Competitors, Welcome to Our Webcasts

I was happy to be a part of Oracle's EPM Showcase yesterday in New York City.  It was a half-day event (plus a happy hour) that had Oracle giving a keynote followed by two 90-minute breakout session timeslots (with two sessions happening concurrently).  I was speaking during the first timeslot on Hyperion DRM (Data Relationship Management) along with Nikki from Verizon and Erin Lineberry from interRel.  In my talk, I described how companies need a single system of record for hierarchies and explained how DRM was a really good fit particularly with the new data governance module in 11.1.2.3.

There were partners in my session, and I had no problem at all with it.  After all, this was a conference open to anyone and I am a firm believer that when people learn more, the whole community benefits.  This is what motivates me to write all of my books, cause believe me, it's not for the money (Google "Starving Authors" before you ever think to make money writing).  I also speak at way too many events around the world each year from tiny user groups to massive conferences like Kscope, Collaborate, and OpenWorld with no concerns that my sessions are primarily filled with Oracle partners looking to improve.

After my session was over, there was one more timeslot for the day and since I didn't want to sit in the hall for 90 minutes, I went to Huron Consulting Group's (they're the company that bought Blue Stone) session on the future of Planning.  It sounded more interesting than Hackett's session which was my other possibility and I saw that one of the speakers was Mike Nader who is a great presenter.  If nothing else, I would get to hear Mike's engaging take on the world since he joined Blue Stone.  I sat in the room in the back row (there were plenty of extra seats, but I wanted to leave the good seats for potential customers).

Right as the session was about to start, Rick Schmitt from Huron (Blue Stone) came over to me and asked me to leave.  I was curious why since I was an official attendee at the event and he said that they were going to be talking over "some proprietary stuff."  I assumed he meant his slides at the beginning on the Blue Stone acquisition or "why Blue Stone is the best at XYZ," so I offered to leave for the first few slides.  I don't need nor want competitive info and I certainly didn't want to make him nervous during his sales pitch.  He said that no, they were going to share lots of proprietary info throughout the session and he didn't want competitors in the room during their session at all.

Rather embarrassed but more bemused, I smiled, gathered my things, and walked out of the room.  I sat in the hall for a while wondering what cool things I was missing and feeling jealous of the 50 clients that got to hear from Blue Stone.  (There's nothing like being excluded from something to make you want it more.)  As I sat there, I pondered my own stance on information sharing.  Personally, I believe that if the community as a whole gets better - if the community learns more - the quality of Hyperion implementations will rise.  Satisfaction with Oracle EPM will rise, and as the reputation of Hyperion gets better, the Hyperion market will grow which benefits the entire community: customers, Oracle, and partners.

And it made me ask what I could be doing better.

So starting effective immediately, all of the public webcasts interRel does (and we did over 100 webcasts last year) will be open to everyone.  That's right: competitors, please come join our webcasts and we'll share all the information that we spend months putting together with you.  You've always had access to our books, our sessions at user groups, our presentations at conferences, and now you have access to our webcasts too.  I hope that this starts a trend: I strongly encourage our competition to open up their sessions and webcasts to anyone who wants to attend.  Don't be afraid: if you're good at what you do, you shouldn't be afraid to help the competition get better too.  Information is meant to be free and to point out the obvious, if the Hyperion market gets bigger from happier clients telling everyone they know to buy Hyperion, your potential customer base gets bigger too.

Our next webcast is Thursday, October 31.  It's on how Smart View is finally an awesome replacement for the Essbase Excel Add-In and I hope to see a ton of our competition on the webcast.  Visit http://bit.ly/iRWebcasts to register.

Kscope - Oracle Business Analytics Strategy & New Features

"Business Analytics is a key strategic priority for Oracle."
                 - Paul Rodwick

I'm sitting in the Kscope13 BI Symposium listening to keynote speaker Paul Rodwick, VP of Oracle BI Product Management. Paul was rather interesting despite his flight having landed in New Orleans at 4AM.  On 3-4 hours sleep, Paul reviewed Oracle's Business Analytics strategy.  It's surprising to me how little Oracle's EPM/BI architecture has changed over the last 5 years (other than the renaming to "Oracle Business Analytics."  This is a good thing.

Why?  Because over the last 5 years, the architecture has gone from a products-integrating-is-a-theoretically-good-idea-so-let's-put-it-on-a-slide-cross-our-fingers-and-see-what-happens to an actual integrated solution that uses the various products in the Oracle Business Analytics line together with each product doing a key part.  Instead of "Essbase or OBIEE or an application?" it's "Essbase as the cube platform, OBIEE as the front-end, applications for needs that are often common across multiple companies."

So now that Oracle has gotten the basics out of the way, they're looking to expand their Business Analytics offerings.  Their key focuses for the immediate future are big data, mobile, in-memory computing, and cloud-based analytics.  The last two really speak to technology of deployment (in-memory and cloud), big data seems to be one of those things that everyone is talking about and no one's quite sure what to do with for the moment, but mobile is on everyone's minds and people are actually doing something about it.  To further that immediate mobile need, Oracle is releasing new functionality in every release or patch of the Oracle mobile analytics products.  For instance, Oracle 11.1.1.7 now has a full mobile security toolkit (available on OTN) for companies that want greater security than native Apple iOS provides.

Paul discussed some of the key features in the 11.1.1.7 release (including Smart View as the primary Office front-end for BI going forward).  He mentioned that the bundled patch for OBIEE 11.1.1.7 will be out on a few weeks, so prep yourself for 11.1.1.7.1.  He also talked about some recent improvements to Endeca in version 3.0 of that product.  While I love Endeca's extremely powerful ability to discover information in unstructured data, right now, most companies are still focused on analyzing their structured information.  Unstructured analysis is definitely coming: it's just only being deployed by a handful of leading-edge companies at the moment.

Where Are They Going?

The key releases we should see in the next 9-12 months will revolve around these themes:

• Visual analysis.  They're trying to make the analysis more intuitive because the majority of users don't spend their day being analysts: they want the system to help them find issues quickly so they can make better business decisions faster.
• Mobile Analytics. Oracle is planning to create a BI Mobile "Applications Designer" that will allow developers to make HTML5 applications purpose-built for mobile deployment.  They will also continue to improve the mobile applications every version but they didn't go into what some of the new improvements are going to be specifically beyond more HTML5 deployment.
• Exalytics.  They promised a new Exalytics announcement in the near future.  I'm presuming this refers to the new Exalytics X3-4 version that's mentioned on the June 4 Oracle Engineered System Price List (page 5).  I expect this will be detailed more during Steve Liebermensch's session later this week.
• Cloud analytics.  Oracle is making a huge investment in the cloud and it looks like there will be more and more applications in Oracle Business Analytics that run in the cloud.  This makes it a lot easier for customers to get immediate ROI from a BI implementation without huge server investments.
• Big data.  Part of Oracle's strategy in this area is to tie into any data in any source behind the scenes into Oracle BI.  Data agnostic
• Predictive analytics.  Paul didn't really talk to this one other than to tease that they do have dedicated resources to expanding the Predictive Analytics capabilities of Oracle BI Foundation Suite.  There is some P.A. functionality in Hyperion Planning, Crystal Ball, and Hyperion Strategic Finance and that sounds like it will be expanded into the BI layer in future releases.

The one thing that's really apparent from Paul's session is that Business Analytics is now a $1+ billion dollar portion of Oracle revenue... and they're treating it as such in terms of research and development.  It's a fast growing space and Oracle seems determined to maintain their market share in overall Business Analytics.

I hope to blog later in the week if any new announcements come out.  Coming to you from Kscope13, this is your humble reporter, Edward Roske.

All the Cool New Features in Oracle EPM 11.1.2.3

Oracle EPM 11.1.2.3 is out and there are some great features in it (Planning and Financial Reporting have my favorites which you'll see in a second).  11.1.2.3 is not as impressive as 11.1.2.1 or 11.1.2.2, though.  A lot of the products got new features in between releases like Smart View (which adds new features with every patch set), Strategic Finance, HFM (which got Tax Provisioning in February), and Financial Close Management instead of making those products wait until 11.1.2.3 was officially released.

Below are the features I think are most interesting in 11.1.2.3.  This is by no means an exhaustive list and I didn't include every product though I did hit all the ones with significant market share (and a few others including a shout-out to the long-forgotten "EPM Workspace").  All the new feature documents are on Oracle.com.  If you see anything major I missed, let me know in the comments.

Oracle Essbase

• Essbase didn't change much in 11.1.2.3 and users are never going to see any of the changes.
• There are several new BSO functions and calc script commands like @INTERSECT, @ISMBRUDA, @ISRANGENONEMPTY, @MEMBERAT, @RANGEFIRSTVAL, and @RANGELASTVAL.  My favorite is @CREATEBLOCK which, wait for it, creates a sparse block with all the dense combinations in it set to missing.  Yes, we finally have a specific command to create specific blocks after 20+ years of silly block creation workarounds.
• There's a new calc script SET command called RUNTIMESUBVARS that let's you create substitution variables in the script that are passed to the script at run-time.  You can then pass values to these variables when you call the calc scripts from MaxL or the API.  There's a new optional argument (with runtimesubvars) to MaxL's "execute calculation" command that sends the run-time variables to the calc script as you call it.
• There's a new Essbase.CFG setting called ESTIMATEDHASHSIZE that lets you specify (in millions) how many members should be loaded into memory from the outline.  It's meant to speed up massive dimension builds and outline edits.  There are two other new CFG settings as well: ENABLERTSVLOGGING (which logs the new run-time substitution variables) and UNICODEENABLE (which sets the server to unicode mode, basically).
• Performance has been improved on ASO dimension builds (specifically with duplicate members), the JAPI, and most helpful for many people including Hyperion Planning users, @XREF has been improved in some cases as much as 40-times.
• Data Mining is gone.  Many people didn't even know it was there, but it's been removed.
• Speaking of gone, there is no Essbase Excel Add-In 11.1.2.3.  Further, earlier versions of the Add-In that you may have (like 11.1.2.2) are not supported against Essbase 11.1.2.3.  It probably will work (the Add-In is wonderfully backwards and forwards compatible) but it's not supported.

Smart View

• There were a lot of improvements to Smart View in 11.1.2.2.3xx which came out about a month ago, so there isn't much new in Smart View 11.1.2.3.  Smart View is the new strategic Microsoft Office add-in for all the Business Analytics (BI and EPM) products, though, so that's why the newest release supported direct access to OBIEE 11.1.1.7.  Hyperion Strategic Finance is also now fully supported in Smart View.
• The only major improvement is actually in Hyperion Planning just exposed through Smart View.  There is a new "Planning Admin" extension that lets administrators update Planning metadata (and a few other things) from Smart View.  I'll say more about this under Planning.

Hyperion Planning

• Essbase ASO databases can now be created as Planning Plan Types.  These databases will allow writeback provided it's at level-0.  This is stunning.  These ASO cubes can be displayed on Planning composite forms with Essbase BSO cubes just like current BSO cubes in multiple plan types can be combined on a single composite form.  For some reason, this release doesn't put security filters on the ASO cubes, so you have to access these cubes through Planning or through the Planning ADM driver in Hyperion Financial Reporting.  Still, ASO in Planning is a step in the right direction.  Oh, and you have to own full-use Essbase to create these ASO cubes; just a Planning license doesn't cut it.
• You can create members on the fly (kinda) if they don't exist when business rules need them.  This may only work in modules and not custom plan types.  The documentation says only modules, but I admittedly haven't tried it on custom plan types yet.
• Custom dimension hierarchies can now vary by plan type.
• Task lists can now include "Copy Version" and "Job Console" as tasks.
• There is a new Task List Dashboard (gives you an overview of tasks by user, due date, etc.) and a Task List Report Page (that exports to XLS and PDF).
• Grid Scroll Preferences lets you control if all rows/columns in a form are retrieved at once or only when you scroll down.  This should improve performance for large forms (and not slow down the internet when we want to watch cat videos on YouTube).
• Users can now control through user preferences if they want member names, aliases, or both.  This can be set to override the form settings.
• Outline Load Utility has been enhanced to do fun things like export metadata to a relational database or export data to a text file.  There's a new user interface for loading dimensions and data from flat files (and exporting them too).  This was previously only doable through the command line.
• There's a new "Plan Type Editor" that lets admins add and delete plan types to already existing applications. Previously, this required going back to the initial creation step or hacking the underlying tables.  The Plan Type Editor can be used to add ASO to an existing Planning application.
• Admins can now do some administration of Planning from within Smart View like editing dimensions, creating cubes, and refreshing cubes.
• Workforce and CapEx have been enhanced to get them up to speed with Project Financial Planning's improvements to these modules in 11.1.2.2.  You won't get these improvements with a straight migration: you have to create a new "shell" application and manually migrate your old dimensions into the new application.
• You can create, assign, and delete substitution variables directly from the Planning web interface.

Data Relationship Management

• There's an entirely new module within DRM (no word yet on if it costs money, but my gut feeling is that it's included with DRM) called "Data Relationship Governance."  To oversimplify what is actually quite cool, it adds workflow to DRM.  It lets data stewards coordinate entry, validation, and approval of hierarchies but it does a lot more too.  Users can request hierarchy changes and they go into a worklist so nothing gets lost.  It has built-in alerts for when users have requested changes and it also sends e-mails when something has been sent to you or it's something you should be informed of.  In my humble opinion, this is the greatest improvement to DRM since it was created.
• Dynamic scripting lets you use JavaScript instead of formulas to create derived properties and validations.  This is a welcome improvement over formulas since we now have access to a real programming language.
• You can now connect directly to external relational database tables to import hierarchies.

Hyperion Financial Management (HFM)

• There's a new module (that technically was released in February) called Hyperion Tax Provision.  It handles tax automation, data collection, tax calculations, reporting and it does it all within HFM.  Now when you create an application in HFM, you tell it if you want a Consolidation (traditional) application type or Tax Provision.
• Data forms let you show/hide the POV members, access the dynamic POV member lists, and run "on-demand rules" to essentially calculate the data form (by running the on-demand rule on a subset of data).
• Data grids also let you control which POV dimensions you're showing and gives you access to dynamic POV member lists.
• Admins can turn off modules for all users if they aren't applicable (for instance, if you don't allow intercompanies in HFM).

Financial Data Quality Management (FDM)

• FDM and ERPi (ERP Integrator) combine in 11.1.2.3 into a single product: FDMEE (Financial Data Quality Management Enterprise Edition).  It's more than just ERPi renamed which is what some are claiming.  Below are some of the improvements.
• The UI (user interface) is now consistent with the other Hyperion products like Planning and HFM.
• FDM is fully supported in Shared Services and Lifecycle Management.
• Data loads are sped up.  Scaling and load balancing are fully supported.
• ERPi users will now see full FDM functionality that they couldn't access before.
• SAP BW is now supported directly as a data source.
• FDM and ERPi owners have access (at no charge) to all the new FDMEE capabilities.

Financial Reporting

• I know what you're thinking and yes, Financial Reporting actually got improved in 11.1.2.3 (it is a strategic product for Oracle). So for the coolest thing you'll see since ASO in Hyperion Planning...
• Financial Reporting is now mobile.  That's right: it runs on Apple iPhones, iPads, Android phones and Android tablets.  Users can browse the repository, launch reports (HTML or PDF), run books (HTML or PDF), change POVs, change page members, expand rows and columns, and even launch related content.  Pick your jaw off the floor.
• Books have been enhanced to allow cover pages before the table of contents, embedding (and launching) Word DOCs from an HTML book, and changing the starting page number of books.
• The designer has new authoring features including a row property to show dots after the member name (to fill the column) in PDF output, custom text colors, and auto-sizing text boxes in PDF output.
• Annotations have a new auditing capability that puts annotation info (like creation date or modified date) in a log file on the server.

EPM Workspace

• OBIEE 11.1.1.7 is back in Workspace (it used to be there back in OBIEE 10).  You can both create and launch OBIEE from Workspace.
• OBIEE uses single-sign on if you're logged into Workspace (OBIEE now can also share a security model with Essbase).

Web Analysis, Interactive Reporting, SQR Production Reporting...

• Seriously?  People, move to OBIEE.  These are dead products.

General Comments

• You can upgrade to 11.1.2.3 directly only from 11.1.1.4 and 11.1.2.x.  Earlier versions require going to either 11.1.1.4 or 11.1.2.2 first.
• 11.1.2.3 still doesn't officially support Chrome or Safari.  The documentation says that Oracle recommends IE (Internet Explorer) 9 or Firefox 10 because older versions are slower.
• The EPM documentation is now fully supported on Apple mobile devices (in ePub format).  It already worked on Amazon Kindles (in Mobi format).

That's all folks.  You can thank me at Kscope13 for making it so you don't have to scour all the readme files yourself.

Oh, that reminds me. Since you read this entire essay of bullets, I owe you a reward.  When you register for Kscope13 (the best Oracle BI, EPM, and Hyperion conference in the world bar none), mention promo code IRC.  It'll save you $100 off whatever the prevailing rate is.  You can tell your friends or make them read this blog to find that out themselves.

#1. Oracle Acquires Hyperion

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.

Essbase 11 and Smart View Books On Amazon Kindle

Amazon Printed and On-Line

I mentioned back in June that you could get our Oracle Essbase 11 and Smart View 11 books from our publisher directly. At the time, many of you wondered when they'd be on Amazon.com. Wait no more:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords="essbase+11"&x=0&y=0

On a very cool note, our two newest 11x books are also available in an Amazon Kindle edition. So if you want to always have Essbase or Smart View material available at your fingertips or if you just love saving trees, get a Kindle copy here:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords="essbase+11"+kindle&x=0&y=0

Direct from interRel Press

Now, of course, I would still prefer you buy them from our publisher because we get to keep more of the revenue, but I understand why some prefer Amazon. If you want to help us starving authors get higher royalties (and get your shipment faster too, generally), please visit:

http://stores.lulu.com/tracyamcmullen

As always, if you want to buy 5 or more copies of one of our books, please e-mail dwhite(at)interrel.com and she'll be happy to arrange 30% off the list price. Now your entire finance department can afford a copy of the end user book!

Look Smarter Than You Are with Hyperion Planning

Finally, as an update, our next book will be released before OpenWorld. Stay tuned to this blog if you're a user of Hyperion Planning who's been waiting patiently for a book to refer to.

Essbase 11 and Smart View Books Are Now Available

I Can't Keep a Secret, Apparently

This was supposed to stay quiet until the press release came out in May, but so many people have already discovered it that I thought I might as well fess up. My (along with Tracy McMullen, the best co-author ever) two new Oracle/Hyperion/Essbase books are now available. At the moment, you can only get them directly from the publisher. If you're interested in Essbase 11 (now with more ASO!) or Smart View, you finally have a place to turn.

Look Smarter Than You Are with Essbase 11: An Administrator's Guide

This book has over 300 pages of new content in it, but the book it self stays under 700 pages. How did we manage this, you ask? Well, with the exception of a very brief chapter on Smart View that's used to introduce Administrator's to dimensionality, we've removed all of the end user content from this book. Yes, that means that if you want end user information, you've got to buy a second book, but if we hadn't done this, the book would be close to 1,000 pages. Since we're not trying to re-write War & Peace (now with a new happier ending!), we made the decision to split the end user stuff out.

So how in the name of Thor did we come up with 300+ pages of new information? Well, some of it was due to the new Essbase 11 features like Varying Attributes and Text Lists. A lot more, though, is due to the new Essbase ASO (aggregate storage) content we wrote. In the last few Essbase books, we treated ASO as an after thought only to be considered if you wanted to build truly huge cubes. In the new book, we talk about ASO as your primary default options for new cubes. For the first 350+ pages of the new book, we just focus on building ASO cubes before we finally get to building BSO cubes.

Some of you Essbase people are cheering right now, "thank God, finally a good source for learning ASO!" A number of you are also wondering, "but shouldn't BSO be the default and ASO only used in certain specific cases?" In our opinion, not any more. With the 11x improvements to ASO, it should be the first place you go to build all new databases (even wee lil' ones). BSO (block storage) should only be used if you need sophisticated writeback or complex calculations. While we still cover BSO in the new book, we show ASO first and then eventually show how to do the equivalent things in ASO (and not the other way around, as our previous Essbase books have).

We hope you'll like all the additional content (and we only had to up the price a mere $10 USD). Here's the link to buy your copy:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/look-smarter-than-you-are-with-essbase-11/6402010

Look Smarter Than You Are with Smart View and Essbase 11: An End User's Guide

If you're looking for instruction on how to use the old Essbase Excel Add-In, you'll want to buy our previous end user book, because this one is all about Smart View for over 250 pages. With all the new features in Smart View 11 (Smart Slices, Report Designer, and more), we had to abandon the Essbase Add-In content and just focus on Smart View.

You might notice that "Essbase" is in the title. Don't be mislead: this is primarily a Smart View book and can be used even if you're accessing HFM, Planning, OBIEE, or whatever; however, we had to pick a data source to use in our examples. Since the majority of people using Smart View have Essbase (even if it's just underlying Planning), we chose Essbase for our exercises in the book. So if you've been wanting a book on Smart View, this is the book for you. Best news, the price (for the moment) stays the exact same:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/look-smarter-than-you-are-with-smart-view-and-essbase-11-an-end-users-guide/5570907

Where can I buy a copy?

For the moment, the only place to get the books is direct from our publisher. They will be on Amazon.com in 6-10 weeks, because it takes a while to get new books through their system unless you're a major publishing house. If you're coming to Collaborate, the books will also be for sale at their bookstore, and Tracy and I are doing an official book signing there too. We'll also be bringing some copies of each book to sell at our booth at Kaleidoscope if you're going there instead. If you want to buy more than 5 copies (bulk discounts give you more fun for less money!), you can get them through interRel at 30% off: just e-mail info@interrel.com.

Go ahead and tell your friends that the books are available, but when you see the press release in early May announcing the official release of the books, please try to act surprised. In the meantime, don't say anything to interRel Press' marketing department.

#3. Financial Reporting, Smart View, and Workspace Live on!

I'm writing this entry from a Carnival cruise ship in the Caribbean.  This demonstrates that 1)I am amazingly dedicated to my job; and 2) I have no idea how to relax.  (Is it strange to find blogging enjoyable?  Discuss.)

I am known as a betting man.  This is mostly because I regularly make fearless predictions and am normally willing to back them up either with my reputation or more commonly, with money.  If someone asked me at in the summer of 2007 to predict the Hyperion products that would not be long for this world now that Oracle was in charge, I would have said:

• Hyperion Pillar, because it's an antiquated product that Hyperion had already all but replaced with Hyperion Planning.
• Smart View, because Oracle already had their own Office add-ins.
• Workspace, because Oracle already had their own BI portal front-ends.
• Financial Reporting, because it's fundamentally an "End User Driven Report Writer" and Oracle had a ton of report writers that better fit with Oracle's philosophy that reports should be IT created.

And I would have been wrong on 3 of the 4 counts.  Based on public comments by Oracle in 2008, we now know that 3 of those products are Oracle's strategic direction (which is a polite way of saying that they're going to continue enhancing them and not just let them wither on the vine).

Smart View

Back in olden timey days, Hyperion had an Excel add-in for everything: Essbase, Planning, HFM, Reports, Analyzer, heck, Enterprise even had two.  With the release of System 9, they decided to combine to a single add-in: Smart View.  When Oracle and Hyperion joined, Oracle's BI products also had their separate Excel clients.

So the story goes, when the Oracle execs saw Smart View, they reliazed it had two strong things going for it.  1) It was designed to plug-in additional products making it easy to add things like OBIEE into Smart View.  2) it worked across all Office products, not just Excel.  Next thing we knew, not only was Smart View not going away, but it became the strategic direction for an Office add-in for all BI/EPM products.

Workspace

Prior to System 9, web front-ends for Hyperion were like Excel add-ins: every product had a different front-end.  Hyperion came up with the great idea of a web-based "portal" (and I do use that term loosely) that would easily enable developers to plug in additional products.  Oracle, like pre-System 9 Hyperion, was in a similar boat: while their different products had similar web looks-and-feels, each one was really a separately coded front-end.

Like Smart View, Oracle realized that the product that was more extensible, Hyperion Workspace, was the best go-forward front-end, and thus Hyperion Workspace became Oracle EPM Workspace.

Financial Reporting

When Oracle development first saw the user interface for Financial Reporting (FR), they actually laughed out loud.  This looks like stripped down version of Excel, they cried in between their howling cackles of cruel laughter.  Hyperion defended themselves: but financial users like Excel; they know it, love it, and want more of it!  Oracle countered by pointing out that users don't write reports, IT developers do, so what the users wanted was irrelevant.

Well, at least that's the way I heard the story and so the rumor began circulating that Financial Reporting was not going to be further enhanced and the strategic direction was OBIEE+ Publisher... until someone realized that there was one major, major difference between Publisher and FR.  Publisher is meant for banded reports whereas FR was designed for detailed, line-by-line, formatting.  At first, some questioned the need for this until it was correctly pointed out that financial-minded reports (and many other types, to be honest) were line formatted and specified.

While I don't want to take the time to explain what all that means (suffice to say that individual rows need individually different formatting in many financially minded reports), suffice to say that once everyone at Oracle realized the value, Financial Reporting was suddenly here to stay.

Disclaimer

Of course, all of the above is subject to change by Oracle, and Oracle probably will.  For the moment, though, I take comfort in knowing that Financial Reporting, Smart View, and Work Space are not only still here, they being embraced into the Oracle fold.

OpenWorld - Thursday, Sep. 25

3:59PM - What's New in OBIEE+

It was my understanding that this presentation would mention some of what's changing in Web Analysis, Financial Reporting, and the other parts of the "plus" part of OBIEE+.  Instead, I just sat through an hour-long sales pitch of "Oracle BI Standard Edition One" which is all about Oracle BI Publisher, Interactive Dashboards, and Answers.  They didn't talk about the former Hyperion products at all.  There was a point where I began wondering if they switched rooms and maybe my topic was being held elsewhere.  I honestly went out on the web to see if they had many any schedule changes.

No, I was in the right room just receiving the wrong content.  The room holds about 100, so I wonder if others were as confused as I am.  Several people walked out.

I'm leaving now to go meet someone in the Marriott lobby.  No, this isn't my last OpenWorld blog entry, so tune in later.

2:45PM - Roske on Hyperion Planning Optimization

That presentation was a lot less full.  It was right next door at Moscone West 3024.  it held 200 or so but was only about 1/4 full.  I guess people are headed to the airport (and there was also a competing Planning tips presentation at the same time).  Everyone seemed interested in the content which is good, because I wasn't at my funniest.

I started off by telling everyone that the #1 way to speed up Planning is to speed up Essbase.  I also told them not to optimize Essbase under Planning the same way one optimizes stand-alone Essbase cubes.  Why?  Because normal Essbase optimization focuses on optimizing data loads and big, batch calcs.  Planning optimizations focus on user experience: speeding up form retrievals, form submissions, and running small/targeted calcs.

Once I went through the Essbase tips that one should consider when optimizing Hyperion Planning, I covered how to optimize Planning web forms themselves.  I covered optimized calculations briefly and also gave some infrastructure tips.  There was just too much content for 1 hour, because there are so many different tips/tricks for Hyperion Planning.  I only got to spend about 15 minutes on tips for improving user experience (basically, user interface tips) and that topic alone needs an hour to do it justice.

A few people stirred when I told them NOT to use Planning's built-in currency capabilities but rather to create a Planning app as non-multi-currency and then add the capability manually.  The reasons for this are both performance based and for usability.  I would have presumed by now that no one was using the Planning multi-currency, but several people seemed shocked when I said that, so apparently, they been getting bad consulting advice (or worse: they got design advice from their Planning Bootcamp instructor).

If you want a copy of the slides for this presentation (assuming you're not a competitor :), send an e-mail to info(at)interrel.com.  For that matter, if you want a copy of any of the ones I've delivered at this year's OpenWorld, send an e-mail specifying which of the 4 presentations you actually want and Danielle will be happy to send you a copy:

• How Essbase Thinks (both BSO and ASO)
• Essbase Outline Tuning and Optimization
• Smart View Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
• Hyperion Planning Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices

While I love public speaking (something's wrong in my brain, I know), I'm glad my presentation work here at OpenWorld is over, because I still worry about my presentations until I've delivered them.  My voice hurts and while I have a few more things to attend to, I don't have to stress about any more presenting.

I have to race now all the way back to the Marriott (this conference is too big) to attend a presentation on what's new in the old Hyperion BI+ tools.  Glad I brought my running shoes...

1:14PM - Roske and XTO on Smart View Tips

The Smart View Tips and Tricks presentation took place in 3022 in Moscone West.  It started at noon, and I got there from the Marriott with only about 10 minutes to spare.  The room held 300 and was more than 80% full.

Bob from XTO Energy started off the presentation by talking about his experiences using Hyperion at XTO.  He told the audience about how he started with a different consulting company than interRel that did a horrible job (thankfully, he didn't mention the name), threw them out, tried to do it themselves, and eventually called interRel for help.  He did mention that we were able to reduce his calculation time from 8-12 hours down to under 20 minutes, so that was a unexpected plug for our Hyperion tuning practice.

He then talked some about their experiences with Smart View specifically.  He gave an interesting tip that you don't tend to hear in most Smart View tricks presentations: consider using the HSGetValue() function (with anchored cell references so you can formula fill it after you've added it once).  Most people say not to use it for speed reasons, but Bob rightly pointed out that it does give you a ton of flexibility in reporting that you don't get when using the simple grid approach.

After about 10 minutes, he turned it over to me.  I talked for about 50 minutes on ways to better your usage of Smart View with Essbase, Planning, Financial Reporting, and Web Analysis.  For a lot of my tips, I had to say, "here's the really complicated way of doing it under System 9, but under 11x, there's this really cool way to do it."  I will be so happy when 11x is stable, so I can recommend that our clients upgrade to it.

About 100 people came up afterwards to give me their business cards and ask questions.  One lady actually came up and asked if interRel could please come out to her company and rescue her Planning implementation that [a consulting firm based out of the East Coast of the USA] screwed up.  It's always good when people realize that you don't actually just talk about Hyperion but you actually implement it as well.

I now have a huge walk to my next presentation which is all the way over at Moscone West, room 3024.  I think that's to the west of where I am now in Moscone West, room 3022.

11:25AM - What's New in Oracle BI Applications

This room at the Marriott is huge.  According to the scanner lady at the door, the room holds almost 1,100 people.  That said, the room is a ghost town.  There are only about 75 people here.  It's as empty as a Texas Rangers day game in August.  Jake Krakauer, Senior Director of BI Apps for Oracle, was the opening speaker.  Why am I here?  To hear about future integration between the BI Apps and the former Hyperion products.  I'm not sure there is any, but I hope to find out.

Jake started off by talking about how BI Apps are part of the EPM System at Oracle. Jake talked briefly about the importance of BI Apps to "achieving management excellence."  Now I know what "Management Excellence" is because I've heard Kopcke speak and been reading the EPM literature for the last few months.  The majority of the room has no idea what Jake meant, though, when he said 'Management Excellence."  A bit of terminology definition would have been nice.

There are around 35 pre-built BI apps like sales pipeline analysis, market basket analysis, and procurement analysis.  Jake's talking about how most of their effort on developing BI Apps goes into the behind scenes things like ETL, security, warehouse design, and under the covers modeling rather than on the front-end.  While that's greatly inspiring, isn't the primary forwarding facing view of the BI Apps the user interface?  Would I still drive a BMW 650 if it looked on the outside like a Ford Pinto?  If I'm going to be paying a ton of money for something, I want it to look nice when I have to look at it.

Jake's been talking about the new Oracle BI Apps 11g that's coming (eventually).  Their goal is to link BI Apps into Fusion Middleware and OBIEE Answers+.

New content in the BI Apps 11g will include:

• US Federal Financial Analytics.  This is a special version of Financial Analytics for federal agencies.
• ODI Integration.  Phase 1 of the BI Apps and ODI integration will have Oracle eBS 11.5.10as the only supported source and Oracle database as the only target. That seems limiting.  They'll be expanding more in the future, apparently.
• Fixed Assets Analytics
• Project Analytics
• HR Functional area
• Data Lineage Console

While those items are pretty definite (because they're already under development), here is what may be released in a beyond 12 month timeframe:

• Procurement & Spend Analytics
• Marketing Loyalty Analytics
• PeopleSoft adapters for P&Spend Analytics and Projects Analytics
• JDEdwards adapters for financials, order management, and P&Spend
• Communications/procewsses focused analytics (industry)
• EBS Manufacturing - OPM and Discrete enhancements
• EBS GRI Sustainability dashboard
• CxO Dashboard/Scorecard
• ODI Phase 2.  Additional Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JDE sources.  Additional targets to include DB2, MS SQL Server, and Teradata.

Jake just started talking about "integrating the Hyperion applications with the BI Applications so data can be used both ways."  Basically, they're working on sharing data between Hyperion apps (like Planning and HFM) and the BI Apps.

On integrating the BI Apps and Essbase, he said that they're focusing on integrating OBIEE and Essbase.  "Today, Essbase can be a source for the Business Analytics Warehouse for use by dashboards.  Essbase can also be a target so if you're doing analysis in your function, you can spin off an Essbase cube and do some deeper analysis."  That all seems really vague.  As of this moment, no one has announced BI Apps sitting directly on Essbase.

On integrating HFM and the BI App for Financial Analysis, Jake basically said that they're complimentary applications.  He then showed a PowerPoint slide that could double as an eye chart.  "HFM is for inter-period reporting, but FInancial Analytics is for intra-period reporting."  Um, okay.

Several people have been walking out, so the room's down to less than 50 people.

They want to integrate Hyperion Planning and HR Analytics so Workforce Planning can feed and pull from HR Analytics.  I don't think from what he's said that it's there yet.

Michael Siebert, the guy from from Ingersoll Rand, came out at about 11AM.  He offered some insight on what Ingersoll Rand has been doing with the BI Apps and what they will be doing.  Mike's basically giving a customer success story which isn't amazingly relevant to most of the audience.  Other people are leaving.

I have a presentation at 12PM in Moscone West on Smart View Tips and Tricks.  I expect the room will be mostly empty, because:

1. Most of our clients are in Hyperion customer advisory boards.
   
2. A number of people have already left for the airport.
3. It's being held during lunch.  Nice timing, Oracle.

9:00AM - Meeting with the Press

I'm about to meet with a reportor from an industry trade magazine.  Apparently, they're really impressed with all the press interRel (my company) has received this week.  While I do the interview, I'll ask Eduardo to post a quick separate entry listing all the press releases with our name in them this week so it doesn't clutter up my live blogging.  It's been a very good week to be interRel (though my feet are killing me).

Essbase 11 - Preview PDF

Thanks to the wonders of the Google gods, Sebastien Roux found a link (which he posted on Network54) to a 66-page preview of Essbase 11.1.1.0.0 (which I think cubegeek then downloaded and put on his site). The preview is in PDF format, and though slightly dated (for instance, it still mentions "Shelley" which was pulled as a code name from the next release), it's remarkably thorough.

It has a ton of screen prints (all of which cutely refer to "Hyperion 9.5"). It goes into enough detail to cover things like new environment variables and there are multiple slides on the new calc script functions which shows just how detailed it is. I particularly liked the slides with shots of the new Smart View Report Designer. There are slides on the new installer and life cycle management tools too.

Go here for the direct link to the PDF:
http://www.dwway.com/bbs/attachment.php?attachmentid=622

Based on some of the more technical content in the PDF, if I had to guess, I'd say this is probably a presentation from someone in the beta program and not one of the Hyperion 11 marketing PDFs floating around. The author (per properties in the file) is "yaoma" which means exactly nothing to me although I choose to believe that Yaoma is a rogue, hyper-intelligent Oracle spy with the looks of Keira Knightley and the attire of Trinity in the first Matrix movie. I also choose to believe that I look good in interRel polo shirts and khaki shorts, so it's possible my judgment is suspect.

I also heard that the newest pushed back release date (subject to change at a moment's whim compliments of Oracle) is July 10. I doubt there will even be a press release when it's made generally available, so make sure you check edelivery.oracle.com or just set up an RSS feed to this blog for further news.

[Update on July 3, 2008: Gary Crisci e-mailed me to say he's pretty sure that this PDF is from the "Hyperion Essbase - What's New, What's Coming" presentation that Aneel Shenker from Oracle delivered at Collaborate in April. I've met Aneel and while he's a nice guy, he's not exactly Keira Knightley.]

Solutions Road Trip - Future of Hyperion

Profitability Management was next in Al Marciante's presentation on the future of Hyperion. He pointed out that HPM (my new acronym for Hyperion Profitability Management) was the first application built from the ground-up using the System 9 framework (which is now the System 11 framework, I guess). For the first time, I finally understand what this application does (thank you, Mr. Marciante). It's basically a big allocation engine. It takes high-level costs and using a graphical interface, allocates them down through multiple stages along multiple dimensions. With the costs fully allocated, profitability can be analyzed! In other words, it's what we've been building for years in Essbase cubes just a whole lot easier to use than pages and pages of complicated Essbase calc scripts. He showed a screen shot of a traceability interface that allows a user to track his costs back graphically to see how he was allocated specific costs. We certainly couldn't do that with Essbase calc scripts. I think I'm going to like this application (now that I understand what the heck it does).

Al started off the discussion of the OBIEE+ products with a curious statement that I tried to write down word for word:

Oracle Answers+ is having the OLAP UI updated to access Essbase more like
Web Analysis does. Oracle products are the future direction, but IR, FR,
and WA will be around for a while.

I can draw two things from this: in the future, Financial Reporting, Web Analysis, and Interactive Reporting are going away; and they're probably being replaced with Oracle Answers+. While this is obviously subject to change, I've heard rumors along these lines from other people. If I was a betting guy (and it's been previously established that I am), I would start looking to Answers+ for my future development.

He did say that changes already underway for the OBIEE+ products would continue. The only interesting (to me) improvement to Financial Reporting is that a user will be able to annotate a report right on the report itself. The annotations can be across an entire report, down a column, across a row, or on a specific cell. Annotation types can include plain text, links to entire documents, or links to the web (URLs).

Aside from some graphical improvements, I didn't see much interesting in the way of new Web Analysis enhancements. Interactive Reporting 11 will include active sections embedded within documents, charting enhancements (the new charts look very pretty), and dashboard enhancements.

Workspace is being significantly enhanced. There was an entire slide of tiny bullets of which I was able to jot down just a couple. It seems that Workspace is also going to be carried forward and will most likely be the face of OBIEE going forward as well. Improvements I was able to jot down include improvements to searching (being able to find documents no matter what folder they're in), UI customization (hiding/showing specific menu items, filters, and other personalization), dynamic help, contextual navigation, and integration with Oracle WebCenter (whoopee!).

Al said that Smart View was here to stay. His exact quote was:

Oracle is standardizing on Smart View. OBIEE is even moving to Smart View.

I'm extremely pleased to hear this because we have a number of clients standardizing on Smart View for Microsoft Office integration. Standardizing on Smart View also means that Oracle will have a vested interest in fixing all the Smart View bugs, anomalies, and undocumented features in Smart View 9.3.x. Someone asked if the Essbase Add-In was disappearing because of the enhancements to Smart View 11. Al admitted that he didn't know when the Essbase Add-In was going away, but he did say that it was going to be still included in Essbase 11. He felt that it would be at least 2010 before enough people were comfortable with Smart View to drop the Essbase Add-In, but he also pointed out that all new functionality was only going to be made available in Smart View. Speaking of new functionality, Smart View enhancements include:

• Report Designer. There will be a new designed in Smart View (it looks Excel only) that lets you build a complex report with multiple sections: a dashboard, for lack of a better term. Some sections could be grids, others could be charts, and still others could be objects like buttons & drop-downs.
• Personal Views. This is awesome. One of the problems with Essbase cubes these days is that they're getting too big. A few years ago, most Essbase cubes had 5-9 dimensions and since users could actually comprehend them, it was good. Modern day Frankencubes have 10+ dimensions and users find it impossible to locate the data in the cube. Every day we hear cries of "I started drilling and all my numbers disappeared." Smart View Personal Views are supposed to cure that. First of all, administrators will be able to set default queries. If you have to specify a version, scenario, and year before any numbers appear, then your default query would include an already selected year, version, and scenario. That's not all, though: if you have a user that only needs to analyze 8 of 10 dimensions in your Essbase sales cube, then the user can be set to only see a slice of the cube with those dimensions being the only ones that the user ever sees. In other words, you can have one master cube that appears to be several different cubes depending on the user audience. This will allow a company to build one very large ASO cube with tons of dimensions without having users' heads explode (never a good thing).
• Additional Data Sources. The new version of Smart View will add OBIEE, Hyperion Strategic Finance, and Hyperion Enterprise as data sources. That's right: Hyperion Enterprise is not only still alive and kicking, it's getting its Excel add-ins (Retrieve and Analyst) replaced with Smart View. Welcome to the 21st century, Enterprise users.
• Ease of Use Improvements. There will be better flow of the user interface, default POVs (points of view), and default aliases in the new release. There is also a much improved connection manager. The old one required a user to know about provider types and sensitive URL strings. The new one looks more like Windows Explorer and is, in my opinion, 149 times easier to use. A user can finally log on without a crash course in Quantum Hyperion Dynamics.
• Hyperion Planning. In the words of the great Al, "Excel will be the primary interface for Planning going forward. While users are happy doing HFM entries over the web, they seem to really want to use Excel as their means of sending in Planning data. Smart View is being expanded to become the primary interface for Hyperion Planning." He did say that it would be 2009 before Smart View was that primary interface, but there are several improvements to Smart View 11's access of Planning including form-based ad-hoc planning (you can now make forms that give a user a starting point for "ad-hoc planning"), the ability to launch Smart View from Planning web forms, and document attachment support.

Planning 11 will include the new Calculation Manager (which runs as part of EPM Architect). This will allow a user to graphically write rules that will become calc scripts behind the scenes. Yes, I know this sounds like Hyperion Business Rules circa 2004, but I'm told from someone who beta tested the new Calc Manager that it writes much better calc scripts than it did before. A user can even import templates with well-written scripts right into Calc Manager. Planning 11 also has a number of UI improvements including attaching documents, showing member formulas from a data form, hiding and showing rows dynamically, job status viewing, and folder security. As part of the Planning 11 beta, I've seen an entire 77-slide PowerPoint (yes, seventy-seven slides) on the new features of Planning 11. I encourage anyone who has Planning to request a copy of the new feature list from your Oracle Account Manager, because the changes to Planning in System 11 are massive. Once the product becomes generally available, I'll probably schedule a webcast to walk everyone through the new Planning 11 features.

Life Cycle Management will be released as part of System 11. This tool will allow an administrator to easily move objects (or entire applications) across servers. It's all done using XML files, and one of the beta testers told me it's very slick. The nice part about Hyperion using XML to do the application/object transfer is that if you wanted to, you could directly edit the XML files since they're plain text. This opens up the possibility of writing our own editors for objects without being stuck in the Hyperion way of doing things.

The other change Al mentioned for Oracle Hyperion EPM System 11 was that HAB (Hyperion Application Builder), Hyperion Objects, and a few other web-based development initiatives Hyperion tried over the years were all being replaced with Oracle JDeveloper (in Oracle ADF). While I'm glad that we're getting a single development environment, I'm sort of tired of having to change technologies every year or two. I'm hoping that they stick with JDeveloper for at least the rest of this decade.