Quiroz on Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat

I know this is silly and doesn't have anything to do with the original intent of this blog, but I am compelled to admit something I do everytime I arrive in San Francisco. It happens just after the captain announces that we are minutes away from landing. I try not to think about it as the jingle slowly gets louder and louder and there is only one way to stop it. I have to confront it head on. The music begins to blare and the impluse to sing along kicks in. I've tried to ignore it. I've tried to fight the urge by writing Essbase calc scripts in my head or calculating block optimal sizes for multidimensional cubes, but it only makes things worse. Once, it played in my head for 3 days until I finally gave in! Rice A Roni, the San Francisco treat, Rice A Roni, the flavor can't be beat...!

Damn you Quaker Oats Company! (since 1956)

Hyperion Conferences - Time to Submit Your Abstracts

With the old (and much missed) Hyperion Solutions conference, the time to submit abstracts for possible inclusion in the April conference was usually in September or October.  With Collaborate (OAUG, IOUG, and Quest's conference) not until May and Kaleidoscope (ODTUG's conference) not until June, you'd think that we'd be able to wait until after OpenWorld to have to think about submissions.  Not so, because both conferences have already begun accepting submissions for presentations at their conferences in 2009.

Why should you submit a presentation?  Here are the three most common reasons:

1. You're helping teach something to the rest of mankind.
2. You get a free pass to the conference.
3. "Speaker at national Hyperion conference" looks great on a resume.

In all honesty, most people do it to get the free pass, because having not having to pay the conference admission fees makes it a whole lot easier to convince your boss go to the conference since the pass is often half the cost of the whole trip.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope: June 21-25

I love Kaleidoscope and my opinion (and John Kopcke's) is that it's the natural successor to the Hyperion Solutions conference.  This year's Hyperion track was outstanding (full disclosure: I was the Hyperion track co-chair so apparently modesty is not my strong suit) and next year should be even better (and yes, I'm helping to head up K'Scope '09 too).  2008 was all about Essbase, but 2009 will expand to include the full former Hyperion toolset (including Hyperion Planning, HFM, Financial Reporting, Web Analysis, Interactive Reporting, and the rest).  I probably wouldn't bother submitting topics on some of the mostly end user products like Strategic Finance or Performance Scorecard, because those are a better fit for Collaborate (more on that in a second).

The audience for Kaleidoscope is primarily developers and administrators of Hyperion applications (like an Essbase admin or a Planning developer).  If you're a casual end user of the product, a department director with little day-to-day hands-on experience with Hyperion, or a VP or CxO type, then Kaleidoscope is not really for you.  It's designed for someone who spends the majority of their time working with Hyperion.  If you feel you have something to deliver to that audience, then here's the submission link:

http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/abstracts.html

While I'm thinking about it, it's worth pointing out that Kaleidoscope is much more intimate than the other conferences, because they cap their number of attendees.  This gives Kaleidoscope more of an "intense training" vibe than your traditional "free food & open bar and if I learn something while I'm there, so much the better" feel than your traditional conference.  While they're opening it up to 1,000 Hyperion attendees this year, you'll want to sign up early (registration opens October 1), because like in 2008, I'm sure they'll hit their maximum.

They're looking for presentations around any of the product lines and they prefer more detailed sessions rather than higher-level overview ones.  Kaleidoscope's deadline for presentation submission is October 15.

COLLABORATE: May 3-7

This is my second favorite conference (after Kaleidoscope) although it's a distant second.  While this conference is supposedly a joint collaboration (hence the name) of the OAUG, IOUG, and Quest user groups, the main group sponsoring the Hyperion track is OAUG, home of the OAUG Hyperion SIG (full disclosure again: I'm Essbase domain co-lead for OAUG Hyperion SIG) .  I've written in the past about some of my major gripes with Collaborate (plan on buying your own food and wear comfortable shoes), but I'm told that it will get better in 2009, so I'm recommending it for certain types of users.

So what type of person would be a good fit at Collaborate?  The audience tends to be more geared towards daily users of Hyperion products but from an end-user perspective.  If you're a finance manager, an IT director, or someone who uses Hyperion products but a lot of other Oracle products as well, then Collaborate may be the right conference for you.  If you have something you'd like to share at Collaborate (or you just like going to Orlando), here's the submission link:

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

I think Collaborate is targeting around 1,000 Hyperion attendees for 2009 just like Kaleidoscope although since Collaborate doesn't cap attendance for each track, they'd be happy to have as many people as will sign up (starting sometime in November).

Collaborate likes client success stories (versus more hands-on training at Kaleidoscope) so keep that in mind as you craft your submissions.  Collaborate is open to all Hyperion products, but they're a lot more friendly to the applications (like Planning, HFM, or Strategic Finance) than they are to the technology stack.  For instance, a presentation on "How to use the Essbase Java API" is unlikely to get accepted at Collaborate and if it was, would be very sparsely attended.  Collaborate's deadline for presentation submission is October 31.

OpenWorld: sometime in the fall of 2009

This is my least favorite of the 3 Hyperion conferences.  No, OpenWorld 2009 hasn't opened up their submissions yet mostly since as of this writing, the 2008 conference hasn't even been held yet.  That said, I'm sure it's just a matter of time until they do, so I guess I should tell you what type of person might want to go to this conference (in case you're budgeting for next year and can only go to one conference or only want to submit your presentations to one conference).

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure yet again, I'm an Oracle ACE Director so I have some level of obligation to attend OpenWorld.  That said, this is my least favorite of the Hyperion-centric conferences.  The reason is mainly that OpenWorld is basically a big marketing event for Oracle.  It's Oracle talking about Oracle.  Now that's not 100% the case.  For instance, I'm delivering 4 presentations next week and I'm neither Oracle nor do I plan on spending my time marketing for Oracle (or interRel).  It's just that 80% of the presentations are by Oracle and many of them are so high-level it's like they were created wholly by Oracle's marketing department(s).

So am I advising OpenWorld to anyone?  Well, yes, actually.  If you want to hear the official world of Oracle, there's no better place than OpenWorld.  I'm actually looking forward next week to hearing John Kopcke speak about Oracle's vision for EPM, Thomas Kurian talk about Oracle's strategy for Fusion, and Al Marciante talk about the future of Essbase.  If like me, you love presentations on "What's New and What's Coming" then by all means, go to OpenWorld.  (Be prepared though for a sanitized version of What's Coming since all of Oracle's competitors also go to OpenWorld for competitive information, the sneaky bastards.)

The other type of person that can benefit from OpenWorld are very senior executives at a company who are looking at Oracle from an overall IT standpoint.  If you're the CIO, VP of IT, or even the CFO at your company looking at spending a bunch of money on Oracle in the coming years, you definitely need to attend OpenWorld to hear what Oracle is going to be doing with your money.  You'll see far more CEOs at OpenWorld than at the other conferences.

Conclusion

I will be attending all three conferences since I'm interested in all three types of information: the official word of Oracle at OpenWorld, case studies of how customers have implemented Hyperion at COLLABORATE, and deep-dive Hyperion training at Kaleidoscope.  Submit your abstract to the one that most suits you, and I'll see you there.

Essbase Labs Blog

I wanted to draw everyone's attention to an Essbase-centric blog that showed up in late July:

Essbase Labs

This blog was started by a couple of the guys who created Hyperion Smart Space and a few other people who've been around the Essbase block.  Here are some of the more interesting posting from them so far:

• Editing Essbase text files.  In this entry, they show how to use TextPad to edit Essbase calc scripts, MaxL scripts, and so forth.  One of the more interesting parts of this post is a ZIP file that contains information on Essbase-specific terms that TextPad can use to syntax check.
• Essbase Studio 11x impressions.  The EL (Essbase Lab) guys installed the new Essbase Studio and then used it to rebuild Sample.Basic in Studio.  I will say that they make it seem a bit more difficult than it actually is, but it's a nice tour of the more common parts of building an Essbase cube in Essbase Studio.
• Recent Essbase differences.  Here they cover some of the major system-level evolutions of Essbase 11x such as recent directory changes and the difficulties in starting Essbase 11x in a foreground window.

Speaking of some of the Smart Space creators, there's another blog that I'll recommend called Project Renegade.  It is not exclusively Hyperion (or Essbase) related, and it's a bit dry, but some of things they've posted are fascinating.  One of my favorite posts (from back in January) has to do with using Essbase CDF (Custom Defined Functions) to alert users.

Oracle OpenWorld - My Tentative Hyperion Schedule

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I would be blogging throughout each day of Oracle OpenWorld 2008 (OOW, to her 40,000+ friends).  I've been looking at my schedule and it's, to put it mildly, ugly.  While there are those who knock OOW for being too much marketing with too little information, no one can ever say it's not busy.  For quick reference, here's the Oracle PDF mentioning all the EPM sessions and events they're aware of at OOW:

http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/focuson/enterprise-perfomance-managment-bi.pdf

For the most part, I can share my schedule with all of you.  There are a couple of private meetings (hey, what's a conference in San Francisco without a few private meetings?) but here's the bulk of my schedule (all times Pacific).  Yes, I know some of these events overlap, so I'll be darting back and forth in a few cases:

Sunday

• 10AM-4PM, Oracle ACE Director Product Briefing (Hilton Union Square, room 23/24).  This is where they share with all the Oracle ACE Directors the plans Oracle has for the upcoming year.  While I will blog what this event is like, I sadly can't comment on a lot of the actual information they'll be conveying here due to non-disclosure agreements.  I'll relay as much as I can without getting sued.  I have to leave the briefing early a little before 1PM to go to...
• 1-4:30PM, ODTUG Hyperion Symposium (Moscone West, room 3016).  There are actually 3 presentations on Hyperion during this period.  I'm delivering the first one from 1-2PM, "How Essbase Thinks."  It's going to be different than my usual "How Essbase Thinks" presentation because I'm going to do a lot of talking about the underpinnings of ASO (Aggregate Storage) in addition to the more traditional BSO (Block Storage).  Sean Bernhoit is giving a presentation from 2-3PM on how to pick which Hyperion reporting tool to use and then Mark Rittman is talking from 3:30-4:30PM about integrating OBIEE and Essbase.
• 2-4:15PM, OAUG Hyperion SIG (Moscone West, room 3022).  From 2-3:30PM, they're mostly going to be talking about the progress of integrating the regional HUG (Hyperion User Groups) into OAUG Hyperion SIG.  Since I'm the Essbase co-domain lead for their group, I'm feeling obligated to attend for at least part of the time.  I'm hoping that they're going to hold elections for board positions on the Hyperion SIG, but I'm not holding my breath.  At 3:30PM, Sean Bernhoit will be giving a presentation on best practices in EPM, and then the OAUG folks are coming down the hall to hang out with the ODTUG folks at...
• 4:30-5:30PM, John Kopcke on Oracle's EPM Vision (Moscone West, room 3016).  Kopcke, SVP of EPM for Oracle, will be talking on "Extending Operational Excellence to Management Excellence: Oracle’s Vision for EPM."  This presentation is being joint sponsored by ODTUG and OAUG which makes for a nice opportunity to get the two largest Hyperion user group communities together.  I'll probably say a few words first and then let Ed Delise (president of the OAUG Hyperion SIG) actually be the one to introduce Kopcke.
• 7:00-8:30PM, Oracle Titan Awards (Hilton Union Square, Grand Ballroom B).  Oracle will be giving away awards for "Partner of the Year" in 17 different categories.  We're nominated in a few of the categories (like Industry Solution and EPM Solution), but we have a snowball's chance in hell of winning.  These awards normally go to huge, multi-national conglomerates like Deloitte, IBM, and PWC with marketing departments larger than our entire company.  We'll show up on the off chance that Hell is having a really cold day, and as they say at the Oscars right after losing, "it's an honor just to be nominated."  Besides, there's free food and an open bar.
• 8:30-9:30PM, Welcome Reception (Howard Street Tent and Yerba Buena Gardens).  This actually starts a while earlier, but we'll be at the Titan Awards enjoying the previously mentioned free food and open bar until 8:30.  As soon as we can, however, we'll move over to the welcome reception for a totally different open bar and free food.

Monday

• 8:30-11AM, Charles Phillips Opening Keynote (Moscone North, Hall D).  According to the description, we'll be hearing about the following: "The power of Oracle's complete, open, and integrated product portfolio is bringing more value to enterprises than ever before. Oracle executives Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat provide fresh insight into Oracle's strategy and highlight the latest innovations in Oracle products in Monday's Oracle OpenWorld keynote."  I will use this time to catch up on my blogging from Sunday.
  
• 11:30AM-12:45PM, General Session: Applications (Moscone North, Hall D).  This is a chance to hear Ed Abbo talk about the future of Oracle applications.  I'm sitting through this one on the off-chance that they say something, anything, about the Hyperion applications.  I will most likely use this time for testing out the new Google Chrome browser.
• 1-2PM, Kopcke Presents Oracle's EPM System (Moscone West, room 2011).  John Kopcke will be giving an overview of Oracle EPM.  It's probably the same stuff I've seen hundreds of times before, but you never know.
• 2:30-3:45PM, General Session: Middleware (Moscone North, Hall D).  Thomas Kurian, Oracle's SVP of Fusion Middleware, will be giving an overview of the middleware product strategy.  Since technically, this is where Hyperion fits (Essbase, in particular), I'm hoping for some late-breaking Hyperion news.
• 5:30-8:30PM, Client Appreciation Party (Annabelle's @ 34 4th Str).  We're hosting a joint cocktail party with Star Analytics and Applied OLAP.  They're two partners of interRel and all three of us are hosting a joint reception for our current (and prospective clients).  If you're an interRel client (or you'd like to be!), send an e-mail to info(at)interrel.com and we'll send you an invitation to the party.  It'll be the most fun you've ever had and remained conscious (quote from the movie, Popeye, in case you're curious).  

Tuesday

• 11:30AM-12:30PM, BI Roadmap and Strategy (Moscone West, room 2022).  I'm hoping for the strategic direction on several of the OBIEE+ products.
• 12:30-1PM, Book Signing of "Look Smarter Than You Are with Essbase" (Moscone West, 2nd Floor Bookstore).  The kind people running the Oracle bookstore at OOW have decided to take pity on this poor, starving author by hosting a book signing for my two System 9 books.  Hopefully, there will be some people who want me to deface their brand-new copies of my books with my chicken-scratch scrawl I call a signature.  If not, I can surf the web on my new iPhone 3G while pretending I'm checking my calendar for the rest of the day.
• 1-2PM, What's New in Scorecard (Moscone West, room 3020).  Right now, Oracle makes 3 or 4 different scorecarding products.  I'm curious which one will be the strategic direction for Oracle going forward.
• 2-4:30PM, Thomas Kurian Keynote (Moscone North, Hall D).  This is the second major session in Hall D presented by Thomas Kurian.  Maybe this one will give us late breaking Fusion news if the one on Monday doesn't.  Maybe pigs will sprout wings and fly around Moscone North, Hall D.  You just never know.
• 5-6PM, Kopcke on Oracle OLAP vs. Essbase (Marriott, Salon 9).  Kopcke is going to tell all the people present when to use Oracle OLAP and when to use Essbase.  This should be fun.
• 6-8PM, OAUG Hyperion SIG Cocktail Reception (Grand Hyatt, Bay View Room).  This is a joint reception put on by OAUG Hyperion SIG, Oracle, and 8 Hyperion partners where there's sure to be free food and an open bar.  While it sounds like it might be interesting since it's the only official "Hyperion reception" at OOW, I will only be there for a few minutes, because I have to skedaddle over to...
• 6:30-8PM, Oracle Excellence Awards (Westin St. Francis, Oak Room).  While the Oracle Titan Awards are for partners, the Oracle Excellence Awards are for customers.  One of our biggest clients in the Northeastern United States is nominated, so we're showing up to cheer for them if they win.  If they don't, there's still free food and open bar (like every good event at OOW).

Wednesday

• 9-10AM, What's New in OBIEE Answers (Marriott, Golden Gate A2).  Answers looks like it might be the long-term replacement for Hyperion Web Analysis, so it's a good idea to find out the Answers roadmap.
• 1-2PM, Roske on Essbase Tuning: Optimizing Outlines (Moscone West, room 3024).  This is my presentation on how to optimize Essbase outlines.  Considering this is a fairly technical presentation and most of the OOW crowd is not that into technical presentations, I suspect that there will be plenty of available seating at this session.
• 2-4:30PM, Ellison Keynote (Moscone North, Hall D).  This is generally one of the more interesting sessions of the conference.  Larry's quite fun to listen to and he usually brings a few guests with him to keep things entertaining.
• 8PM-Midnight, Final Night Party (Treasure Island).  Supposedly, they're going to be recreating a world's fair on Treasure Island out in the middle of the bay.  There should be plenty of singing (UB40!), and - say it with me - free food and open bar.  I will have to get to bed early, though, because I have two presentations on Thursday.  Who schedules presentations on Thursday?  Masochists.

Thursday

• 11:30AM-12:30PM, What's New in Essbase (Marriott, Salon 12/13).  Al Marciante's heading up this one.  I expect that most of the information will have already been covered (and blogged here) during Kaleidoscope 2008, but you never know.
• 12-1PM, Roske and XTO on Smart View (Moscone West, room 3022).  I'm doing this presentation with XTO Energy and it should be much more suited to the OOW crowd than my last one.  It's about better ways to use Smart View and it includes some significant coverage of the new Smart View 11x features (of which there are many).
• 1:30-2:30PM, Roske on Tips & Tricks for Hyperion Planning (Moscone West, room 3024).  In this one, I'll be giving tips on better ways to use Hyperion Planning.  According to the schedule there are only 3 or 4 presentations on Hyperion at this time.  Why then are 2 of them about Hyperion Planning?  Bad planning, I say.
• 3-4PM, What's New in Web Analysis and Financial Reporting (Marriott, Salon 12/13).  This one should be interesting if for no other reason than because there are rumors floating around about the potential demise of Web Analysis and/or Financial Reporting.  Will they be telling us that's "What's New" is that XYZ product is about to leave this mortal coil?
• 4-whenever, Catch Up (hotel room).  I don't fly out until Friday morning, so if I fall behind during the week (which should only happen when my laptop battery dies or my brain battery runs low), this is my chance to catch up on my blogging and e-mail.  If I'm all caught up, I might get a couple of minutes of SanFran sight seeing in.  There's some big golden bridge around here somewhere, I'm sure.

If you're going to OOW and you're feeling really lazy, I guess you could join me at all the events above.  This saves you the trouble of having to come up with any original agenda of your own.  That said, there are probably lots of more interesting things than those above.  If you know of any, please feel free to comment on this post with your suggestions.  My schedule is at your command.

Live Blogging Oracle OpenWorld from a Hyperion Standpoint

I've gotten several e-mails in the last few days about Oracle OpenWorld.  They tend to go like this:

Hey, Edward!  It's been too long.  You haven't posted anything since Hyperion 11x came out.  Been too busy trying to workaround all the bugs in the new version?  ROTFLOL.

In all seriousness, I was writing to ask if you're going to OpenWorld?  I'm not.  If you're going, can you do me a favor and write about every single interesting thing you come across while you're there?  That way, I can learn through you and save my money for [Kaleidoscope or Collaborate].

I really appreciate all that you do, and if you're too busy to post every day of OpenWorld, I understand, but I will no longer respect you.

Your friend,
[Someone I've never heard of]

Now it's important to me to be respected by those I don't know since people who've met me have 0% chance of respecting me.  So let me say that yes, I will be going to Oracle OpenWorld 2008, and yes, I will be live blogging throughout the conference.  This means that I will not only be posting every single day, I will be submitting posts through the wonders of AT&T 3G from my laptop several times each day too.  While this is not terribly unique since there are at least 100 other people blogging OOW, it's worth pointing out that I'm one of fewer than three people that I know that plans on doing so solely from the perspective of Hyperion (or Essbase or EPM Fusion Edition or whatever cute name we're supposed to be calling the former Hyperion Solutions today).

To help you follow the daily tribulations of OOW, bookmark this link which will take you right to my OpenWorld postings throughout the conference (this way, you skip my many postings about what my cat caught last night out behind the woodshed and then dragged into my kitchen to show me):

http://looksmarter.blogspot.com/search/label/OpenWorld

In the next couple of days, I'll be posting the events that I plan to attend at OOW (including a presentation or two that I'll be delivering).  If you want to offer suggestions for things for me to go to on your behalf (so you won't have to), feel free to comment on this post.  I'm totally open for new ideas (saving me from having to come up with any of my own).

If you are actually attending OOW, there is a nice PDF that Oracle's put together that describes all the EPM-related content.  They did miss a couple of key events - like the ODTUG Hyperion Symposium on Sunday from 1-4:30 and Kopcke's Keynote from 4:30-5:30 - but it's definitely a great start:

http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/focuson/enterprise-perfomance-managment-bi.pdf

Speaking of the ODTUG Hyperion Symposium on Sunday, both that and the Kopcke keynote "Extending Operational Excellence to Management Excellence: Oracle’s Vision for EPM" are in Moscone West room 3016.  I'll be chairing the symposium, so if you want to come by and say hello (or more likely, throw things at me like, say, $100 bills), stop by room 3016 a little before 1PM on Sunday.