Well it's the day before our second annual BI Forum in Brighton, and after a bit of last minute panic about the ash cloud coming back, people should be traveling over today and tomorrow to get to the Hotel Seattle in Brighton. In all about fifty-five OBIEE, ODI and Essbase experts will be joining us at the event, presenting on and discussing technical topics around Oracle's BI tools.
This year we're pleased to have two guest speakers join us. Tomorrow, Kurt Wolff, one of the original nQuire team and designer of the BI Administration tool, will be presenting a masterclass on the origins of OBIEE, design principles, and dashboard and RPD best practices. I've had a sneak peek at Kurt's materials and it looks really excellent, with content I've never seen at presentations before. We're also very glad to have Phil Bates, Oracle BI Architect at Oracle Corporation, present the keynote on Wednesday evening, where he'll be talking about the design goals for OBIEE 11g and what we might expect in the future. From a personal perspective, Kurt and Phil are two of the people that inspired me to get into OBIEE, and provided ideas that I'm still using today, so I'm especially glad that they've agreed to come along to the event.
After the masterclass and reception tomorrow, we start on the event proper on Thursday with a range of technical presentations on OBIEE, ODI, Essbase and Fusion Middleware. Adrian Ward and Venkat will be running a two-part "OBIEE Gurus" quiz during the event, whilst Christian Berg and Emiel van Bockel are chairing a design best practices debate on Thursday evening. Like previous years, we're majoring on networking and social activities, and this is a great opportunity to get to speak to all the Oracle BI enthusiasts you see on the blogs, the forums and recently the OBIEE Enterprise Methodology Group on Google Groups.
Keep an eye out for blogs from some of the attendees, Twitter posts (hashtag #biforum), and I'll post the presentations on this site once the event is over. Other than that, if you're coming over then have a safe journey, and I'll see you all in a day or so in Brighton!