Countdown to the 2011 BI Forum

It's just a couple of days now until seventy of Europe's top OBIEE, DW and EPM developers converge on Brighton's Hotel Seattle for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2011. It's been a long time in the planning, but we're extremely excited about the agenda and the fantastic line-up of speakers and delegates who will be joining us in our home city - and we're doing it all again the week afterwards in Atlanta, home of Rittman Mead America.

This year in Brighton the opening Masterclass will be provided by myself and Tony Heljula, and we'll be doing a deep-dive into some of the new features in OBIEE 11g. In a joint session, I'll be taking the lead on OBIEE architecture and internals, and RPD modeling (updated over the weekend for 11.1.1.5!), whilst Tony will be leading on SOA and Spatial integration. Following on from the masterclass, we've got a drinks reception at 6pm, a keynote from Oracle BI Product Development's Nick Tuson, and then two days of sessions by some of Europe's top BI&DW implementors. Full details on the agenda are on the event website.

As well as the conference sessions, we've also got two panel sessions; "OBIEE 11g - Was It Worth the Wait?", and "Should All BI Projects be Agile?", where we'll be asking members of the audience to come up and argue the opposing cases. We're taking everyone to Brighton's Hotel du Vin for the meal on Thursday night, and almost all of the delegates will be staying together in the venue hotel, so there'll be some great opportunities for networking and sharing tips.

And ... for the first year ever, we're packing up our stuff on Friday, getting a plane over to the States, and then running the US version of the BI Forum the same time the week after, at the Emory Convention Center, Atlanta. Tony and I are doing another run of the masterclass, we'll run the panel sessions again (it'll be interesting to see if conclusions are different "across the pond"), and we've got another line-up of speakers from around the USA. Thanks to Stewart for organizing the logistics over in Atlanta, and we're very excited about taking the event over to the States and meeting another great group of Oracle BI, DW and EPM developers and consultants.

As with previous years, once both events have run we'll upload the presentations to our website, so anyone who's interested can download them. Thanks again to everyone who's coming, and keep an eye on the blog and on twitter (#biforum) for updates during the events.