My Collaborate'09 Schedule

Borkur and I are off to Collaborate'09 in a few weeks time, with myself doing a session on Oracle BI Apps DW Optimization and Borkur doing one on Oracle BI EE High Availability and Clustering, both of which are on the OAUG track. The event this year is over in Orlando and is a collaboration between IOUG, OAUG and Quest, and as this is generally (from the BI side) an applications rather than tools conference, I'll be taking the opportunity to go to a few Hyperion sessions, with a particular focus on Planning which seems to be a hot topic with our customers at the moment. Anyway, here's my schedule for the week:

Sunday May 3rd

13.00 - 15.15 : OAUG Business Intelligence / Data Warehousing SIG Meeting
15.30 - 17.45 : OAUG Business Intelligence (OBI) SIG Meeting

I'm not quite sure about the distinction between the two SIGs (I guess the second focuses on Oracle BI EE, wheras the first is more "classic" database-driven BI? But I'm guessing here) but meetings like this are always good to go to, to share stories and find our what others are up to. I'll try and make it along to both meetings.

Also on this day are a number of university sessions, including ones by our good friends at Vlamis Software Solutions; Chris Claterbos is delivering an all-day session entitled "How to Use Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) to Solve Real World Problems" from 9am to 5pm, so if you're looking for an end-to-end introduction to Oracle's BI tools, try and get along to this session.

Monday May 4th

10.45 - 11.45 : Visual Dashboard Design, Steve Stein, Perot Systems
13.15 - 14.15 : BI Panel - Critical Success Factors for BI Projects
14.30 - 15.30 : Introduction to Hyperion Planning, Floy Conrad, Oracle
15.45 - 16.45 : Analytics Driven Business Processes: Oracle Applications Unlimited Road Map and Strategy for Business Intelligence, Jagannath Vasudevan, Oracle

I've heard good things about Steve and I'm looking forward to his presentation. Shyam Varan (from BIWA) is organizing the BI Panel and I'm one of the panelists, the focus this year is on critical success factors in projects. The planning session should be useful although I suspect I'm beyond the beginner part now, whilst the roadmap session on BI for the legacy ERP applications should be a good heads up on what's coming with ODI (this will support EBS Financials first, from what I hear) and how support for additional EBS and Peoplesoft modules will be extended (they should also announce BI Apps support for JDE as well)

Tuesday May 5th

09.45 - 10.45 : A Day in the Life of a Planning Administrator, Kathy Gates, Aspect Software
11.00 - 12.00 : Hyperion Smart View : Guidance for a Successful Implementation, Shane Edler, Oracle
13:30 - 14.30 : Beyond BI: Adding Forecasting Analytics to Business Intelligence, Lucie Trepanier, Oracle
15.15 - 16.15 : High Availability in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Borkur Steingrimsson, Rittman Mead
16:30 - 17.30 : Essbase Data Extraction – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, Quinlan Eddy, Star Analytics

Again, a useful planning session at the start, followed by what looks to be a best practices talk on SmartView, the new Excel addin that also covered OBIEE that I have to admit I've not properly got my head around yet. Following the BI Apps and Hyperion sessions is one that looks particularly interesting, especially if it starts to talk about adding planning, forecasting and modeling functionality to OBIEE and the BI Apps. Later on in the afternoon is Borkur's session, followed by one on Essbase data extraction from the Star Analytics people, a company I keep meaning to catch up with.

Wednesday May 6th

08.30 - 09.30 : Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Overview and Road Map, John O'Rourke, Oracle
11:00 - 12.00 : Optimizing the Performance of the Oracle BI Applications Data Warehouse, Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead
12.15 - 13.15 : Best practices for deploying a Data Warehouse on Oracle Database 11g, Hermann Baer, Oracle
13.30 - 14.30 : Business Intelligence Publisher Overview and Planned Features, Mike Donahoe, Oracle
16.30 - 17.30 : Oracle Financial Analytics Implementation Methodology, Glenn Kretkowski

Thursday starts at 8.30am (ouch) with the BI Apps roadmap, again this should build on the session on Tuesday and hopefully will talk further about ODI, the DAC replacement and integration between this product and the various Hyperion tools. After that it's my session, followed by a data warehousing one by Hermann Baer and an update on BI Publisher from Mike Donahoe (where's the web-based template builder, Mike?) After that is a session that's got the potential to be very useful, a case study on Financial Analytics implementation, a product that's poorly documented but is the number one BI Apps module that customers ask me about implementing.

Thursday May 7th

09.45 - 10.45 : Migrating Oracle Discoverer to Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, Mike Durran, Oracle
11.00 - 12.00 : Oracle Data Integrator: A Key Element of Enterprise Performance Management, Denis Gray, Oracle

Finally, on Thursday there's a couple of sessions before I fly back in the afternoon. Mike Durran will be giving us an update on Discoverer to OBIEE migration (including hopefully, news on workbook migration), followed on by an update on ODI - hopefully there'll be news on ODI 11g as details on what's coming in this next release are pretty thin on the ground.

Anyway, if you're coming along to Collaborate, it'll be good to see you there. We'll be wearing our Rittman Mead shirts so if you see us, be sure to say hello.