Report on the UKOUG BI & Performance Management Day

What with Easter and some client visits, I've not had a chance to report on the UKOUG BI & Performance Management day since it ran last week. I've got a day at home today before I fly off to Bucharest tomorrow, so here's the highlights and a few photos.

This event was the first that Rittman Mead had officially exhibited at, and we'd used the occasion to put some marketing materials together, produce an exhibition stand and give ourselves a new corporate ID. The day itself started off with an extra-early train journey up to London to meet Jon and Pete at the hotel, then a quick assemble of the stand and unpacking of the leaflets and folders.

The event itself had four streams; one on Performance Management; one on BI Solutions (such as the BI Apps, Oracle packaged warehouse initiative and so on); one on the BI Platform and one on Data Warehousing and Analytics. The range of speakers we were able to secure for the event was pretty impressive, with Frank Buytendijk, Oracle's VP of EPM Strategy doing the keynote, Charlie Berger from the Oracle in the States doing a talk on Oracle Data Mining and OBIEE, Douglas Stevenson doing a talk on ODI, Phil Bates doing a BI development roadmap and Paolo Fragapane doing a talk on OBIEE and BAM, amongst others.

For myself one of the key bit of information I picked up was on the release timescale for OBIEE11g - the current guidance is that it'll be in Oracle's next financial year, which means some time before May 2009 - and the useful feedback I got on my Next-Generation Oracle BI Architecture talk, the slides for which you can download here.

Anyway, for us it was a very useful day, a good chance to catch up with some old colleagues, some friends and contacts within Oracle, partners and customers, and a good chance to swap stories and compare notes on how the Oracle BI industry is going at the moment.

If you're a UKOUG member you can download all the slides from the UKOUG website, our slides are available on this site on our articles page, you can also download some of the new material we've put together on our training and consulting offerings if you're wondering what else we do.