interRel Repeats as EPM & BI Partner of the Year

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

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

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

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

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

Quiroz on interRel in the News

Everyone's talking about interRel this week:

• On Edward becoming an Oracle Ace Director. Congratulations and well deserved Edward!
  

• On Pearson Education and interRel winning an Oracle Excellence Award.
  
• On interRel receiving EPM Solution of the Year award.
  
• On interRel achieving operational and management excellence.
  
• On Oracle honoring all the winners of the Titan Awards.
  

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.

OpenWorld - Sunday, Sep. 21

12:51AM: OMFG, interRel won EPM Solution of the Year

We won.  We actually won.  I take back everything I ever said about these awards being political, because we just won the Titan Award for best EPM Solution.  This is the first time this award has ever been given out at Oracle (they added it after the Hyperion acquisition) and interRel will forever be known as the original winners.  The awards were 5+ hours ago, and I'm still stunned.  I was half right, though, in that the honorable mentions for EPM Solution went to Deloitte and IBM, but we actually won (proving that once in a while long shots come in first and good guys don't always finish last).  For anyone that put $2 down on interRel to win, you just won $8,000.

Deloitte won either winner or honorable mention in something like 12 of the 17 categories.  They actually won 4 of them.  IBM, Bearing Point, and Accenture all showed up as winners or honorable mentions too.  For the Manufacturing Industry Solution award, I can't tell you who won (because I don't remember), but I was thrilled to see interRel get Honorable Mention (along with, shock of shocks, Deloitte).

We should go back in time a bit to what happened at the awards ceremony.  The awards were held in the Hilton (same place as the Oracle ACE Director briefing earlier in the day) in a massive ballroom.  The place probably held 5,000+ people.  The host for the event was Ted Bereswill, Sr. Vice President for North America Alliances and Channels.  Jeff Henly (Oracle Chairman of the Board) was also there to meet and greet the winners of each of the awards.  Tyler Prince, Group VP for Applications Alliances and Channels presented the awards.

Eduardo Quiroz, Michael Manes, and I took seats half way back.  The awards started off fairly predictably with Deloitte winning 2 of the first 5 awards and receiving honorable mention for a few others.  Over the course of the night, Deloitte ended up winning so many awards (not EPM Solution, though) that we were jokingly referring to these as the "Titan Awards brought to you by the good folks at Deloitte."  The new Deloitte logo has a green dot at the end to show they're environmentally savy.  Eduardo speculated that we would be more likely to win if we put a green dot somewhere in our logo.  Maybe the dot over our interRel 'i'?

For each of the awards, they announced the honorable mentions first.  They then told what the winners did for their clients to win the award followed by some details about the partner and then finally, they revealed the name of the winner.  I have no idea what they said about what we did to win the EPM award.  I just remember the stunned silence of the entire room when they announced, "and the winner for EPM Solution is... interRel Consulting.  Edward Roske, CEO, will be accepting their award."  I think the collective thought going through the other 19,999 partners' minds was something along the lines of, "interRel who?"  I remembered some people in the audience clapping as we walked up.

Eduardo and I took a while to get up to the stage since we were halfway back in the room.  On stage, we shook the hands of the Oracle luminaries and then they gave us a huge crystal award/cup with interRel etched into it along with the award we won.  I held the cup like a baby as the photographer took a few pictures.  We shook hands again and I took interRel's newest child (the award, I mean) back to our seats.  As we left the stage, the Deloitte people sitting towards the front gave us a round of applause.  I felt that was very classy, and I'm going to make a point to reach out to the Deloitte EPM team since they could have been sore losers but instead were gracious in defeat.  That's the type of people I want to work with.

When we got back to our seats, a few people around us gave us high fives and said congratulatory things.  We sat patiently through a few more awards and were pleased to see our logo on the screen as one of the three finalists for the Manufacturing Industry Solution award.

After the ceremony, there was a reception at the back of the ballroom.  We mingled for a bit.  I carried around the award cup like a proud papa (yes, I do realize that it's a piece of crystal and not a real baby: I'm not that delusional) as I walked around not finding anything to eat.

We ditched the reception after introducing some of our competitors to little Baby Award.  We ended up over at the restaurant at the Serrano Hotel.  I had potato & leek soup, tofu with Thai chili sauce, and a tempura banana split.  While it was a lot of food, I'm still hungry.  Until this meal, all I had eaten today was a granola bar and a banana.  My conference diet is starting in earnest.

Today was a whirlwind.  It started at 9ish with the ACE Director briefing and has been going non-stop ever since.  Tomorrow will be just as busy.  The first keynote of the day is at 9AM from Charles Phillips, Oracle's president.  I then have non-stop events (some overlapping) until midnight.  I'm hoping to get some blogging in during the middle.

Did I mention we won the award for best EPM Solution?  Out of more than 20,000 Oracle partners in the world, we won the inaugural EPM Solution award.  How cool is that?  I am so high on life right now that I will never touch back down to Earth.  I don't think I'll be sleeping tonight.  I promise not to dwell on the award tomorrow, but tonight?  I'm reveling.

Oracle, you're now my friend for life.

6:30PM: Kopcke Meeting with ODTUG

I just had a meeting with John Kopcke, Mark Conway from Oracle, and the ODTUG board of directors.  It went very well, because John seemed extremely receptive to ODTUG Kaleidoscope becoming the home for the technical content that the Hyperon Solutions conferences used to have.  He did also acknowledge (as did Mark Conway) that no one seems to be getting the mailers from Oracle about the state of EPM.  We all agreed to work together to distribute information to the former Hyperion community as well as the Oracle world that's interested in the former Hyperion world.

I may never get used to saying "Oracle EPM."  I know that "Hyperion" is no more, but it's going to take me some time to get used to it.

I'm now racing back to my hotel to change clothes for the Oracle Titan Awards.  These are the awards given away by the Oracle PartnerNetwork to North American partners.  We're nominated in a couple of categories (Manufacturing Industry Solution and EPM Solution) but we're like 4,000 to 1 underdogs.  These awards always go to huge companies to Deloitte, IBM, Accenture, Bearing Point, and the like.  It's basically awards like these come down to politics: the winners are the wons who can drive revenue to the company giving the awards.  Still, it's nice to be nominated, so I'll go put on a tie, shake a few hands, and try to find something vegetarian to eat.

5:25PM: Kopcke's EPM Roadmap Session

I just introducted John Kopcke, SVP of the EPM Global Business Unit.  With the OAUG and ODTUG groups together, there are around 150 people in the room, so it looks decently full.  Before introducing Kopcke, I spoke briefly about the two user groups and how they work together.

Kopcke started off by saying, "there's really no longer a distinction between Hyperion products and Oracle products.  It's a single Oracle platform (even though the heritage of a lot of the EPM unit came from Hyperion." He also said, and it got a round of applause, "no, there is no enablement fee to go from System 9 to 11.1.1."

I love how much Hyperion has affected Oracle and it pervades John's entire presentation.  Rather than "what's Oracle's plan for Hyperion" it's more like "what will Hyperion be doing for Oracle EPM?"  Here's another quote from John just now: "Oracle used to dablle in a lot of business intelligence products... but to be very clear, while all of those products are being supported, but they're not the strategic director.  EPM Fusion Edition is our direction going forward."  Music to my ears.

Kopcke's talking about how EPM enables "Management Excellence" above and beyond "Operational Excellence."  Suffice to say that operationally excellent companies focus on the transaction systems (like GLs and ERPs) whereas management excellence firms capture that data but then go beyond it to perform greater and faster levels of analysis.  What differentiates a Southwest Airlines from Northwest Airlines?  They both have ERPs.  They bought have invoicing systems.  They both have budgets, and so on.  The simple answer is that Southwest Airlines has management excellence and Northwest is on a path to bankruptcy (correction: they're already there).

Kopcke made a good point that BI (Business Intelligence) is the most overused and underdefined term in enterprise software.  He asked "if I told you that next week I was going to go do Business Intelligence, would any of you have any idea what work I would be doing?"  Compare that to GL (General Ledger) which is well understood in the industry, and you realize how BI means different things to different companies (and even different people within those companies).

Per Kopcke, "SmartView is our strategic direction for Office technology going forward."  People have speculated over that for months, so now that Kopcke's spoken, we can take that one to the bank.  Start learning Smart View and you'll be sure Oracle will be expanding it going forward. 

John's talking about the new things in 11.1.1.  One of the things I was happy to hear is that Oracle has been focusing on improving the installation from the old dark ages of Hyperion System 9 installs.  He made me laugh outloud when he said "raise your hand if you survived a System 9 upgrade?  You people all deserve t-shirts."

He just talked about the current world record for dimensions in an Essbase cube is 104 dimensions.  The record for members in a dimension is 51,000,000.  Those are ASO cubes, obviously.  If you're not using Essbase ASO, you should be.

John's talking a lot about the strategic direction for products.  Here's another quote: "Hyperion Financial Reporting is Oracle's strategic tool for creating for financial reports," so put to rest, everyone, those rumors of Financial Reporting's demise.  It's here to stay and it's their go-forward canned financial report writer.  In response to a question from me, Kopcke also said that Oracle's strategic direction for budgeting is Hyperion Planning, their direction for financial consolidations is Hyperion Financial Management, and their strategic direction for OLAP is... Oracle OLAP and Essbase.  Basically, there are reasons to use both (per John Kopcke).  To oversimplify, Oracle OLAP is for OLAP on top of Oracle data warehouses.  Essbase is for OLAP on multiple data databases and against non-Oracle sources.

I appreciate John Kopcke taking the time to talk to all of us.  I always enjoy hearing him speak, because not only does he have a dry sense of humor (a man after my own heart), but he's extremely knowledgeable.  I learn more in 15 minutes with him than hours with some others who are supposed to also be visionaries in the EPM space.  I'm supposed to the 2nd floor to meet further with John Kopcke and the ODTUG leadership about partnering up more in the future.  I hope I can talk him into coming to ODTUG Kaleidoscope for a keynote.

3:57PM: ODTUG Hyperion Symposium

I'm back in room 3016.  ODTUG was taking a break (for snacks, compliments of Oracle) from 3-3:30.  Sean is now over in the OAUG room (3022) giving a talk on Hyperion Planning best practices.  I asked a few people how Sean's "Hyperion Reporting Toolset" presentation went.  The feedback was positive.  A couple of people mentioned that it was a bit too high-level, but it's difficult to cover all the Hyperion front-end reporting tools in an hour at anything below a 10,000 feet level.  Overall, though, people seemed to appreciate the information.

I spoke for about 5 minutes on the future of the ODTUG Hyperion Developer's SIG.  Right now, I'm the President of the ODTUG Hyperion Developer's SIG (I think I've mentioned that before) until we load elections at Kaleidoscope 2009.  I mentioned that I'm actively recruiting members for the ODTUG Hyperion Developer's SIG Board of Directors.  I think we have 6 members on the board right now.  If you're interested in ODTUG Hyperion Developer's SIG (and/or helping drive the direction for Hyperion content at Kaliedoscope 2009), send me an e-mail at eroske@odtug.com.  After the success of the Essbase track at this year's Kaleidoscope, we need all the help we can get arranging next year's conference.

Mark Rittman is talking (in a faux British accent) about integrating Essbase and OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition).  As he points out, there are a lot of places where Essbase and OBIEE intersect:

• Essbase can be a data source for OBIEE
  
• OBIEE can be a source for Essbase
  
• SmartSpace can access both OBIEE and Essbase
  
• Workspace can host OBIEE Dashboards, Answers, Delivers, and Publihser.
  
• Informatica PowerCenter is the strandard ETL tool for Oracle BI apps and Essbase
  

Mark's a great speaker (though I may think that just because he's British), but there was a problem with his clip-on microphone, so he's hard to hear from the back of the room unless he's holding one of the microphones from the stands.  Mark will be speaking until 4:25PM and then the OAUG Hyperion folks will be coming to this room for Kopcke's talk at 4:30.

3:00PM: OAUG Hyperion SIG

I'm in the back of the room at the OAUG Hyperion SIG meeting.  Tina Weiss is at the front of the room who works with user groups at Oracle and reports to Mary Lou Dopart.  She's talking about the value of user groups at Oracle.  It's boring me to tears, frankly, because it's not very Hyperion/EPM-centric.  She did mention that 5 months ago, the regional HUGs (Hyperion User Groups) decided to affiliate with OAUG.  The problem is that the individual Hyperion users have no idea where they specifically are supposed to be going (OAUG, ODTUG, IOUG, or ???).  I think this message has been communicated poorly (if at all) to the user community.

Since I'm bored to tears (sorry), here are my personal thoughts on where users of Hyperion products should go:

• OAUG: End users of the product who don't spend time developing and/or administering Hyperion.
• ODTUG: Developers and administrators of Hyperion products who spend a lot of time working with Hyperion.  Essbase users probably want to join ODTUG too.
• IOUG: Oracle DBAs who want to expand their IT offerings at their companies to include Essbase.
• Quest: Don't bother.
• There are also a few industry-specific user groups that may or may not be creating Hyperion SIGs.

Tina's wrapping up her part and turning it over to Mark Conway from Oracle's EPM Global Business Unit (that's the group that rolls up to John Kopcke).  Mark is the Oracle liaison to the OAUG Hyperion SIG.  Fittingly, he's also the Oracle liaison to ODTUG Hyperion SIG.  He just mentioned that the Hyperion community has complained about poor communication to the users.  Mark's talking about Oracle working with Regina from OAUG (and Tina from Oracle who presented a bit ago).

He brought up the fact that John Kopcke's user group letter from the summer didn't make it to a lot of people.  I'm glad that Oracle realizes that since I know of only 4 people who got the letter and it supposedly went out to thousands.  He just said that "80% of the Hyperion users will go to OAUG and 20% of them will go elsewhere.  OAUG will be the home for the vast majority of the customer base."

I don't think that it's true that 80% of the Hyperion users will gravitate to OAUG.  While I am a part of OAUG Hyperion SIG so am a little biased, OAUG is all about the Hyperion applications.  There are far more users of Essbase than there are of Planning and HFM put together and OAUG is for application users not Essbase developers.  Maybe Oracle doesn't realize how many of the type of users that join Hyperion user groups are not end users of the product.  I suspect it's going to be more like 50% OAUG, 40% ODTUG, and 10% all the other groups put together.  That said, there are about 30 more people right now in the ODTUG Hyperion SIG room than in the OAUG Hyperion SIG room, so maybe ODTUG and OAUG will flip-flop.

Ed Delise, OAUG Hyperion SIG president, is now talking about the SIG accomplishments over the last year.  They now have 500 members, a board of directors with domain leads, a Hyperion e-mail list, monthly e-Learning sessions, a website with resources/calendar.  He wants to have 1,500 members by end of this year and 4,000 by the end of next year.  I think this is way too aggressive, because Oracle is not being forthcoming with the previous HUG attendees.

Ed announced that elections for board positions will not be until May of 2009 (argh).  In May, they will be voting at Collaborate for the following board positions: President, Member Services, and Oracle Liaison.  In September at OOW 09, they're voting for Program/Education, Marketing/Communications. and HUG Liaison board members.

I'm surprised to hear that OAUG Hyperion SIG doesn't even have approved bylaws yet, but I'm glad to hear their goal is to have them by October 31.  They want to sync up all the local HUGs with the local OAUG Geos by June of 2009 (good luck).

Ed's encouraging everyone to join the OAUG Hyperion SIG.  He just said the cost for a company to join OAUG is $725.  He pointed out that you have to be a member to be president of the Hyperion SIG, attend the e-Learning sessions, or get any of the Hyperion SIG content from the Knowledge Factory.  Have I complained enough times yet that charging for on-line information should be a criminal offense?  It is worth noting that joining OAUG only has to be done at a company level and not individual members.  That said, they're still charging which the HUGs never did, so... I'll stop complaining now.  Ed's opening it up for Q&A now, so I'm going to be heading back over to the ODTUG room now.

Ed just talked briefly about the differences between OAUG and ODTUG.  He said that business users of Essbase go with OAUG and developers with Essbase go to ODTUG.  He joked that "if you like looking at code" join ODTUG.  Speaking as someone who never looks at any code more complicated than an Essbase calc script, I'm a member of both.  I'm a member of OAUG for the business-side of Hyperion and ODTUG for the technical side, and I'm not a code by any means (by background is in finance, actually).  Also, there are certainly non-Essbase developers joining ODTUG (Hyperion Planning admins, for instance).  That said, ODTUG is definitely NOT the home for strictly end user types of the Hyperion products.  If your job consists of accessing existing implementations of Hyperion Strategic Finance or Hyperion Performance Scorecard (for instance), then you should be joining OAUG.

2:08PM: ODTUG Hyperion Symposium

I just finished up my "How Essbase Thinks" presentation.  Attendance was a lot better than I expected.  I thought there would be about 50 people, but it was closer to 100.  Normally, people leave towards the end of a session (to get somewhere else) but in this case, people kept arriving.  I guess their flights got in late (or maybe they heard that the last 15 minutes of my presentations are often the best...).

I enjoyed giving the presentation mostly because I got to spend 30+ minutes talking about ASO (Aggregate Storage Option).  I love ASO, but most people only care about Block Storage.  I've seen databases built in ASO that have upwards of 17,000,000 members: cubes no one in his right mind would ever try to build under BSO.

I turned it over to Sean Bernhoit to talk about when to use which Hyperion reporting tools.  Originally, I was going to deliver that talk too, but I wanted to share the speaking with other people.  He's talking until 3PM, so I have time to go visit the OAUG Hyperion SIG.  It's just down the hall in Moscone West 083022.

11:48 AM: ACE Director Briefing

I'm sitting in the Oracle ACE Director briefing in the Hilton San Francisco.  I was pleased to find out that the Hilton is about 100 feet directly across the corner from my hotel.  This let me sleep in a bit more than I will be able to the other days.

There are about 30 ACE Directors in the room which means that around 60% of the ACE Directors are here at OpenWorld.  Tim Tow and Duncan Mills are at my table, and there are some familiar faces at other tables around the room.  First on the agenda is a briefing from Mark Townsend, Oracle VP of Product Management for Oracle Database.  He's talking right now about how much larger Oracle's market share is than the other top databases put together.  He's also talking about how much faster Oracle is getting in Oracle 11g.

I really can't write about any of the things Oracle will be sharing with us at this briefing due to a non-disclosure agreement I signed when becoming an ACE Director.  So what can I write about?  Well, I guess I'm safe in saying that everyone needs to pay very, very close attention to Larry Ellison's keynote on Wednesday afternoon.  If there is something big to announce, it'll come out during Larry's keynote.  I'm not saying that there is or is not something interesting to announce, but Larry does like to save the best announcements of the week for himself.  Speaking as a CEO of my own company, I completely understand, by the way.

I'm leaving at noon to head over to Moscone West for the ODTUG Hyperion Symposium.  I'm meeting Eduardo at the shuttle stop here at the Hilton.  It's not that far of a walk, but the shuttle has the nice benefit of allowing me to sit down and blog more.  The Oracle EPM update for the ACE Directors is from 3-3:30PM, so I won't be here for it.  This is too bad because this is definitely the most relevant for me (and you!).

While I'm here in this meeting, interRel's senior practice director is attending the Oracle PartnerNetwork Forum.  It's also here at the Hilton (in a much larger room) and there's a briefing going on over there that is not quite so secretive and forward-looking as the one I'm in.  If something interesting comes out of the partner forum, he will let me know and I'll share it here.

At the rate I'm blogging at the moment, I'll double the total content of this blog by Thursday.  Look for my wordiness to slack off as the week gets busier and busier (and I develop a nasty case of carpal tunnel).

10:03 AM: Walking to the Hilton

I'm writing this entry from my iPhone while waiting for the traffic light to change.  I was just surfing the net while waiting for the elevator down to the lobby.  I found a press release that says the attendance at this year's OpenWorld is expected to be 43,000 people and there will be just under 1,800 presentations.  The 43,000 attendees is less than I was predicting.  I've been saying 45 to 50 thousand, because they had 43,000 last year and with the addition of BEA, I figured they'd be increasing the attendance by at least a couple of thousand.  Apparently, I forgot to factor in the current state of the economy (Recession or media hype? Discuss.).

I just missed the light because I was iPhone blogging.  Well, I guess I have 3 more minutes of blog time.  Continuing with the theme of this entry, there's another press release from Oracle discussing the keynote speakers.  I will be missing tonight's keynote (with James Carville, Mary Matalin, and the mayor of San Francisco) because I'm attending a meeting between John Kopcke and the ODTUG Hyperion SIG.

I read somewhere that San Francisco has the highest incidents of pedestrians being hit by cars in the USA.  I don't know if it's true or not, but judging by my personal experiences, I'm completely willing to believe it.

9:35 AM: My hotel room

I just woke up.  I hate mornings.  Yes, I know it's 11:35AM in my home time zone, but it's still morning, and I hate that.  Why couldn't they hold the Oracle ACE briefing starting at 10PM instead of 10AM?  I asked that rhetorically, but part of me really wishes they would hold meetings in the middle of the night.