Oracle Open World 2008, Day 3 : New BI Technology & Keynotes
Now that's more like it. After I mentioned that there didn't appear to be much new BI information at this year's Open World, I went to a session by Matt Bedin on "New Technologies in Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition" whilst Thomas Kurian's keynote was almost all about the new BI and EPM products that have come along in the past year or so. Before that though was my final session, on Data Modeling Techniques using Oracle BI Server, and I have to say that I though this was the most successful of my four sessions. There was a good turnout for the 9am start, the demos went well and there were lots of questions at the end. From my work with clients over the past year, the data modeling aspect of OBIEE together with the role that the BI Apps data warehouse plays in Oracle's new BI technology stack are the two areas that customers are most confused about, so I wasn't surprised that this session and the first one I ran on Sunday would be the best attended. Anyway it was a good way to end off my presenting duties, and as usual the slides are uploaded here.
Matt Bedin's session on New Technologies in OBIEE didn't introduce anything absolutely new, as in only announced this week, but it did go over the new Essbase Studio application, the new sample application that comes with OBIEE 10.1.3.4, and the integration that's now possible between OBIEE and (Hyperion) EPM Workspace. This new Workspace integration looks good, and it was good to hear that you don't need Hyperion licenses to use it (although of course it's only really relevant if you have other Hyperion products to integrate), which is also the case with Smart View, the strategic product for MS Office integration. It was good to see a demo of OBIEE, Workspace and Smart View working together, and I'm currently downloading all the relevant pieces at the moment so that hopefully I can show this in more detail later in the week.
The other interesting thing yesterday was Thomas Kurian's keynote, although I did have to sit through a tedious one hour infomercial from Intel beforehand before he came on. What was interesting about Thomas' keynote was the fact that the first hour or so was all around BI and EPM, starting off with Oracle Data Integrator....
Then moving on to OBIEE and then Essbase...
Followed up by the BI Applications and Smart View.
So, take-aways from Open World so far, from the perspective of BI and EPM? Well, the integration between OBIEE and the Hyperion tools is moving on, with a visual and security integration now possible from the OBIEE 10.1.3.4 / EPM 11.1.1 releases, something you can get up and running now. Essbase and the Hyperion tools are centre-stage for Oracle now, certainly from our (tech) perspective we're skilled up on Essbase now and looking to extend that out towards planning and Hyperion's master data management solution. Oracle Data Integrator is obviously the strategic data migration / data integration tool going forward, with ODI and OWB merging their features and their individual product managers now reporting in to the same management. OBIEE 11g itself is no closer, with "within 12 months" still given as the delivery date although I expect the beta release to become available in some form before the end of this calendar year. No brand-new features have been announced this week, although for most attendees the integration between OBIEE and EPM Workspace will be new, I'll also be interested to see whether many Essbase developers start taking up the opportunity to source at least some of their data from the OBIEE semantic layer, something that's now possible with the release of Essbase Studio.
Anyway, I'm off to meet Jon Mead for breakfast in the cafe around the corner, then I'm off to the Moscone to hear the session by Adam Bloom and Nick Tuson on process integration using OBIEE. Larry's keynote is later today, so we'll also get to hear what all the fuss around "X" is all about.