Preview of the Rittman Mead BI Forum in Atlanta

Mark has done a great job of previewing the upcoming content for both BI Forums, the one running locally for us in Atlanta, as well as the one in Brighton, UK. We have an exceptional Master Class this year with Lars George from Cloudera, including an introduction to the Cloudera Big Data stack with full details on building, loading and analyzing Hadoop clusters. The exact details of what's covered, as well as the timetable for all speaker presentations, is listed here. Additionally, Mark posted on the two special presentations occurring at the two events: Maria Colgan on the In-Memory database option in Atlanta, and myself and Andrew Bond covering the latest iteration of Oracle's Information Management Reference Architecture in Brighton. And finally, Mark also covered three presentations for the Atlanta event covering Advanced Visualizations and Mobility. Instead of rehashing all of that, I wanted to do a blog post diving a bit more into the Atlanta event, and some of the content not previously mentioned, especially those by Oracle. We've always had incredible representation from Oracle at the BI Forum, and we are very appreciate that the different teams consider our event to be so important in the community.

I wanted to start off by discussing the venue a bit: the Renaissance Hotel in Midtown Atlanta. It's a modern, upscale Atlanta hotel in Midown that also has the amazing Rooftop 866 bar with incredible views of the city (those of you that have "socialized" with me over the years know I'll be spending some time up there). I'm confident this will be our best venue to date.

Before diving into the sessions that Oracle will be presenting in Atlanta, it seems prudent to give those folks a "warm and fuzzy" feeling, show our appreciation, and make them feel safe and sound. So here's an image that many of our readers will already recognize; for those who don't, I'm sure you'll know it by heart when the two events conclude:

Philippe Lions will be back again this year previewing the newest version of Sample App. For customers and partners who are like us at Rittman Mead, Sample App is a pivotal part of your OBIEE methodology. It allows us the ability to demonstrate anything from simple OBIEE analyses and dashboards, to some of the crazy mad-scientist stuff that Philippe's team comes up with. If Oracle and Philippe didn't design and build Sample App and keep it current, then we would have to build it ourselves. From my understanding, this will be the first time Philippe has previewed this content external to Oracle, so we are pleased and honored that he chose the BI Forum as the venue for this. It's also worth noting that Philippe is a BI Forum veteran... he has never missed the Atlanta event since it's inception four years ago.

We also have Jack Berkowitz, VP of Product Management for Business Analytics at Oracle, speaking on "Analytics Applications and the Cloud". He'll be discussing Oracle BI Applications (OBIA) in detail and the roadmap Oracle has for deploying those applications in the Cloud. I imagine that Jack will be giving the Wednesday night Keynote (as he did last year with Philippe), which is always a crowd-pleaser. Jack also spoke on the new Mobile Application Designer last year, so I imagine he will also be able to update us on that product even though his focus at Oracle has shifted. Also from Oracle we have Matt Bedin (another BI Forum veteran) talking about Oracle BI and Cloud, but with a focus on Oracle's roadmap with regular Oracle Analytics in the Cloud, which equates to having a Cloud-optimized OBIEE running in Oracle's Public Cloud. As this product is not yet generally available, attendees will get the scoop on where this product is going... and we might even get some hints on when to expect it.

We are excited to have Chris Lynskey, Senior Director, Product Management and Strategy at Oracle, making his first appearance at the BI Forum. He'll be speaking on "Endeca Information Technology for Self-Service and Big Data", so we'll see Endeca's positioning for structured and non-structured reporting on an adhoc basis. We'll have several presentations that delve into Endeca, but it will be good to hear from Chris on this topic, as he was with Endeca prior to the acquisition by Oracle, and has been deeply involved with the 3.1 release. Rounding out Oracle's participation is BI Forum newcomer Susan Cheung, Vice President of Product Management for Oracle TimesTen. Susan will be speaking on "TimesTen In-Memory Database for Analytics – Best Practices and Use Cases". So it will be interesting to have both Susan and Maria Colgan at the Forum, so attendees will have a chance to see Oracle's complete In-Memory strategy and roadmap at one setting.

The final session I'd like to discuss is an entry from yours truly on "ExtremeBI: Agile, Real-Time BI with Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate". I know... it's an incredibly long title... but I had to get in all the buzz words. I also rely heavily on the Information Management Reference architecture that Andrew Bond and I are presenting at the UK BI Forum, so my Atlanta session will be based around this newest release. I love this content, and I think it shows with my excitement level every time I present it. I describe an Agile methodology that utilizes Oracle's BI stack to the fullest: integrating OBIEE, ODI and perhaps the most beneficial element: Oracle GoldenGate. For those organizations who are investigating ways to deliver content rapidly while also making the end user central to the development process, then this session is for you.

Their are still slots available at both venues, so feel free to contact me directly if you have questions about either event.