Putting On My Presales Hat
January 21st, 2006 by Mark Rittman
I mentioned yesterday that I’m off to Ireland tomorrow, and the work I’m
going to be doing for most of the week is a presales engagement for a
public-sector organisation.
It’s probably true to say that presales is probably the sort of work that I
get the most enjoyment out of; you typically have to go in at the start of an
engagement with a customer, try and understand their requirements - and the
things that are most likely to make them want to use you - and then try and put
a proposition together that meets their needs. You usually have to have a fairly
good understanding of a lot of technologies, and to be a bit of a problem solver
- you can’t raise a TAR and wait for Oracle Support to get back as you’ve
usually only got a couple of days to get the job done. The piece of work I’m
doing next week is building a Discoverer, Portal and Reports demo and we’re up
against offerings from vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects. One of the
things I’m most looking at getting my teeth into is using Reports to produce
some highly formatted "statement-style" documents, lots of barcodes, multiple
queries and so forth. If I get a chance I’ll post an article on how this bit
gets done.
A couple of bits of news. Nicholas Goodman posted on his blog the other day
that
he’d been made an Oracle ACE; well done Nick, thoroughly deserved and I’m
looking forward to catching up with you this year. Nick’s also presenting at the
ODTUG Virtual Conference 2006
on OWB Paris, if you get a chance to register and watch the presentation I’m
sure it’ll be excellent.
There’s a good little article over at IntelligentEnterprise on
architectures for business intelligence product suites. If you’re thinking
about a proper architecture for your BI tools, or looking to evaluate offerings
from the different vendors, it’s a useful read.
Finally, Howard J. Rogers has created a
Wiki on his Dizwell website
to see whether it’s something that the community might use and get some value
out of. Wikis are "collaboratively edited websites" - the most famous one of
course being Wikipedia - with the idea
being that anyone can add content or edit it. I’ve often thought about an Oracle
Business Intelligence wiki, to try and capture some of the knowledge that’s out
there, but I’ve always been mindful of just fragmenting the knowledge and sites
that are already out there. I’ve set my own forum up, not as a rival to Oracle’s
own BI & Data Warehousing forums, but more as a way of documenting some of the
questions and answers that get sent through to me directly. It’ll be interesting
to see how the wiki that Howard is hosting gets on, I suspect it’ll take off as
there’s quite a collaborative community around the Dizwell site who are prepared
to contribute as well as just read.
January 23rd, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Reports? Didn’t you just do a blog on XML Pub? Do you see Reports surviving into the future?
January 24th, 2006 at 1:18 am
Well, if you get a chance, a ‘nugget’ or two of BI wisdom dropped onto the Wiki would be an excellent thing to have. That kind of stuff doesn’t get around as much as it ought to!
Good luck in Ireland, anyway. A beautiful country (and Dublin’s my favourite city in the world).
January 24th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Anonymous : Yes, good point. Reports is the product that’s available now, and as part of the BI 10g package, whilst XMLP is probably one that’s “more for the future”. In terms of a presales engagement, you tend to concentrate more on what’s deliverable now as opposed to what’s coming later in the year.
Howard : I might just well do that. If a request comes up for a page of information that’s around BI, I’ll get stuck in and add some content.
Yes, Dublin’s excellent, I’ve spent many a good weekend there. I’m up North though for this one, working with a client up towards Coleraine. Very nice coastline and quite a nice contrast to London, where I normally get to work.