Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Like

Lisa Dobson and

Peter Scott, I went along to the
UKOUG
BI & Analytics Special Event at the Grange City Hotel, London earlier this
week. As the UKOUG BIRT SIG Chair, I helped to organise the event and did one of
the presentations, on behalf of my company,
SolStonePlus. These special events are
sort of mini BI "summits", and take place every couple of years at a hotel near
London. With this event, Oracle had a

new product line to announce, Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition, and so we
had plenty of VPs and marketing managers around, doing keynotes and generally
getting to talk with the delegates (as well as a second outing for
that
jacket…)

The day started off with a couple of keynotes, one by David Pryor on where
Oracle are going with their BI strategy (pervasive BI, being key to Fusion,
standards based and using Siebel’s best of breed Analytics technology) followed
by an interesting talk by Jon Ainsworth on where he sees the BI market going
over the next few years. From a personal perspective there was nothing new here,
but for most of the delegates this was the first time they’d heard news of the
new product line, so there was a lot of interest and a fair few questions for
the technical sessions later on.

After lunch was the technical, business and partner streams, with Doug
Cackett doing the first technical one on how he sees OLAP and data mining
fitting into data warehouse architectures. Following on from that was my talk on
BI Suite Enterprise Edition (you can download the

paper here, and

presentation here) which to my surprise was to a full room, in fact we had
to turn people away which is unusual for a partner presentation.

Lisa kindly volunteered to introduce me, and I went through how the new
product set worked, how it related to the existing toolset, and in particular
how the BI Analytics Server worked. The talk was rounded off with a
demonstration of Answers and Dashboard and a few questions were taken after.
After my talk, Morgan Russell went through the product release schedule, talked
about

what’s coming up with Discoverer, and took some more questions on Oracle’s
BI product plans.

Finally, a few points came up during the day that are worth making a note
of. First of all, OWB 10g Release 2, a.k.a. "Paris", is now available for
download as production code, currently using
http://edelivery.oracle.com (under
database products) and on OTN fairly soon. Next, I had a couple of
clarifications to points I made about future plans for BI Suite Enterprise
Edition - the first one is that Discoverer will *not* be a data source for the
BI Analytics Server, but there will be migration tools to migrate EULs to the
Enterprise Semantic Model. The other bit of news is that there’s going to be (or
at least there are plans to be, no promises) a new query tool called OracleBI
OLAP Answers that will have elements of Discoverer OLAP functionality - the
query builder for example - incorporated into it, and will allow reporting
(through the BI Analytic Server) against both Oracle OLAP and MDX (MS AS) OLAP
cubes.

Posted in General |