Looking forward the BI Forum 2013, Brighton UK

It's around a month to go now until the Rittman Mead BI Forum runs in Brighton, UK, with the Atlanta event running the week after. Full details on both events are on the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2013 homepage, but I thought it'd be worth taking a look at the Brighton event in more detail, along with the speaker and session line-up.

Our first ever BI Forum ran at the Hilton Metropole in Brighton back in 2009, with around fifty attendees from around the world getting together talk about OBIEE, Essbase, ODI and the Oracle Database. Tony Heljula won the inaugural "Best Speaker" award, Venkat Janakiraman came over all the way from India (and joined us at Rittman Mead shortly afterwards, to become Managing Director for Rittman Mead India), Edward Roske slept through the days and was awake during the night, and we took the decision shortly afterwards to make it an annual event, moving down the road to the Hotel Seattle the following year where we've been ever since.

This year is the fifth anniversary of the BI Forum, and whilst we now run the event in Atlanta as well we've kept to the same basic principles; keep the attendee numbers restricted, assume a basic level of knowledge with the tools, maximise networking and keep the focus on OBIEE and its related technologies. This year our speaker line-up includes familiar faces and some new speakers from around the world, along with Oracle's product management team and a guest speaker from outside our immediate industry:

• Uli Bethke, Tony Heljula, Michael Wilcke, Edelweiss Kammermann and Adam Seed from the developer/partner community will be talking about OBIEE performance tuning, ODI development best practices, going beyond the basics with Endeca, and getting started with BI-related technologies such as Oracle Business Activity Monitoring
• Oracle's Philippe Lions, Adam Bloom, Alan Lee, Mike Durran and Nick Tuson will update everyone on what's new with OBIEE post-11.1.1.7, including news on the replacement to the BI Administration Tool and the updated 11.1.1.7 version of SampleApp, as well as answering questions around OBIEE multi-tenancy, Exalytics and virtualisation

On the day before the main conference, myself, Stewart Bryson and Michael Rainey will be delivering a masterclass around Oracle's data integration tools; in this optional one-day session we'll be taking a closer look at the ODI product roadmap, integration with other tools such as GoldenGate, Hadoop and Enterprise Data Quality, and also sharing ODI development best practices around topics such as ETL high-availability and scripted deployment.

Finally - if all of this sounds a bit heavy going - the secret about the BI Forum is that we try to make it fun as well. On the night before the main event opens we hold a drinks reception followed by an Oracle keynote, and on both nights we host gala dinners with open bars and lots of opportunities to meet everyone at the event. The vast majority of people who come to one BI Forum event then come back every following year (if not, we come and get you anyway, Christian…), and if you've not been before, make sure you sign-up soon before all of the places go. Details of the event including links to the registration form are on the BI Forum 2013 homepage, and I'll be back in a couple of days time to talk about what we've got planned for Atlanta this year.