#6. Disbanding of the Hyperion User Groups

The polite way to refer to the Hyperion User Groups (adorably referred to as the "HUGs") pre-Oracle merger was... decentralized.  There was no common organizing body (unless you count Hyperion offering to help fund some of the HUGs in some areas).  The HUGs just operated as 25+ regional entities with no coordination between them.  Even though there was no central governing organization, all the HUGs held meetings with invited speakers on Hyperion topics, Oracle would frequently speak along with clients and vendors, and in general, dues weren't charged (although their were a couple of notable exceptions like Michigan's annual HUG event).

This led to some interesting regional differences between the HUGs.  Some areas like Southern California didn't have a HUG to speak of (for the last few years, at least).  The last time SoCal tried to hold a HUG meeting, twelve people attended.  In all of Southern California, home to one of the largest concentrations of Hyperion clients in the USA, twelve people made it to their last user group meeting.

Other areas had very strong HUGs that met quarterly.  In North Texas, the quarterly meetings attracted anywhere between 50 and 120 people depending on who was speaking.  South Texas also had a strong HUG that attracted roughly the same numbers every quarter.  Even smaller Hyperion communities like Iowa, Michigan, and upstate New Jersey still managed to put on an annual user group meeting that attracted up to 50 people.

Some of the HUGs were controlled by users, whereas others were dominated by consulting companies, but at least they were holding meetings.  All told, across the 25+ HUGs, you could pretty much find a user group meeting somewhere in the USA at least once a week if you were a HUG junkie.

And then Oracle arrived.  Oracle insisted that the HUGs be under a common user group umbrella.  Oracle offered up OAUG, IOUG, and Quest and each was invited to present to the 25+ HUG leaders about why they should "disband" their local HUG and go under the banner of the much larger group.  For reasons I don't understand, ODTUG was not invited to present to the HUGs even a large number of HUG attendees were developers/administrators.

After various pitches from the umbrella groups, the HUG leadership (usually, without a vote of their individual HUG's members, sadly) decided to go under the leadership of OAUG in the summer of 2008.  I have no idea why the HUG leaders thought this was a good idea, but I know for a fact many of them are wishing they could take it back.

What's happened since the HUGs gave up their independence?  Some of the HUGs ceased to exist while others kept meeting as usual... basically ignoring that they were now part of OAUG.  Most of the HUGs are in total disarray because neither the leadership nor the users even understands if their groups still exist.

While it's true that Hyperion/Oracle definitely doesn't provide sponsorship dollars and support to the individual HUGs anymore, there's nothing stopping them from existing.  They don't even really have to coordinate with OAUG's Hyperion SIG if they don't want to.  Either way, the users have no clue what's going on, they have no where to turn for information, and that's bad for everyone.

Personally, I think that Oracle did a great job of acquiring Hyperion from a corporate standpoint, but the systematic dismantling of the user groups and the annual Solutions conference was abysmally handled.  While I think the acquisition deserves an "A" overall, how Oracle handling the users gets a solid "F".

Abstracts Due for Kaleidoscope and Collaborate

The deadlines for submitting presentations to the Kaleidoscope and Collaborate conferences are rapidly approaching. Collaborate is being held in May of 2009 in Orlando (yet another conference in Orlando, yippee...) and their abstract submission deadline is Friday, October 31. Kaleidoscope is held in June of 2009 in Monterey, CA (hey, someplace I've never been to a conference!) and their deadline is Monday, November 3.

Why bother?

So the burning question is, why should you submit a presentation and endure an hour of potential humiliation in front of complete strangers (or worse, people who actually know you)? The most important reason is that both of these conferences give you a free pass to the whole conference for speaking. This is worth around $2,000. It also makes it a whole lot easier to convince your boss to pay for the travel costs to the conference if your admission fee, the most expensive part of the trip, is paid for. What boss would, even in the current economic climate, reject a free week of training for you?

There are some other less major reasons for you to consider presenting. If you're an altruistic type (or just trying to weasel your way into heaven), consider that you're helping educate the rest of mankind. If you're a career climber, putting "Speaker on Hyperion at national convention in 2009" looks very nice on a resume. If you're one of those afraid of public speaking, it's probably not a bad idea to get outside your comfort zone, face your fears, and talk to a room of people for 60 minutes.

Which conference?

Now that I have you convinced that you should submit a presentation (you can always change your mind and back out later), which conference wants your presentation?

Collaborate is more for end users, so if you want to do a case study of your company's Hyperion, Essbase, BI, or EPM implementation, submit to Collaborate. Now submitting to Collaborate is a bit confusing. You need to decide which user group you wish to submit under (IOUG, OAUG, or Quest) since Collaborate is a mixture of three different user groups. I personally suggest OAUG since they have the strongest Hyperion SIG.although if you have an Essbase presentation, you might want to submit it under IOUG's Essbase SIG. Once you go to the OAUG submission portion of Collaborate (http://oaug.collaborate09.com/presenterinfo/), you have to select a track to put your paper into. You'll notice immediately that Hyperion, Essbase, and EPM are not mentioned under any tracks. What I'm told is that Hyperion/Essbase/EPM presentations should all be submitted under the "BI/Warehousing" track with "Hyperion" selected as the product. You then have to fill out a ton of questions.

Kaleidoscope is more for developers/administrators of the former Hyperion products so if you want to do more of a training session (or if your case study has a technical nature to it), submit to Kaleidoscope. Submitting to Kaleidoscope is much more straight-forward and there are fewer questions to fill in than with the Collaborate submissions.

Getting Accepted!

Since I'm one of the abstract reviewers for the selection committees for both conferences, I thought it might be helpful to tell you what I tend to look for (and not look for) in submissions:

• Don't submit one hour infomercials for your company or product. No matter how well you disguise your submission, the reviewers can easily sniff out a "marketing-centric" presentation. If you want to market for an hour, buy one of the vendor sponsored presentation slots.
• Don't make a presentation so high-level that no one walks out of the session having learned anything. Your number one goal should be to educate your attendees, so make your abstract and title reflect that you intend to teach people
• Do be creative. If I see one more presentation titled "How We Implemented Hyperion _____ at ______", I'm going to scream. Submit a presentation that will stand out from the rest because no one else is teaching something on that topic. It doesn't have to be a one-time only presentation, but it should be something that other people aren't likely to be presenting on as well. For instance, I regularly submit a presentation called "How Essbase Thinks," and it usually gets accepted, because no one else is presenting on the topic of Essbase under the covers. If you submit a presentation on using the Essbase Excel Add-In, expect to be one of 5+ submissions on this topic.
• Do understand your conference audience. Again, if you submit a high-level case study to Kaleidoscope, you're going to get rejected. If you submit a developer-centric presentation to Collaborate, you're going to get rejected. Know who the people are who tend to go to each conference.

So by October 31, submit your Collaborate presentation:

http://oaug.collaborate09.com/presenterinfo/submit/

And by November 3, submit your Kaleidoscope presentation:

http://www.technicalconferencesolutions.com/pls/caat/caat_abstracts_upd.main?conference_id=42

Good luck on your submissions!

Breaking News: It's Official, Kaleidoscope to Replace Solutions and Top Gun

Lost in the midst of the "HUGs are joining OAUG fanfare" is this sentence in John Kopcke's letter talking about the Kaleidoscope conference:

This conference will replace the technical content of Hyperion Top Gun and the breadth of presentations of the Hyperion Solutions conference.

In other words, we finally have the official word from Oracle on which conference will replace the beloved Hyperion Solutions conference: Kaleidoscope. This is absolutely shocking to me on a couple of levels:

1. I'm the co-chair of the Hyperion track at Kaleidoscope. You'd think someone would have given me a heads up that our conference was going to suddenly take on the 4,500 users from the 2007 Solutions conference.
2. I thought Collaborate was going to be the successor to Solutions.

On that second point, while Collaborate was discussed in Kopcke's letter, the praise was "less than effusive." Collaborate was first mentioned in Kopcke's letter along with the other conferences (Collaborate, OpenWorld, and Kaleidoscope):

We saw many of you in Denver at Collaborate08 taking advantage of the Hyperion track and meeting with other users and Hyperion experts, we see that Hyperion developers are still registering for this month's ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 in New Orleans with its special Hyperion track, and we look forward to seeing all of you in September during Oracle OpenWorld 2008 in San Francisco.

"We saw many of you... taking advantage of the Hyperion track?" That's a ringing endorsement. Well, surely there must be more mentioning of the Collaborate conference in Kopcke's e-mail, right? Actually, no. Collaborate isn't mentioned again in the entire e-mail. Talk about damning with faint praise. On the other hand, here's what he had to say about ODTUG Kaleidoscope (in addition to the above sentence where it's mentioned along with Collaborate and OpenWorld):

Next month's ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2008 conference will be a great opportunity for Essbase developers to become familiar with the ODTUG community. This conference will replace the technical content of Hyperion Top Gun and the breadth of presentations of the Hyperion Solutions conference. Kaleidoscope 2008 is offering an agenda of hard-core Essbase information brought to you by some of the most senior Essbase gurus from Oracle, partners, and customers alike. To coincide with this announcement, ODTUG will reinstate the early bird registration fee for the conference to allow Essbase developers just learning about Kaleidoscope to register at the discounted rate available through June 14th at ODTUG Kaleidoscope website.

That's damned near an advertisement for Kaleidoscope from the Great Kopcke, himself (I love that guy). Hell, there's even a plug for an extension of the early bird registration rate until the 14th of June. Let's get beyond the sales pitch for a second, though.

Of course, the second sentence in that paragraph is the important one: "This conference will replace the technical content of Hyperion Top Gun and the breadth of presentations of the Hyperion Solutions conference." That's a rather tall order to live up to. Top Gun always had amazingly hard-core presentations on things like "Optimizing Shared Services by Configuring Java Garbage Collection Settings." Solutions 2007 had close to 300 presentations. While I'd agree that the presentations this year are very techie (I'm chairing an entire day on Optimizing Essbase, for instance), they aren't quite as geektastic as some of the Top Gun presentations. Also, Kaleidoscope has a long way to go to get to 300 presentations.

I suspect that Kaleidoscope will need to GBF (Get Big Fast) to handle the demand from the Hyperion user community that's been practicing involuntary Solutions abstinence for the last year. There were a ton of people who were very disappointed in Collaborate both in the user community and within Oracle, so I guess I'm not totally shocked by this announcement (although you'd think someone would have the courtesy to give me a bit of warning: thanks, Leakers!). I will say that if Kaleidoscope puts on a horrible Hyperion conference next year, you may see people drift away and never come back to the Hyperion conference fold. I'm a bit worried that Kaleidoscope can take on 4,500 users all at once, but I expect that it's going to be a slow climb back to that number (if that number is ever reached again, at all).

It's worth pointing out that Collaborate and OpenWorld's Hyperion tracks are by no means dead despite what Oracle may be saying right now. I'm presenting 2 (at the moment, subject to increase) Hyperion presentations at OpenWorld, so it's obvious that OpenWorld is continuing to offer Hyperion content. OAUG is the home of the Hyperion User Groups too, so I would hope that the Hyperion SIG makes sure there are presentations at Collaborate. I guess this means that some of us will have to attend 3+ conferences in 2009. Here's what I see happening (and this part is just a prediction) with Hyperion content:

• Kaleidoscope. This will be the replacement for Solutions and is where the vast majority of the old Hyperion Solutions (and Arbor Dimensions, if you can remember that far back) attendees will go. Kaleidoscope is put on by ODTUG, though, so I don't expect that they'll have a ton of client case study presentations.
• Collaborate. This will become the home for top management looking for presentations on how companies are using Hyperion. They'll be fairly high-level "here was our problem, here's how we solved it, and here's our ROI" type sessions. The Hyperion SIG will become a big part of directing this track.
  
• OpenWorld. This is where the gluttons for punishment will go (just kidding, Oracle; we tease because we love). Actually, this is where I see people who use multiple products at a not very deep level going. There will be Hyperion presentations at OpenWorld, they just won't be going very deep. I also think that IT executives looking to get the official word on Oracle's Hyperion direction directly from Oracle will go.
  

Congratulation homeless Solutions attendees: we now know where we're supposed to live. See you at Kaleidoscope in 2009 (which will hopefully NOT be held in Las Vegas or Orlando, or I just might boycott and go to Collaborate).

Breaking News: HUGs to OAUG Hyperion SIG

We all knew that the regional Hyperion User Groups (HUGs) were not long for this world. Oracle hates having too many user groups to deal with, so it's been politely insisting that the HUGs join with IOUG, Quest, or OAUG. In a decision that everyone has basically known for months now, the HUGs are no more: they've been folded into the OAUG (Oracle Application User Group) Hyperion SIG (Special Interest Group).

The only real question was when it would become official. With John Kopcke's letter from last Thursday, it's official now. Before I go any further, I should point out that I'm the Essbase co-domain lead (along with Tim Tow) of the OAUG Hyperion SIG. That said, if you doubt anything I'm telling you, read Kopcke's letter for yourself.

In the first paragraph of Kopcke's letter, John states:

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

The bolding was added by me. I like the last sentence of this paragraph ("the following describes which of the Oracle users groups would be best for you to join") because it promises great things for the rest of the e-mail. What's curious is that John then goes on to not really explain which user groups each person should join.

What is crystal clear, however, is that the HUGs are folding into OAUG's Hyperion SIG. Read down to the final paragraph under the "Stay Involved" heading and you'll find:

If you are already an active HUG member we encourage you to stay involved as the HUGs in North America align with the OAUG.

In other words, dearly departed HUG members, head out to http://hyperionsig.oaug.org/ and sign up for the SIG now. Going forward, this SIG will be your number one source (beyond this blog) for Hyperion information. Oracle often pushes information out through the user groups, so joining the Hyperion SIG is the only way to guarantee you get some of this information.

Part of me is extremely annoyed at the downfall of the HUGs, because several of them put on great quarterly and/or annual events that really focused on sharing information. Some of the HUGs were awful because either they didn't meet regularly, they were too controlled by Oracle employees, or they were dominated by partners, but the vast majority of the HUGs were great, grass roots organizations. The Hyperion SIG is also in its infancy: it has a lot of maturing to do and it needs a lot of new members.

Part of me, though, is excited about the possibility of an umbrella organization for the local meetings. A little consistency is a good thing, because it allows the best practices of one organization to be shared with those of another. An umbrella organization also can coordinate regional events to make sure they happen regularly. I'm curious when the first "OAUG Hyperion SIG GEO" (GEO = geographical user group) meeting will occur, because I'm anxious to see what, if any, changes will need to occur as part of being under OAUG. I'm taking a wait and see stance on that one.

I did find out that it costs absolutely nothing to join the Hyperion SIG. Even if you're not a member of OAUG, you can still join the SIG for free. It does cost money (a lot of it, actually) for a company to join OAUG, but again, you do not have to be an OAUG member to join the Hyperion SIG. I hope to see you at the Hyperion SIG meeting at OpenWorld.

John Kopcke's Letter to the Hyperion Community

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

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

Dear [name removed],

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborate 2008 Has 1,000+ Hyperion Attendees

I'm tempted to rename this blog from "Look Smarter" to "Updates on All the Hyperion Conferences and User Groups" because it seems like that's all there is to write about these days. I just found out today that the number of people registered for the Hyperion track at Collaborate 08 has surpassed 1,000, so it seemed like a great opportunity to give an update on the conference. Though Collaborate as a whole attracts over 7,500 people, I'm amazed that they have over 1,000 Hyperion registrants. 1,000 was their goal and the conference is still weeks away.

If you haven't registered yet, make sure you do it by April 3. After that, the price goes up from $1,495 to $1,695 (and you're basically paying the on-site rate). The easiest way to register is here: http://collaborate08.com/COLLABORATE08/Hyperion.htm.

It will give you two options. If you're a member of OAUG, IOUG, or Quest, it will direct you to register through their links. If you're just a common Hyperion user who doesn't belong to one of them fancy "citified" user groups, you'll be instructed to click here: https://www.questdirect.org/registration/default.aspx?ec=103.

No matter which route you take, please use discount code INTERREL08 when you register (we get credit for pointing you in the right direction).

There's a tremendous amount of information available on-line about the conference. There's an overall agenda for the conference in a nicely printable PDF. If you prefer a PDF just listing the Hyperion presentations there's one of those too. There's a search page pre-filtered for Hyperion sessions if you're looking to find specific presentations. OAUG also offers a personal agenda builder to create a schedule of just what you want to see.

As far as Hyperion presentations go, they were originally hoping to offer 100-150 Hyperion sessions. (I mentioned this on a blog posting back in February.) Due to the lack of quality presentations to choose from, they only ended up selecting a little over 80 presentations (hey, quality is better than quantity). Of those ~80 presentations, ~30 are being delivered by Oracle staffers (mostly the high-level intro presentations or the product direction presentations). interRel is delivering (either alone or with interRel clients) 25 or 26 presentations. That leaves around 25 sessions that non-interRel clients and other partners of Oracle are presenting. I'm wondering if the Collaborate folks should say "The Hyperion Track is brought to you by Oracle and the good folks at interRel"...

Since they spread the ~80 presentations over 19 timeslots, a couple of the timeslots are pretty sparse. Some hours have as few as 2 presentations while other slots have up to 7 presentations. There are a few time slots where interRel isn't presenting anything and then there are weird times like 2:15PM on Monday when 3 OUT OF 4 presentations are by interRel.

Of the interRel presentations, I'm delivering 9 or 10 of them. Tracy McMullen is doing another 8 or 9 and we have another 13 people coming to the conference to help deliver the remainder. Oh, and they're staffing the booth too. If you want to come by and visit us at Collaborate, we're in booth 963. You can also visit Tracy and me at our book signings. Apparently, there will a bookstore at Collaborate selling books on Oracle topics (including copies of all of the different Look Smarter books we've written). On Tuesday and Wednesday from 12:30-1:30, they've asked us to come by the bookstore and sign copies of our books for our adoring fans (if any actually exist). If you wish for me to deface your book with my signature, please free to stop by.

I'm looking forward to seeing you in Denver!

Best Essbase Conference Ever?

Life is funny sometimes. Just when you think you know what's going to happen, you suddenly find yourself dragged in an entirely new direction.

If you read my post from February, I basically advised everyone to attend Collaborate because it was, frankly, bigger than the Oracle Developer Tool Users Group Kaleidoscope conference. There's no way, I said, that a conference with fewer than 10 presentations [note: I was off by a factor of 3] on Hyperion could do justice to all the products that Hyperion historically produced (60+). Mike Riley from ODTUG wrote me back (and commented on my blog entry) and he disagreed with my point that variety equals quality. To quote him exactly, "From an individual attendee's perspective, if I only had 17 sessions that I could attend, and each of those sessions had 10 tracks, does that mean I could see 170 presentations? No, I'm still limited to 17 presentations."

My e-mailed response to him started off with "You make a good point: if I had to choose from 150 mediocre presentations or 10 good ones, I would definitely choose quality over quantity." I then went on to say that his conference would need some serious help to achieve the quality that would make me go to it instead of a larger conference. I said that Kaleidoscope would have to have top-notch keynotes from the top Oracle brass, panels from recognized Hyperion gurus and developers, information packed presentations (not those horrible hour long infomercials) on topics people really wanted to learn about, and most importantly, a narrowed focus so that one product could be handled well rather than multiple products handled inadequately. I suggested they focus just on Essbase and leave Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management and the rest for another year.

I have to admit that I was being rather vocal to Mike about what I feel he should do with his conference, and I was pretty sure he was going to punch me (or the 21st century equivalent: flame me in a blog comment) for stepping on his turf. Mike turned out to be a much bigger individual than I am. He came back to me and said, basically, "you made some good points, so how would you like to head up the Hyperion track at Kaleidoscope?" In other words, "put your money where your mouth is, buddy, and let's see if you can really make something out of this!"

Well, I semi-accepted the challenge. Knowing that chairing an entire track was more than one man could handle, I volunteered my good friend, Tim Tow, to be co-chair along with me (although I'm pretty sure that Tim will no longer be my good friend once this is all over). Our first decision was to focus exclusively on Essbase this year since it's the most developer-oriented tool that Hyperion makes (that's widely used) although we briefly entertained the possibility of two Hyperion tracks (Essbase in one track and the Hyperion apps in the other).

The next 4+ weeks were hell. Putting together an entire track in less than a month is always difficult, and we weren't just aiming for a pretty good track (or even a "Hyperion Solutions conference" quality track). Proving that dreamers are alive and well in the Hyperion world, we decided to create "the greatest Essbase conference in the history of the world." If you're going to dream, dream big. We'll let history decide if we succeeded, but here are the basic facts:

• Keynotes. We wanted to have a headliner to kick the week off. We have two: John Kopcke and Robert Gersten (both SVPs from Oracle in the BI/EPM areas) will both be delivering keynotes.
• Presentations. We wanted to have at least as many hours of presentations as Solutions (timeslots, not total quantities of presentations). We ended up with 30+ hours of content starting on Sunday morning at 8AM and going until noon on Thursday. Some days have presentations until 6PM at night. 30 hours is more than double the number of hours that Solutions used to offer.
• Quality of presenters. Instead of waiting for the speakers we wanted to come to us, we went to them. We didn't see a single presentation submitted by Essbase developers, so we invited them to attend and they said yes. We asked the leaders from some of the Essbase forums (like Jeff McAhren from Health Markets) to attend and they said yes. We asked the top people at the largest Hyperion partners to speak, and they said yes. Of all of the people we invited to speak, only three declined the invitation.
• Themes. We wanted each day to be not just a high-level hitting of topics but rather a deep-dive on one key area of focus. As such, we have entire days devoted to optimization, the future of Essbase, programming, and more.
• Panels. We have panels with the Essbase development team, panels with Essbase optimization gurus, panels with large-scale implementation customers, and more. We have more panels than I've seen at all the Hyperion Solutions conferences in the last 5 years put together.
  

Have a look at the final agenda at http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/hyperion.html. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Is it practically perfect in every way? Well, there is one disconcerting issue. The current ballroom that's hosting the Hyperion Essbase track at Kaleidoscope can only hold 150 people. Based on the expected demand for the track above, they're expecting more than 150 people. While they're actively looking to get a bigger room for us, they may be limiting attendees to the first 150 people to register. My advice is not to delay or you might be told that all spaces in the Hyperion track are full.

If you're responsible for multiple products and you can only afford to go to one conference this year, you might want to consider Collaborate. If your job is to build or maintain Essbase cubes, though, you want to be a part of Kaleidoscope. Who knows if we'll ever be able to pull this off again? Early bird registration is up on March 25, so get over to the Kaleidoscope site and register now to get the cheaper rate (and guarantee your space).

Keep reading this blog for further updates as we get closer to the start of the Kaleidoscope conference. See you June 15-19 in New Orleans!

Oracle OpenWorld vs. Collaborate vs. Kaleidoscope

In response to my blog entry on February 6th, Robert posed an interesting question:

If you could only go to one conference (and pretend that you don't get an iPod at any of them :) ), which would you go to? ODTUG, COLLABORATE, or OpenWorld?

First of all, the iPod comment is in response to a post I made during OpenWorld. For being such a decent guy, Oracle decided to reward me with the coolest device ever created (well, as of today), an iPod Touch. Okay, it was a blatant bribe which I shamelessly accepted. I didn't let it cloud my coverage of OpenWorld, though. Most people agree that I was pretty negative on OpenWorld with the exception of my iTouch). [Editor's Note: the iPod Touch is the coolest device ever created, so take that wheel, cotton gin, and telephone.] My problem is that I keep comparing it to the late, great Hyperion Solutions conference. While Hyperion Solutions wasn't as great as the old Arbor Dimension conferences, it was far better than most software conferences.

I seriously doubt Collaborate or Kaleidoscope will be giving me another iTouch, so let's go with Robert's hypothetical and pretend that OpenWorld doesn't give out bribes either. Now which one would I attend if I could only go to one?

Collaborate. Without reservation. If I'm going to a conference, it's primarily to learn. As such, content is key.

I actually got asked a very similar question on Network 54's Essbase discussion board just yesterday (apparently, it's a popular question these days). To parrot what I said there, OpenWorld was very, very marketing-oriented. 80% of the fewer than 100 presentations in the Hyperion track were delivered by Oracle (in some cases, with clients/partners as co-speakers). COLLABORATE is supposed to have 100-150 presentations with 100+ of those delivered by clients and partners.

In the interest of full-disclosure, my company, interRel, is paying to be a 4-star partner of COLLABORATE. Why? Because we're hoping that COLLABORATE becomes the successor to to the Solutions conference. Solutions was a great opportunity to learn (partying was always secondary) and I refuse to believe it's dead with nothing to take it's mantle. We're investing a great deal of money with the assumption that something has to take the place of Hyperion Solutions conference, and it certainly isn't OpenWorld.

Is OpenWorld completely bad? Absolutely not. In addition to the great bribes, it's a much larger conference than COLLABORATE or ODTUG's Kaleidoscope, so if your thing is networking, by all means, go to OpenWorld. OpenWorld is the best place to get the official Oracle party line on upcoming releases and what not. OpenWorld is also the place to hear better keynotes (well, at least by More Famous People like Larry Ellison, himself). OpenWorld has better parties too. OpenWorld is also in San Francisco which is just a generally cooler town. In short, OpenWorld was very well organized, but since it's being put on by Oracle, it's about them getting out their message to their existing and prospective client base.

So why aren't I recommending Kaleidoscope (since I haven't been to that either)? Size, mostly. Their entire conference will have around 100 presentations, so their Hyperion track will most likely be fewer than 10 presentations. I've been to regional Hyperion User Group meetings that have more than that (well, the one interRel hosted in August of 2007 had 9, but close enough). While Kaleidoscope may one day grow their Hyperion track, it's going to be a long time until they equal the 100-150 presentations that COLLABORATE is supposed to have on Hyperion alone.

If you're only going to one Hyperion-oriented conference this year, register for COLLABORATE. If you've got money in the budget for two conferences, also go to OpenWorld. If you're a developer that finds both COLLABORATE and OpenWorld to be too much high-level fluff, then go to Kaleidoscope.

Oracle Conferences - ODTUG

In the good ole days of Hyperion, there was a single annual conference (at least in the USA) each year: Hyperion Solutions. There were also some regional user groups. Now that Oracle has taken over, I can't seem to keep track of all the conferences. There's OpenWorld in the fall (September 21-25 in 2008) which is put on by Oracle and is basically Oracle marketing Oracle. COLLABORATE is held in April (this year is April 13-17 in Denver) and it's put on by the various large Oracle User Group umbrella organizations (IOUG, OAUG, and Quest). At the moment, COLLABORATE seems to be the closest to taking on the banner of the late, great Hyperion Solutions conferences. I just found out this morning about another Oracle conference that's adding Hyperion content: Oracle Development Tools User Group's Kaleidoscope. Their upcoming conference is in June in New Orleans.

I was going to write a really long, extremely poetic blog entry about how to find out more information about ODTUG, but my good friend, Tim Tow, already blogged about it on Monday. Rather than have me repeat the links in his entry, I'll just direct you to Tim's blog. Tim's name is probably familiar to many of you: like me, he's been around the Hyperion world since the dinosaur days of Essbase. He's the founder of AppliedOLAP and he's probably the most active helper on all the Essbase forums around the web. I recommend that everyone bookmark his blog, because he does a great job of sharing technical information.

If you're interested in submitting a paper to the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference, the deadline has been extended to February 18.

Iowa Hyperion User Group

I'm currently freezing in the arctic tundra euphemistically referred to as "Des Moines, Iowa in mid-December." Des Moines just went through an ice storm. While ice storms are very sad and tragic (people die), I have to admit that ice storms make for gorgeous scenery. All the trees look like they've been dipped in glass.

I flew into Des Moines last night from Dallas (via Austin and Chicago). The temperature this morning was 12 degrees: I checked the weather in the USA Today, and it's colder right now in Des Moines than it is in Anchorage, Alaska. How stupid am I? Instead of a thick winter parka, I brought a polyester hoodie. Polyester hoodies are for staying warm during light summer breezes not The Great Ice Storm of Ought Seven.

So why am I in Des Moines on the 14th of December? I'm one of the two presenters at the Iowa Hyperion User Group. The keynote presenter (question: why am I never the keynote?) is John O'Rourke who's one of the Senior Directors of Hyperion at Oracle. He was at Hyperion for years and on a good note, made the jump to Oracle.

There are about forty people here (mostly clients, hurrah) which is impressive considering most people are surprised when they find out there's an Iowa Hyperion User Group at all. Every one of these people seems to be dressed more warmly than I am. Apparently, every one of these people is smarter than I am.

John O'Rourke's presentation is on the Hyperion Roadmap going forward. John acknowledged that the roadmap he's presenting is virtually identical to what was presented at OpenWorld. Interestingly, John isn't actually here in person. He's back East and his flight to Des Moines (via St. Louis) was cancelled. As such, he's doing the keynote via webcast. It's funny to me to think that I traveled to Iowa to watch a webcast. The audio is actually fairly high quality and the slides are coming across well. He started off by taking a poll of how many people in the room went to OpenWorld. About ten people raised their hands which, of course, John couldn't see. Giggle.

The start of his presentation covered the same overall "where does Hyperion fit into Oracle" information that we've all seen before. One thing I'm not sure I've written about before is that Oracle's new official policy is that Essbase is not a database. This is surprising considering that for the last 15 years, everyone has said that Essbase is a database. The problem is that Oracle officially only has one database (the main Oracle relational database). So what is Essbase? It's not clear, but in the EPM diagram, it's part of the Business Intelligence Foundation. I've heard it referred as a server that delivers multi-dimensional data, so I guess it's a "Multi-dimensional server?" I'll have to get my head around that one.

Oracle has three milestones for product integration with Hyperion. The first milestone is "Align and Certify" which was already in the 9.3.1 release. One of the great things that Oracle did in 9.3.1 was to remove the license server. They also did rebranding (putting the Oracle name everywhere) as part of the Align & Certify initiative. The only thing they haven't done yet is to localize Hyperion to the tons of languages that

The second milestone is "Unify & Integrate" which is due in the first and second quarters in 2008 (most likely in the Kennedy/9.5 release of Hyperion). Some of the goals of this milestone are:

- Common user interface & workspace

- Common identity management

- Common application server

- Common data integration

- Common data access & search

- Interoperability across BI foundation

- Integrated access to applications

The third milestone is "Extend & Evolve." This will bring together the Hyperion applications with some of the other Oracle products like Retek, Siebel, Oracle ERP, and so forth.

John talked about some of the goals for what they're now calling "Financial Performance Management" (Planning, HFM, Strategic Finance, etc.). One of their goals for these products is to actually increase the integration with SAP R/3 and SAP BW. This is not unexpected, but it's nice to see it in print. John also announced that the intention is to migrate users of other Oracle products (like Oracle Financial Analyzer, PeopleSoft EPM or Oracle consolidations) to the superior Hyperion products. For example, those using PeopleSoft EPM should be migrating to Hyperion Planning. They're not going to insist on it, but it's clear that future development of budgeting functionality, for instance, will be focused on Hyperion Planning. Likewise, financial consolidation will be concentrated on the Hyperion Financial Management product. Tony (Hyperion's Iowa Account Manager who's the only one in the room, from what I can tell, from Oracle) said that the migration will be a credit towards Hyperion (not a one-for-one replacement) and also pointed out that there's not a migration path. In other words, it's a reinstallation because there's no tool to migrate say, Oracle Financial Analyzer to Essbase (or HFM).

Specific goals for HFM in 9.5 and beyond include:

- 64-bit platform support

- EPM Architect enhancements

o Common calc manager (integrated with Hyperion Planning)

o Lifecycle management

- Reporting accelerator

- Delegated user management and administration

- Better Oracle platform integration including drill-back to the underlying transactional systems

Goals for Hyperion Planning in 2008 include:

- EPM Architect enhancements (same as HFM)

o Common calc manager (integrated with Hyperion Planning)

o Lifecycle management

- Planning for banking

- Delegated user management and administration

- Oracle platform integration

John talked about some of the goals for Hyperion Strategic Finance which include integration with Smart View as well as integration with Hyperion's Crystal Ball acquisition for predictive analysis. Performance Scorecard will also be integrated with Smart View.

The new Hyperion Profitability Application got mentioned again. As many have already heard, it lets a user analyze profitability (hence the catchy name) with support for cost management, activity based costing, traceability maps, and more). One thing I learned about it that I didn't know before is that the primary data store for this application is Essbase. It's currently in beta and should be released in the spring of 2008. It looks a lot like Hyperion Planning and since it uses Essbase, you can access the data with Web Analysis, Financial Reporting, and so forth.

There were a few slides on the future of Essbase which was covered in more detail at OpenWorld. John concluded with a call for people to attend COLLABORATE 2008 in April, 2008. He feels that there will be 80-100 presentations (down from the 150 previously hoped for) with 1/3 of those being delivered from Oracle and the rest from customers and partners. He also mentioned that COLLABORATE is extending a discount to Hyperion clients in the hopes of getting 1,000+ people to the conference; the price should be about $975 per person.

Someone asked about the future of Hyperion Enterprise. Per Tony, Oracle's direction is to push people to HFM. Hyperion Enterprise is going to be continued to be supported and enhanced, though, including Smart View against Enterprise in 2008.

I'm actually giving two presentations (live an in-person, unlike my snowed in buddy, John O'Rourke). One is a repeat of one I've delivered a lot in 2007, "Busting System 9 Migration Myths," which is basically an episode of Mythbusters but with all the myths being Hyperion System 9 specific. It's a lot of fun and includes video clips from the TV show. Normally, I deliver it with my fellow Mythbuster, Eduardo Quiroz (who's also the co-founder of interRel), but today, I'm flying solo since Eduardo recognized that the presentation was in Des Moines in December. My second presentation is on "Best Practices in Reporting & Analysis."

I just delivered my two presentations (with a break in the middle so I could wake up the sleeping attendees). If anyone wants a copy, send an e-mail to info@interrel.com and specify which presentation you want. Pioneer Hi-Bred (a division of DuPont) is hosting this event and they've brought lunch in. I'm going to go hunt down some vegetarian food (oh, the irony), network a bit, and then head to the airport for the flight back to Dallas.

This may end up being my last blog entry for the year, because I don't think I have anything interesting planned for the remainder of 2007. May your 2008 be better than your 2007!

Hyperion Town Hall - Houston

I'm at the Alden Hotel in Houston, Texas today attending an Oracle sponsored event called "Hyperion Town Hall."  Basically, they're supposed to talk about the Oracle acquisition of Hyperion.  Here's the agenda:

- Welcome

- Integration Strategy & Roadmap

- Customer Speaker (University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston)

- Question and Answer

- Networking Session

There is some networking time before the agenda above.  From what I can tell, most of the crowd is either Oracle (former Hyperion) or partners.  Every partner has at least two people (we have three including me).  Having a one-to-one ratio of partners and clients makes for some odd networking situations.  There's a lot of partners talking to partners about partnering.  Observing the forced niceties is making giggle on the inside.

                "Hi, My Dreaded Competition.  What's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?"

                "Well as I live and breathe, if isn't That Guy I Hate With A Passion!  How the heck have you been?  Hope you haven't lost your arms in a trash compactor accident!"

                "No, of course not, I made sure to stand way back as I pushed your mother in.  I'm kidding of course."

                "Oh, you always were the quick wit.  Well, I guess I better move on and talk to someone with a personality, um, I mean the potential to get me revenue."

                "I completely understand: you're not getting any younger, you know."

The main speaker was Ken Hohenstein, RVP of Southern EPM (over John Hernandez who's the regional EPM manager over Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas).  I get along pretty well with Ken on a personal level, but he can be kind of a dry presenter (though that may be due to the dryness of the material too).  He could crack a joke once in a while.

Most of the presentation was pretty dry: the same slides I've seen before.  There's an interesting point on retention post-acquisition: 98% of the development staff joined Oracle and 95% of sales, support, and consulting made the move as well.  I'm thrilled about the development retention.  Consulting?  Not so much.

He talked some about the leadership of the EPM/BI Leadership.  John Kopcke is now SVP of Performance Management and Business Intelligence.  Rich Clayton is now VP of BI and Performance Management Marketing.   Both of those guys are in Product Strategy.  Robert Gersten is in Product Development as SVP of Development of Performance Management and BI.  I think they just said that he's now in charge of 2,000 developers.  Wow.

Ken talked about support for a bit.  One of the more surprising things is that all standard-level and Enterprise-level support clients have been migrated (at apparently, no charge) to Oracle Premier Support on December 1, 2007.  This means that if a Hyperion client was on standard support (meaning only 8 hours per day support, 5 days per week).

One of Mr. Hohenstein's final slides was on the conferences replacing Hyperion Solutions (may she rest in peace).  COLLABORATE 2008 is in Denver from April 13-17.  This is the one put on by the user groups.  They're trying to get more Hyperion presentations at COLLABORATE, and I think it should have 50-100 Hyperion presentations.  OpenWorld 2008 is September 21-25th.  God, I hope they improve the Hyperion content, but I guess I've written about that one to death.

Jay White, President of the South Texas Hyperion User's Group (STxHUG), got up to speak next.  He thanked Oracle for picking up his valet parking and US-Analytics for bribing people (or as Jay put it "donating the door prizes").  He spoke for about 15 minutes, but none is much relevant to those outside of Houston, so I won't repeat it.  At the conclusion of his section, he did comment on interRel's "Hyperion Solutions Road Trip to the South" we held back in August.  He praised our game show (as he put it "Business Intelligence Jeopardy") and said that we must have more money than Oracle to put that event on.  I thought that was pretty darned funny.

The next speaker was Rich Clayton, VP of stuff (see above), talking about the EPM Product Strategy and Roadmap.  He started off by mentioning that Smart View is being placed on top of Hyperion Enterprise which is interesting, because I thought that Enterprise wasn't long for this world.  I'm still not convinced it's staying around, but this is at least a sign that it's not dead already.

Rich had a lot of slides that again, I've seen before on the growth in reporting, analytics, and such.  I'd blog them, but I'm worried that while typing in the content of the slides, I might bore myself into a coma.  Some of the content (specifically around Essbase) was the same as the Future of Essbase presentation from OpenWorld.  Here's what's new:

·         HFM will have enhanced XBRL support.  HFM will also allow journals and adjustments to go back into the underlying ERP (too cool).

·         Financial Reporting will allow annotations to be added to a report.  This could be quite helpful for variance analysis ("you missed your budget: explain yourself, man!").

·         Hyperion will be linked to Oracle E-Business Suite to allow drill-down and account analysis to underlying ERP data (in PeopleSoft, Oracle financial ledgers, etc.) via Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management. 

·         Planning will have a new module to do "Strategic Operational Planning."  I think that means more detail-oriented planning beyond the financial space (like manufacturing detail).

·         Hyperion Profitability Management is being released sometime in 2008.  I haven't seen a demo of this, so I don't know much more beyond the title.  It's apparently going to let a user look at a Profit & Loss statement and have visibility to where all the numbers came from (which were direct and which were allocated).  When I actually see this one live, I'll write more on it.

·         Calculation Manager is the integrated method for writing calculations across all Hyperion products.  It should be in 9.5, but he admits that it will take 2 or 3 releases to get all the kinks worked out.

·         Simplified installation and configuration should be coming in 9.5 (formerly known as Kennedy).

·         Lifecycle Management Services in 9.5 allows administrators to move Hyperion applications from development to production.  It's a retooling of the old Hyperion Hub product, from what I can tell.

·         There are about 75 new features in 9.5 in the old BI+ products (Interactive Reporting, Web Analysis, Financial Reporting, SQR Production Reporting).   The only one that I was able to read (in 3 point font) was that Interactive Reporting in 9.5 will have prettier charts.

·         Visual Explorer will have predictive visualization sometime in 2008.

He said that 9.5 is scheduled for release in May of 2008.  Well, that's targeted, but officially it's sometime in 2008.  Knowing what I know about the beta schedule for 9.5, I think that May-June of 2008 is realistic.

The chairs they have us sitting in are horrible.  I may take a Blog Break so I don't get deep vein thrombosis.  I lost feeling in my legs about an hour ago…

The customer presentation from Jerry Jackson of UTMB (Univ. Texas Medical Branch) was about how they converted an Essbase cube from block storage to aggregate storage.  Considering how marketing-oriented the earlier material was, the technical nature of this presentation was jarring.  Also, the speaker's microphone was set at zero, so no one could hear him.  I was in the back row, so not could I not hear him: I was too far away to read lips.  I did read his slides.  One slide I did enjoy the title of said "18 Dimensions is Not Enough" which explained why they needed to expand from 18 to 24 dimensions to do their financial reporting.  I find this shocking since the dimensionality on financial reporting cubes tends to be much smaller (in the 5-9 dimension range).

Jerry's presentation wasn't nearly as, um, technical as the second presentation from one of the IT people at UTMB.  The topic was "Accessing Stored Procedures [in Oracle] Using Interactive Reporting."  I found the looks on the sales people comical when he started showing stored procedure code.

At the conclusion of the event was some drawing of door prizes.  I may be mistaken, but I think all three prizes were won by employees of UTMB.  This is not surprising since UTMB brought the largest contingent (I guess, because they were speaking?).

I am supposed to go to the Hyperion Town Hall in Dallas tomorrow.  Based on the assumption that tomorrow's content will be quite similar to today's, I think I'm going to skip it.

 

Oracle OpenWorld - Day Three - HUG Leadership

I thought I'd try to break up today's blog into multiple postings. If nothing else, it gives me an excuse to hook up my laptop to the free Wi-Fi here at OpenWorld.

I had to get up at 6 this morning, because Rye Livingston (Senior Manager of Hyperion User Group Relations) decided to hold a HUG (Hyperion User Group) leadership breakfast at 7:15 AM. It was mostly a meet and greet, but I did learn a few things. The HUGs will, it seems, be allowed to remain an entity independent of one of the existing user group communities at Oracle (like OAUG, IOUG, Quest, et al). The user group leadership community at Oracle looked at the people who attend Hyperion User Group meetings and realized that they're not exactly like the other Oracle products. Hyperion users tend to have a blend of technology and application skills, so it's difficult to slot them into one of the more stratified existing user communities.

The Oracle folks asked what changes we (as user group leaders) wanted to see in the user groups with the Oracle acquisition. I lobbied for a sharing of best practices across the HUGs as well as a shared database of presenters and presentations. I've presented at 6 or 7 HUGs across the country, and the content that each region delivers varies dramatically. It would be nice for one region to be able to leverage the presentations that another region is delivering.

They're targeting the new HUG structure to be in place by May/June of 2008. I think that the HUGs are likely to improve in quality and attendance under the new leadership. I genuinely liked all the people I met and I really liked some of their improvement suggestions. You definitely get the impression that these people have done this before. I think they've learned from the disaster that occurred when they tried to integrate the JDEdwards user groups into the overall structure. Then again, I could be wrong and any sense of vibrancy that the HUGs currently have could be dead in 18 months. I don't think there will be much middle ground.

I've been complaining about the lack of helpful information at OpenWorld (for Hyperion users, at least). It seems that Oracle COLLABORATE will be a lot more content focused and customer driven than OpenWorld. COLLABORATE 2008 will be held April 13-17 in Denver, Colorado. They're trying to have a Hyperion track, and I wish them the best. I'll try to submit a few presentations for COLLABORATE, and we'll see what happens.