattle (and not be a competitor, obviously).

October 23

Hyperion Solutions Road Trip to Phoenix

This time, we're heading down South to Phoenix, Arizona.  The agenda will be very similar to the Denver event above and there will be great fun in the evening after, so join us for education and networking all for free.  Just to prove that geography is not our strong suit, in this exact same week, we'll be traveling to:

October 25

Hyperion Solutions Road Trip to Calgary

I'm told that Canadians are very scary and intimidating, but I'm hoping they'll be nice as we take our first road trip North of the border.  Expect a similar agenda to the others but with a dash of vegetarian back bacon.  I'm looking forward to the Calgary Flames game after the day's education is complete because apparently hockey is trying to become a major sport, and this is my one chance to learn something about it (red line? blue line? icing?).  Jenny, our business coordinator at interRel, is from Canada and she assures me that if hockey doesn't take off, at least curling will.

October 30

Hyperion Solutions Road Trip to Los Angeles

The agenda for this event is quite different.  Among other things, it's a full-day instead of a half-day and it has 3 full tracks instead of 2.  It's basically a one-day, free Hyperion conference.  This year, it'll be at the Hilton inside Universal Studios and our after event will be at Jillian's on the Universal City Walk.  Here's the complete agenda:

Hyperion Solutions Road Trip to Southern California
8:30 AM	Check In & Registration
9:00 AM	Keynote: Analytics-Led Business Innovation, Matt Bradley, Oracle
	Experience the Future of Oracle EPM 11.1.2.2 Live Demos Included!	The World of Hyperion Applications	The Foundations of Business Intelligence: Oracle Essbase & OBIEE
10:00 AM	Taking Control of Your Hierarchies with DRM 11.1.2.2	Introduction to Integrated Business Planning	BI Foundation Suite: Integrating Oracle Essbase & The New OBIEE 11.1.1.6
11:00 AM	The Next Evolution in Forecasting: Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.2	Reducing Your Close Cycle: Financial Close & Account Reconciliation Management	Oracle Essbase Worst Practices: Lessons from a Moron
11:50 PM	Lunch
12:20 PM	Ask a Guru Panel Session
1:30 PM	Managing Your Project Budgets: Introduction to the New Hyperion Planning Project Module	Best Practices for Your Strategic Oracle EPM Road Map: Building Your 3 Year Plan	Extending the Value of Oracle eBusiness Suite with Oracle EPM
2:30 PM	Hyperion Financial Management 11.1.2.2: Unlimited Dimensionality & Financial Management Analytics	Optimizing Your Oracle Hyperion Planning & Oracle Essbase Outlines	Exalytics: In-Memory Business Intelligence for Oracle Essbase & OBIEE
3:20 PM	Break
3:50 PM	Breaking Away from the Excel Add-In: Welcome to Smart View 11.1.2.2	Integrating Hyperion Financial Management & Hyperion Planning	What’s New in OBIEE 11.1.1.6: Oracle on Your iPhone & Other Cool Things
4:40 PM	Drawings / Networking
5:30 PM	Dinner/Drinks/Entertainment at Jillian’s at Universal Studios City Walk

November 5-6

OAUG Connection Point - EPM&BI
Orlando, Florida

Each year, OAUG puts on a 2-day Oracle EPM&BI focused conference.  It has nowhere near as many sessions on Hyperion as Kscope, but it's by far the second-best conference out there.  It has around 50 sessions and this year, interRel is giving 6 of them.  I'm giving a session on Exalytics and other interRel speakers will include Glenn Schwartzberg on Smart View 11.1.2.2, Tracy McMullen on multiple topics, and  Dr. Troy Seguin talking on Predictive Analytics.  We will also have a booth there with our newest 11.1.2.2 books.

Unlike the Road Trips mentioned above, this conference isn't free.  That said, it's a lot cheaper than OpenWorld with far better targeted content.  If you're in the Southeastern United States, I strongly encourage you to make it to Connection Point at the Peabody Hotel.

November 15-16

ODTUG Seriously Practical - EPM&BI
Auckland, New Zealand

ODTUG is putting on two 2-day conferences in Australia and New Zealand in November.  This is the first of those conferences.  There's a charge for them, but it's minimal for the content you get over 2 days. Cameron Lackpour (ACE Director and all-around decent human being) and I are the featured speakers.

There are actually two tracks: one is focused on Hyperion and Oracle EPM.  The other track is focused on Oracle BI.  I'm giving sessions in both rooms as well as some excellent local speakers and Oracle luminaries.  Make sure you visit the ODTUG website closer to the date for more details.

November 19-20

ODTUG Seriously Practical - EPM&BI
Melbourne, Australia

This is basically the same 2-day, 2-room itinerary as the event in Auckland.  I have presented at the InSync conference in Melbourne before and I love the city.  If you can't make it to Auckland, I'm hoping you can fly down to Melbourne.  They have koalas.

After this, I hope to return back to the good ole US-of-A with a month to spare before TEOTWAWKI.  I have some final things I need to take care of before December 21.  Among other things, I'm hoping to clean out my Inbox, because my mother always told me that you don't want to face an apocalypse unless you have a clean Inbox.

Oh, is that all?

Seriously?!?  That's the busiest conference schedule I've ever had with the exception of the 3-week multi-continent trip last year with some of the Oracle ACE Directors from the Oracle Technology Network.  I'm hoping that with all those travel dates over the next 2 months, I'll run into some of you in-person.  If you're anywhere near, please try to stop by.  I'm also hoping that all this travel will give me time to blog on airplanes.

It's good to be back.

OpenWorld - Tuesday, Sep. 23

11:00PM - Evening Wrap Up

After the Excellence awards, I went back to the Oracle Hyperion reception that was joint hosted with the OAUG Hyperion SIG.  When I got there, the room was packed so tightly no one could breathe.  Remember how I said that the room held 300 people?  They apparently let in four hundred and fifty.

I had a nice talk with Rich Clayton towards the end of the night.  He congratulated us on the EPM Solution of the Year award win.  He expressed to me his appreciation of how of the smaller partners deliver high quality solutions that are quite often better than the huge multi-national conglomerate consulting firms.  Rich is a great guy, and I was sincerely grateful for his words of encouragement.  I complimented on his ability to move the mouse during the "demo" at Kurian's keynote using only the power of his mind. Although the reception was supposed to end at 8PM, I didn't get out of there until 9:30.

After the reception, I stopped at a Thai restauraent with a friend of mine from the Oracle community.  It was probably the best food I've had since arriving in San Francisco.  I ate a huge bowl of Tom Kha (vegetarian) and took some Green Curry (with tofu) back to the hotel.

I've got a meeting at 7:45AM, so now it's off to sleep.  And by sleep, I mean watch on iTunes the season premiere of Heroes...

7:30PM - Oracle Excellence Awards

The Oracle Excellence Awards were held in the Oak Room of the Westin St. Francis.  It was a much smaller venue than the Titan Awards from Saturday.  Whereas the Titan Awards were in a grand ballroom with thousands of people, these awards are held in a smallish room holding fewer than 200 people.  Hey, it's only the second year of these awards, and they'll be getting bigger each year, I'm sure.

Pearson Education, one of interRel's best clients and the largest textbook manufacturer in the world, won an Oracle Excellence Award for the implementation we did with them of Hyperion.  Pearson asked me to come up and be in the picture which was very nice.  They also showed the interRel logo on the screen at the front of the room as a "Supporting System Integrator" which I didn't expect at all.

We ate some free appetizers (actually, I didn't because they were all beast-based) and after a Coke, I'm heading back to the Hyperion reception at the Hyatt.

6:25PM - Oracle Hyperion Reception

I just left a reception for Hyperion customers and partners at the Grand Hyatt Union Square.  It was packed.  Kristin Newman from Linium (and a really good friend of mine) arranged the logistics for the event, and she did a great job.  The room the event was held in was the Bay View Room on the 36th floor of the Hyatt.  It had a panoramic view of the bay to the West and the city to the South.  It was gorgeous.  The room holds about 300 (it's half the top story of the Hyatt)  and right now, it's about 1/3 full.

Kristin arranged for a 3 feet tall cake.  It has multple levels and around the edges of the cake are edible scale models of Oracle HQ, Oracle's sailing yacht, and the Oracle racing plane.  It's one of the most impressive custom cakes I've ever seen.  Kopcke and Gersten are showing up later to cut the cake and it almost seems like a travesty.  Kristin also arranged for lots of free food and several open bars, just so we know we're at Oracle OpenWorld (home of free food and open bar).

I'm running out now to go to the Oracle Excellence Awards at the Westin St. Francis.  Luckily, it's about a block from here.

5:46PM - Oracle OLAP and Essbase

I got to the presentation late.  Luckily, there was plenty of seating.  The room probably held ~500 and was maybe 1/4 full.  Ray Roccaforte was delivering the presentation.  He started off by saying that both Oracle OLAP and Essbase are Oracle's strategic directions for OLAP.  "But wait!," you scream in confusion. "How will I know which one to use?"  Well, here was Ray's exact quote as best as I could capture it:

The difference is in the target audience....If you're consolidating data, the OLAP option is probably your best bet.  If you're more interested in being more software compliant and merging with different systems, Essbase is your best bet.

Ray elaborated on Oracle OLAP by saying that it's more of an IT product than a business product and is designed for people who are more "rationally focused."  Interesting move referring to business users as not rational.  He added that "our target audience with Oracle OLAP is SQL application developers.  It's all about improving BI applications in the Oracle database."  He concluded his portion by saying that Oracle OLAP is best on an Oracle data warehouse.  By "best," I think he means that you should only use Oracle OLAP on a Oracle data warehouse.

John Kopcke came out next to talk about when to use Essbase.  He started by saying that the target audience of Essbase is end users and primary sponsors of Essbase implementations are lines of business (not IT).  Kopcke continued with the theme of "Oracle OLAP is for IT and Essbase is for business."  He had a cute quote:

The Essbase users are the business users, the ones with the ties on. If you're in a shirt with the top button open, you're probably more interested in Oracle OLAP.

I get a kick out John's presentations, as you can tell.  He also said that Essbase should definitely be used when data is coming from multiple sources.

So what did we learn?  If you have an Oracle data warehouse and want to rack and stack you some data warehouse, use Oracle OLAP.  In all other cases, use Essbase.  I can actually see situations where we would want to use both together.  For instance, take your Oracle data warehouse, roll it up with Oracle OLAP, and create an Essbase 11 xOLAP cube (basically, a virtual cube that sits on top of a relational product) to make it easy for your users who like an Essbase like engine.  The data would then sit in Oracle OLAP while users accessed a transparent Essbase cube.

I know have to race to the Hyperion reception at the Grand Hyatt.  My feet are killing me.  Santa, please give me a Segway for Christmas.  I've been a good (enough) boy.

4:50PM - Thomas Kurian Keynote (now with more Kurian)

When Intel finished at 3:28, one third of the room left.  They were here just for the commercial?  That strikes me as very weird.  Maybe they thought it was all over?  Ah, many of them are now coming back.  Silly people.

Thomas Kurian, SVP of Oracle Fusion Middleware, came out at 3:30 on the dot.  The man is prompt, I'll give him that.  He's talking about Oracle Data Integrator (and other data translation products) at the moment, but there's nothing earth shattering being said.

Hey, he just said "Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Manager" (formerly known as Hyperion MDM)!  He's just showing how it's part of the Oracle Data Integration Suite.  Rich Clayton (a former Hyperion guy and now a director in the Oracle EPM Product Marketing group) was just brought out on stage to demo aspects of the Oracle Data Integration Suite.  Wait, Thomas Kurian said demo, but it's really a recording of a demo done at some point in the past.  Basically, we're listening to Rich Clayton narrate a video.  I guess that means that we won't be treated to any sudden software crashes during the "demo."  Note to Rich: it's not as obvious that it's recorded if you leave a hand near the computer when the mouse is moving.  Rich, a friend of mine, did get a nice round of applause as he left the stage just now.

Thomas is now talking about all the new Essbase 11x features.  He just misstated that "Essbase can now stay up and running while users are submitting data through Planning."  Um, it always did that.  I think he meant that Essbase 11x ASO cubes can stay up during retrieves and submits even submissions from users.  He also said that "Essbase now can combine multiple cubes into one on the fly."  Again, it has done that for years.  I think he meant that Essbase ASO cubes can now be targets of transparent partitions and he was trying to explain that to non-Essbase users.  He did mention that Essbase 11x has new time intelligence and allows text in an Essbase cube.  I would have led with "Essbase can now handle text in the cube" but that's just me.  He did talk briefly about the existence of the new Essbase Studio, but didn't explain why it kicks EIS ass.

He's now talking about Smart View (now called Oracle Smart View for Office) and Oracle Smart Space. He's on a Hyperion roll, but there's no new information beyond standard marketing.  It's just nice to see Oracle talking about the former Hyperion products during a keynote.

Rich Clayton just came back out to do some more video narration.  He's starting off with a dashboard in Oracle EPM Workspace (formerly Hyperion Workspace).  Rich is talking about how cool page dropdowns are when they are linked to the entire dashboard.  Yes, dropdown page filters are handy, but not exactly cutting edge.  The recorded demo from Rich is a bit too "look at how we're doing things like conditional formatting or multiple sources on a grid" for me.  I tend to shy away from a feature-centric demo and go more for of the "and how does this help me?" demo.  Considering most of the people in the audience are IT (whereas I'm a finance guy at heart), a technology demo may very well be appropriate.  People around me seem to be interested.

I do like how Rich Clayton and Thomas Kurian keep saying "Essbase" over and over.  It's music to my ears.  Rich just showed OBIEE Publisher sitting on top of Essbase.  I didn't realize that the new version of Publisher could do that.  Maybe I should spend next week learning all the new OBIEE 10.1.3.4 features?  Rich just left to another round of applause (his third, I believe) while Thomas gave some statistics about how fast Essbase is.

Thomas is now talking about Oracle EPM Architect (note that there's no "Hyperion" anywhere in the name), Oracle Hyperion Planning, Oracle Hyperion Profitabiltiy and Cost Management, Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting, 

He just said that one of the new features of Hyperion Planning are the Workforce planning and CapEx Planning modules.  No, these have been around since System 9.3 (and earlier, in the case of Workforce).  I wonder who vetted this speech?  Weird.

Rich Clayton came out again.  This time he's talking about integrating Oracle eBusiness Suite and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management.  He started off in Hyperion Financial Reporting and talked about the new annotations available in Financial Reporting 11x.  He then jumped over to HFM, right-clicked on a number, and jumped out to Hyperion FDQM.  He then clicked on a transaction in FDQM and jumped out to Oracle eBusiness Suite.  That's remarkably powerful integration.  I'd like to see this same capability for other GLs (notably, SAP).

Rich is now demonstrating PowerPoint.  No, not PowerPoint slides; he's showing how to access Hyperion Planning data from inside PowerPoint (via Smart View).  He just jumped from PowerPoint over to Excel to show Smart View in Excel.  He's now showing a brief demo of Hyperion Profitability.

Did I mention I'm impressed that all of Kurian's demos so far have been about Hyperion products (and in some cases, how they integrate with OBIEE)?  It gives me a warm feeling inside.  Rich just left to a third round of applause.

I would like to advise the Oracle keynote speakers (all the speakers, actually) to add some humor to their presentations.  Don't be so dry: people are more receptive to information when they're having fun, smiling, and not falling asleep.  I haven't the audience laugh in at least an hour, and that's not good.  By the end of the keynote, half the room had left.  Not a good sign, so make it more interesting, for your sake and ours.  Maybe all of the top people from Oracle could get together and write a wacky musical about the software industry?

While we're being critical of speakers, may I also advise that the keynote speakers not read everything off teleprompters?  First of all, it's weird to see all of the keynoters looking down at their feet (where the teleprompter screens are) half the time.  Second of all, if you're reading, you're not being spontaneous.  You can't react to your audience.  If your audience is bored with what you're saying, you can't try a different approach, because you're a slave to the prompting gods.  If you're worried about forgetting where you are, may I suggest you have the teleprompter just show you the bullets you want to be covering?  Or you could memorize your talking points, perhaps.  I'm just saying.

In case you're wondering why I've stopped blogging about what's actually going on in the room around me, it's because Thomas Kurian has switched from BI/EPM to the other fusion technologies.  While those are probably great fun at parties (and they have great personalities), I'm not terribly concerned with those other products.

There's a demo going on right now of Oracle Beehive (catchy, eh?) which Oracle describes thus: "Oracle Beehive provides a centralized, secure and auditable collaboration platform that helps organizations reduce the cost and complexity of regulatory compliance and legal discovery."  If you have any idea what means, please feel free to send an e-mail to wtf@oracle.com.  It seems to be about increasing collaboration (via e-mail, IM, wikis, portals, mobile phones, or whatever) across a company.  Think "Web 2.0 but focused within a company."  Now why couldn't the Oracle marketing department just say that?

Speaking of marketing, Oracle just issued a press release about customers who have "selected or evaluated" Hyperion 11x.  They actually included a quote from me (or someone making up a quote and attributing it to me) on the release.  Here's the quote.  Note that it sounds nothing like me:

“The latest release of Oracle’s EPM System includes hundreds of feature enhancements that will help improve user experience and simplify application administration for our customers,” said Edward Roske, CEO of interRel Consulting. “The new Hyperion Calculation Manager redefines enterprise integration and user accessibility while the enhancements to Oracle Essbase solidifies its position as the world’s leading OLAP server."

The room is now 90% empty.  I guess that's because it's now 4:45.  I wonder why it's running so much over?  I could walk out to go to Kopcke's presentation on "Oracle's Strategic OLAP Technologies - Essbase and Oracle OLAP Option" but it doesn't seem right to walk out on a keynote.

Thomas Kurian just called an abrupt end to the meeting.  I'm going to run to Kopcke's presentation at the Marriott and see if I can still get in.  Here I go running...

3:15PM - Thomas Kurian Keynote (brought to you by Intel)

I got to the Thomas Kurian Keynote a little after 2.  I stopped off to get one of Oracle's vegetarian boxed lunches.  While the food at OOW is nothing to blog home about, they are vegetarian friendly... if you can find where they hide the vegetarian food.  The main lunch places only have meat-based food, because they put all the "special meals" in one specific lunch spot: the Sinking Ship pavilion in the Yerba Buena Gardens (in what Oracle calls the "Green Marketplace").  When I finally found it, I was extremely impressed at the variety of special meals: vegan, lacto-vegetarian (I never see that), kosher, halla, Indian, gluten-free, lactose intolerant, and more.  Now that said, my lacto-vegetarian meal was basically tofu on salad in a boxed lunch and definitely not filling.

While people were getting seated, I was treated to a cello quartet by a nice young lady.  Yes, it was a single person.  She played along in front of the room and recorded it.  She would then play it back with a foot pedal and play along live with the recording all the while recording this.  She'd then play this recording back and play along with (and so ad infinitum).

This keynote is much better attended than the other things I've been to in this hall so far.  The room seems to be mostly full.  (I'm speculating that they're not holding any competing events right now.)

Safra Catz from Oracle just came out to introduce Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel (not to be confused with interRel).  Paul is going to be talking about "how Intel is driving the pace of Moore's Law to deliver innovative solutions that will enable enterprises to use time to their advantage."  He has a nice blue background and he came out after an interesting video homage to the concept of time.  It showed how clocks have evolved over the last thousands of years and included various slow-mo and fast-mo images with quotes about time from famous thinkers flashing across the screen.

He just mentioned that Intel is working on the flux capacitator from Back to the Future (though he added that they haven't perfected it yet).  We're going to presume he was joking (but if not, it's very cool that Intel is going to be the market edge leader in time machines).  He's been talking about linear and exponential improvements in the speed of business.  There hasn't been any EPM content, but there have been a lot of pretty pictures flowing across the screen.

A woman from a medical imaging firm just came out and showed us 3-D images of blood flow in brains.  I don't know what it has to do with Oracle, but brains are cool.

I think Thomas Kurian will be coming on at about 3:30.  Until then, I think I'll be taking a power nap.

1:22PM - Hyperion Performance Scorecard

I sat in the Scorecard session for about 20 minutes.  Unlike the "BI Roadmap" presentation (that was standing room only), there were only 65 people in this room.  I was hoping to hear about the future of Performance Scorecard.  Unfortunately, this presentation was more of an introduction to the topic.  This is, admittedly, exactly what the abstract said it was going to be, so my hopes were minimal.

I just left the Scorecard session and now I'm off to find something to eat.

1:02PM - Book Signing

I just spent 30 minutes at the Oracle bookstore in Moscone West signing copies of "Look Smarter Than You Are with Essbase."  A lot of people came up, glanced through the book, asked "are you the author?", and when I said yes, they asked, "so what is this Essbase thing Oracle bought anyway?"  I enjoyed talking with everyone (I love to educate people on Essbase, Hyperion, and now Oracle EPM) but it did teach me something.  A lot of the Oracle user community has heard about Essbase, but hardly anyone understands what it does.  BI and EPM are not cool well defined concepts like GL, ERP, CRM, and the like.  Calling Essbase an "OLAP tool" way oversimplifies what it can do.  Oracle needs to define where Essbase fits in the enterprise, because right now there's confusion and no one wants to see Essbase pigeonholed into the Finance group again.

12:23PM - Business Intelligence Roadmap and Strategy

I was 5 minutes late getting into the room, because the place is packed.  The line to check in to the room was over 150 feet long.  It literally went down the hall and around the corner.  Paul Rodwick from Oracle is talking about the current and future world of BI/EPM at Oracle.  Please remember that all this information is speculative, so Oracle is likely to change their minds at the drop of a hat.  For the moment, though, this is their plan.

Paul has been offering up some great insight to Oracle's strategic direction for various Hyperion and OBIEE products.  For instance, Paul just said that "Hyperion Workspace has been adopted as the primary interface to Business Intelligence information at Oracle.  [Hyperion Workspace] has been renamed the Oracle EPM Workspace."

The three major components of Oracle's BI Foundation are Essbase, BI Server, and Predictive Analytics (Oracle Real-Time Decisions).  I'm glad to see Essbase in there as a key component of Oracle's BI strategy.

He said that HFM is Oracle's go-forward product for global consolidations like Planning is for budgeting.  I heard this from Kopcke on Sunday, but it's good to hear it reiterated.  He also said that Oracle's strategic direction for dashboards is not Interactive Reporting but rather OBIEE Dashboards.  He also said their strategic direction for ad-hoc querying is OBIEE (Answers, I'm presuming, but he didn't specify).  This is, I think, the last nail in the coffin of Web Analysis.  I'd heard this before, but never in an official setting.  Paul had a slide that showed Oracle's direction for canned reports is OBIEE (presumably Publisher) and not Hyperion (SQR Production Reporting).

He reiterated that the installation of System 9 took up to 270 screens of installation prompts whereas 11.1 takes only 8 screens to install everything.  While 11.1 is easier than System 9 to install, there are still some tricks to it, so don't think it's a walk in the park.  Maybe it's more like a walk through Central Park at 3AM.

OBIEE 10.1.3.4 came out in August and adds a great deal of integration with Hyperion.  One of the neat features of OBIEE 10.1.3.4 is a sample "Best Practices" application which shows some of the best practices for KPIs, dashboards, detailed reports, trending, and the like.  If you don't know where to start with your EPM application, check this out on OTN or edelivery.oracle.com.  OBIEE 11g should be out within the next 12 months and it should add a lot of expansion to the existing OBIEE products to make them work better with multi-dimensional data (like Essbase).  There are more than 140 major projects as part of OBIEE 11g: so many that I can't reasonably cover them all.

One of the really neat things about OBIEE 11g is the enhancement of Answers+ to give it more of an "OLAP experience" that doesn't "flatten all the hierarchies."  They're also enhancing and optimizing the capabilities of Answers+ against Essbase.  Yes, it looks like Web Analysis really is dead.

He reiterated Kopcke's statement that Hyperion Smart View is Oracle's go forward product for Business Intelligence inside the Microsoft Office products.  He also stated that Hyperion Financial Reporting is Oracle's strategic direction for creating reports of an accounting nature.

Paul is saying so much interesting information that I'm having a hard time keeping up (and I type at 80-100 words per minute).  This is definitely the most helpful session so far.  I'm definitely not bored.  While a lot of this presentation is talking about what's currently released in Hyperion 11.1 and OBIEE 10.1.3.4, there is really good "our strategic direction for XYZ product is" information to be had.

Sadly, I have to duck out of the room now (it's about 12:20) to make it to my book signing at 12:30.  Thankfully, the bookstore is only about 100 yards from the room I'm in on the same floor.

11:03AM - EPM Management Excellence Think Tank

I just finished helping facilitate one of the two subgroups for the EPM think tank at the Westin St. Francis.  The attendance was outstanding.  There were 50+ companies there.  There were about 4 partners from the OAUG Hyperion SIG in attendance to help coordinate things.  There were also far more Oracle employees than I expected, but they were hosting the event, so I guess I'm not totally shocked.

Breakfast was put out for the attendees and it had an international flair to it.  Some of the stranger items included pickled eggplant and pickled eggs.  Some of the other things I couldn't even identify, but the people who got there earlier enough for the world-spanning buffet seemed to enjoy it.

The meeting kicked off with a brief introduction from Stephan Scholl who is over Oracle consulting for North America.  He then handed it of Gauthier Vasseur to lay the ground rules for the event.  He did a neat little magic trick with a bit of rope that turned hard when "everyone started collaborating."

They split everyone into two groups.  My group was in the "Study" room at the St. Francis Suite.  We had 30+ people in our room and I shared the facilitation with Oracle consulting honchos John Van Puffelen and Naren Truelove.

I can't go into the details of what we discussed, but I will say that our group was very forward looking.  We spent our time trying to stop looking backwards and imagine what the EPM world will look like going forward.  Almost everyone in the room participated and for the most part, we stuck to the mission (high-level creative thought) and stayed out of product details and gripes.

After the breakout sessions, everyone regrouped in the main room where John Kopcke was waiting to thank everyone for coming.  A professional photographer then came in to take a professional picture of all the attendees together in front of one of the many marble fireplaces.

I have to run now to Moscone North 2022 for a BI roadmap session.

6:03AM - My hotel room

I had to get up at 6AM so I can help setup the think tank.  Considering the time I got to bed, I'm not very happy about getting up this early.  I apologize in advance if my blog today is a bit grouchy.

OpenWorld - Monday, Sep. 22

11:53PM - Annabelle's for Customer Reception

At 5:30, I went to Annabelle's (as I did Saturday) for a joint reception honoring our clients (and StarAnalytics' and Applied OLAP's).  It was much better attended than I expected.  I was hoping for 100 and we were closer to 150.  It was a lot of fun, because some luminaries from the past days of Arbor Software attended including Jim Dorrian, Howard Dresner, Arbor's first PR person, and the person who came up with the original "outline tree" Essbase logo.  John Kopcke stopped by for a few minutes which was nice.  I got to spend a decent amount of time talking to some of our clients around the USA and Al Marciante and I bonded for a few minutes too.

After a couple of hours, Suzanne Hoffman from StarAnalytics asked me to say a few words.  I told everyone about our EPM win and then gave them some advice on which user groups to join depending on the types of people they were.  Jim Dorrian then drew some names for winners of iPod Shuffles (see: everyone's giving out iPods or Wiis).

I mingled for another hour and ate some vegetarian appetizers that they prepared for me.  They were quite tasty except for the vegetarian sushi which smelled fishy.  Literally, it smelled like fish (but supposedly didn't have any fish in them).  The service was much more responsive than it was on Saturday night.  Our server from Saturday was back and was ultra-helpful tending bar in one of the rooms we reserved.

At around 9, Eduardo and I made our way to a Hawaiian fusion restaurant named Roy's to eat with some client friends of ours.  I was worried because Hawaiian food is notoriously vegetarian hostile, but they actually have a separate menu for vegetarians.  I ordered the Hawaiian spring rolls, some Asian Hawaiian noodle dish, and for dessert, eggless strawberry shortcake.  The shortcake was to die for.  After a couple of hours of pleasant food and engaging conversation, Eduardo and I took a cab back to the Serrano Hotel.

We have to get up at 6AM to prepare for the EPM Management Excellence think tank, so I'm going to be less verbose than normal (can I hear a 'hallelujah?') and cut this entry short.  In addition to the think tank, I have a book signing, several presentations, a keynote or two, another awards ceremony, and a Hyperion reception to attend on Tuesday.  My feet and knees are already killing me, so I can't imagine how bad they'll feel afer the marathon day I have in store.

I'm off to dream land.  If you're feeling starved for more Oracle EPM content, read Glenn Schwartzberg's blog.  In his OpenWorld entry from Sunday, he referred to me as a "dry martini... an acquired taste, but quite knowledgeable."  For that excellent metaphor, I'm linking to his blog:
http://glennschwartzbergs-essbase-blog.blogspot.com/

5:05PM - Moscone South Exhibit Hall

I spent more than an hour touring the Moscone South exhibit hall and I have exactly nothing to show for it.  Okay, I take that back: a nice company gave me two MP3 downloads.  The Moscone South seems to be for the bigger and more impressive vendor booths.  While there are still tiny cheap booths at the edges, there are some truly massive booths in Moscone South including a few 2 story booths.

The theme for this year's booths seems to be "Nintendo Wiis".  The majority of the booths either have a Wii hooked up for people to play (the most common two games are baseball and tennis) or are giving a Wii away as a prize drawing.  Some booths have a Wii AND are giving away a Wii.  No, I'm not sure if they're using the Wii first and then giving the same one away.  The second most common "prize drawing" was for various flavors of iPods (I prefer the mint).  Some booths were actually giving away money which for some wacky reason strikes me as unseemly.

I'm taking a break now to have a drink and charge my laptop battery.  My feet are killing me and I have 7 more hours to go today.  Next on the agenda is a joint Hyperion reception at Annabelle's with StarAnalytics and Applied OLAP.

3:40PM - Bicycling to save the planet (and charge my laptop)

In the waiting area leading in to the Moscone North Hall D, there are a couple of bicycles hooked up to some electrical generators.  You have to pedal the bikes to power the outlets to charge your laptop or cell phone.  They claim that 15 minutes of cycling will run a laptop for an hour.  I needed to charge my laptop for about 2 hours so I got on the bike and pedaled for about 30 seconds which charged my laptop for about 2 minutes.  While that's not two hours, I do feel like I helped the environment just a little bit.  No, there's no need to thank me.  I pedal because I care.

Oh, there's also a teaser in this lobby area for a major announcement at Larry Ellison's keynote on Wednesday.  Here's the wall image for "X" with no further explanation:

3:37PM - General Session Middleware Keynote

In the waiting area leading in to the Moscone North Hall D, there are a couple of bicycles hooked up to some electrical generators.  You have to pedal the bikes to power the outlets to charge your laptop or cell phone.  They claim that 15 minutes of cycling will run a laptop for an hour.  I needed to charge my laptop for about 2 hours so I got on the bike and pedaled for about 30 seconds which charged my laptop for about 2 minutes.  While that's not two hours, I do feel like I helped the environment just a little bit.  No, there's no need to thank me.  I pedal because I care.

Oracle OpenWorld is extremely blogger-friendly this year.  They let bloggers in for free (like they do for traditional press) and they give us great seats in the keynotes with electrical power and tables for our laptops.  I'm sitting about 20 rows back in the blogger section right now.

The first 30 minutes of the session were a marketing spiel for a company called Satyam.  They are (per the SVP from Satyam who presented) the 4th largest IT firm in India.  I think Satyam had to pay to buy the part of the keynote they just delivered.  I think they paid Oracle, but I think it would have been more appropriate for them to pay the attendees who had to sit through one of the most boring marketing pitches since... well... ever.  This is the most boring marketing pitch ever.  Wow, I think someone from Oracle should issue a press release:

"You thought watching paint dry was boring?  Come to OpenWorld 2008 to see something far worse: listening to Random SVP from Satyam talk about nothing in particular!  Random Guy recently won an award for the most boring man in the world and you don't want to miss this year's keynote as we turn out the lights to make his presentation that much more boring!"

The only thing interesting about the whole talk was his comment that Satyam is the official IT provider for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.  Now I'm not positive, but I think that the World Cup has to do with soccer.  I guess that in the year 2010, soccer will need some computer servers (or maybe some wireless routers?) and Satyam is going to make sure that those servers don't crash.  What's interesting about this is that I didn't know soccer required servers.  Go figure.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle's SVP of Middleware and therefore John Kopcke's boss, is up talking now about changes in Oracle Fusion Middleware over the upcoming year.  While Thomas isn't a whole lot more dynamic of a speaker than the Satyam guy, at least Thomas is talking about something potentially relevant to Hyperion and EPM.

As of 25 minutes into Thomas Kurian's portion, there hasn't been anything interesting yet, but I still have hopes.  Several of the bloggers around me seemed to get excited when he mentioned that JDeveloper 11g would be released very soon.  JDeveloper, as you may remember from Kaleidoscope, is a Java development environment that has Hyperion objects for quickly building Hyperion/EPM applications.  It accesses a ton of other things too, but it's nice to see that it ties into Hyperion.

The reason that nothing has been interesting (to me) so far is that BEA is rolling up under the Fusion Middleware business unit, and since BEA is Oracle's newest toy, they want to show off how cool it is to the world.  Hyperion is, I guess, sooo last year.  I think I've seen more BEA slides in the last 30 minutes than I've seen in my entire life.  Needless to say, BEA WebLogic is what I'd use for an application server going forward, because Oracle seems to be embracing it as their go-forward app server solution.  They also announced some new world records for WebLogic.  

Keynote's over and I didn't hear EPM once (though I did hear BI a few times).  Sorry for no startling news.

2:25PM - Moscone West Exhibit Hall

I expected to see 3 or 4 Hyperion vendors, but I ended up seeing 15 or 20.  Some of them spent some significant money on their booths, but the traffic seemed minimal.  One of the booths that was well visited had little to do with Hyperion.  It was from a company called Fusion IO that makes solid state disk drives.  To show how older drives with drive heads tended to move around a lot (and potentially break), they took a mechanical bull and dressed it up to look like a traditional disk drive.  People then got on the drive and they turned on the bucking mechanism.  There may be few things funnier that watching computer geeks try to do something requiring coordination.  I watched 4 different guys (and yes, all the ones who tried it were guys) last less than 8 seconds each.  I then laughed uncontrollably as they went flying through the air.

A couple of competitors (Kerdock and Deloitte) came up to congratulate us on our EPM Solution award win which was very gracious.  More of our competitors avoided us like the plague, so I won't bother mentioning their company names.

On the exhibit hall floor was a video arcade.  I wanted to play air hockey, but a couple from Asia were dominating the air action.  I ended up playing two games of basketball.  I totally demolished an older Japanese lady and then I barely beat an Indian fellow in a business suit with a last minute shot at the buzzer.  After I won, he refused to acknowledge that we had bet $1,000 on the game.  Welcher.

I'm going to fight my way across the crosswalk to Moscone North.  Boy, do I love being in the middle of 43,000 all of whom seem to be going the opposite direction I want to go while still managing to take up all the seats in the room I want to sit in.

1:15PM - Kopcke's EPM Vision

I'm sitting in the John Kopcke room and getting a real sense of deja vu.  Most of the content at this session is the same as the presentation John Kopcke gave yesterday to the ODTUG and OAUG Hyperion user groups.  The only main difference is that this presentation is a bit higher level.  John knew that yesterday's presentation was geared to existing users of Hyperion and that today's would draw people who have no idea what EPM means.  As such, he has to be less product-specific and talk more about "Oracle's strategic vision for EPM."

While I always enjoy Kopcke's sessions, I'm going to sneakily exit from this room and head to the Moscone West exhibit hall to try find some Hyperion vendors.

12:17PM - General Session Keynote on Applications

I'm sitting in Moscone North (with 3,000 of my closest friends) listening to Ed Abbo, SVP of Oracle Application Development, talk about "Applications Unlimited and the Future of Applications."  He's been talking for several minutes and I haven't heard anything relevant to EPM yet, but I'm always hopeful.

The room in which the keynotes are held is really pretty (and really red, admittedly, which makes me angry for some subliminal reason).  There are about 100 yards wide of high-def screens (about 20 feet high) across the whole front of the hall.  I'm told the room holds upwards of 10,000 people although at the moment, the room looks to be less than 1/3 full (2/3 empty?).

Ed Abbo is handing off the speaking duties periodically to some other companies.  Tata Motors. Wells Fargo, and Loreal are some of the guest speakers telling customer success stories.  They taught me exactly... nothing.  Ah, well.  At least it broke up the marketing monotony.  I'm sure there will be an announcement soon or I'll be lapsing into a coma.

Hey, the Tata guy just showed some OBIEE Dashboards (hey, EPM content!) that Tata Motors uses for margin analysis.  They're remarkably - hmm, can't think of a nice word to put here - simplistic.  Each screen of the dashboard has a bar chart on the left and a line chart on the right.  That's less of a dashboard and more of a PowerPoint slide.  That might be because they dumbed down their real dashboards for the keynote session.  Either that or this is a proof of concept that needs some serious fleshing out.  A dashboard should give users access to all of the information they need to do their jobs.  I just don't see managers getting a true "heads up" view of their areas with only two major bits of information.

Now Wells Fargo is showing off their OBIEE Dashboard.  It's a lot more information packed than Tata's, but I still think it's been simplified for the audience.  It seems to be a Human Resources analysis application.  I guess if you're in the US banking industry these days, it helps to know which of your employees are happy and which are suicidal/homicidal.  Their dashboard links in with their corporate instant messaging system and their internal social networking site.  You can even click on an employee in the system and contact them through VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol).  Who needs telephones when you have Oracle?  Overall, I'm remarkably impressed with the Wells Fargo application.

A lady from Loreal just appeared on stage wearing red which under the red lights and against a huge red background almost makes her disappear.  She showed an iPhone application that Loreal is creating with The Body Shop.  It keeps track of a user's personal preferences and recent purchases.  It also has some social networking aspects to it that lets a user rate & review individual purchases.

If you decide to buy something, the iPhone application shows a UPC bar code on the screen.  The consumer then holds the iPhone window with the code up at the store to a cashier who scans it and gives the customer their purchase.  It's a cute Web 2.0 application, and since it's on the iPhone (my favorite gadget of the moment), I'm sold.  Oh, what the heck does this have to do with Oracle?  I wondered myself until Loreal mentioned that their iPhone was talking to Oracle CRM and other Oracle databases behind the scenes to power their iPhone application.

Ed's now talking about the iPhone application "Oracle Business Indicators" which lets you look at OBIEE information on your iPhone.  He also talked about adding a new iPhone application to allow approvals via an iPhone (you might be asked to approve an invoice, for example).  There are also sales and forecasting iPhone apps in development.  It seems that Oracle wants to make information available no matter how a user wants to access it (Windows thick client, web browser, Google search, iPhone, Blackberry, or whatever).

It's over and people are flooding out.  On to the next event!

11:15AM - EPM Management Excellence Think Tank planning session

As I mentioned earlier, I'm one of the facilitators for a think tank that Oracle's putting together on coming up with the future of EPM.  The actual meeting is Tuesday morning, but there was a planning session today from 10-11AM.  The setting for the meeting is a gorgeous suite of rooms at the Westin St. Francis.

The area where we'll be holding our meetings is aptly named the "St. Francis Suite" and it's actually 3 large rooms, a large foyer, and restrooms.  The whole setting seems like something straight out of a turn of the century mansion: there's wood paneling, marble fireplaces, chandeliers, and high ceilings everywhere.  We're starting off in the main room and then breaking the group in half and moving to the "Study" and "Library" rooms.  I'm facilitating the "Study" group.  Eduardo Quiroz has also been recruited to be to the official photographer for the whole think tank.

11:00AM - Charles Phillips Keynote

I just got a report from Michael and Eduardo who attended the keynote (in my absence) from Charles Phillips, Oracle's president.  Mr. Phillips talked about how much the last year has been a "year of innovation" for Oracle.  Charles gave some interesteing statistics about the size of Oracle such as they have 3,000 products, 20,000 developers, 30,000 servers, and nightly run 300,000 test scripts. Charlie also added that Oracle has over 1,200 patents and over 85,000 employees worldwide.  

After Chuck finished speaking, Michael Phelps came out on stage for a quick hello.  Thankfully, he was not in speedos.  After that, there were a few other speakers none of which said anything relevant to EPM.

9:08AM - Last Night's Keynote

I talked to a couple of the ~10,000 people that went to the Oracle opening night keynote.  There was apparently no relevant Hyperion/EPM information (not that we thought there would be), but it sounds like it was really funny.  ChannelWeb blogged some of the best of Mary Matalin and James Carville's one-liners (mostly of the "zinging the other person and/or political party persuasion"):
http://www.crn.com/software/210602881

There was also a bit of self-deprecating humor (mostly from Carville).  Here's Carville on Carville:

Gavin Newsom is the nation's handsomest mayor. ...What they said about me is, 'Carville looks like someone who was sired out of the love scene in the film Deliverance.'

9:00AM - Hotel room

I finally fell asleep around 7AM.  When I couldn't sleep, I decided to write a press release about the Titan Awards.  Oracle also has a issued a press release listing all the Titan Award winners (interRel is about 1/3 of the way down the release).

I'm skipping the Phillips keynote, and no, it's not because I'm tired.  Sleep is for wimps!  No, I'm skipping because I have to go to the Westin St. Francis to meet with some Oracle folks at 10AM.  I'm one of the facilitators at an EPM Management Excellence think tank on Tuesday morning, and we need to have a pre-planning meeting.  All of our schedules is so busy that we only have "free time" during keynote sessions.  Other than those times, at least one of us has a presentation, meeting, or some other event we can't change.

Michael and Eduardo are at the keynote right now taking good notes.  I'll post the highlights if they report any back that Oracle doesn't put out in a press release.  In the meantime, I need to hurry, get dressed, and head over to Union Square to the Westin.