Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

Stewart wrote and posted his last blog posting while on the plane to Monterey via gogo. Frankly, spending as much time on planes as we do, I am jealous and need to start flying with a better class of airline. Actual live internet at 35,000 feet? Now that is first class.

Speaking of first class, ODTUG Kaleidoscope never disappoints, the level of the sessions is consistently excellent. People tend to vote with their feet and the word is that attendance is up this year as well. This certainly fits with what we’ve been seeing at the presentations. This is the first conference I’ve gone to in the last 9 or 10 month that I haven’t presented at and it is nice to be able to attend more sessions. This is actually my first trip to Monterey and variation in landscapes in California continues to impress.

Stewart delivered an impressive presentation on considerations for selecting OWB. There were some particularly interesting points regarding the advantages and trade offs of the cube and dimension accelerators. The question and answer session afterward suggests that the new packaging of OWB with ODI has helped to reduce if not eliminate customer concern regarding which tool to use for new development.

Mark moderated the BI/DW panel with Mike Durran, Dan Vlamis, Jean-Pierre Dijcks and Michael Armstrong-Smith (Left to Right). There were some provocative opinions expressed regarding possible future paths for the essbase engine and how it might or might not integrate with the Oracle technology stack. Perhaps I’ll kick that bees nest in some future post. It is a topic that I think would generate a lot of discussion. Mark also presented our OBIEE optimization methodology. This approach focuses on specifically on measuring and managing the performance of the Oracle BI server. It joins our methodology for improving the performance of the Oracle BI applications. If you are reading this before today’s sessions, you will also want to stop by Mark’s presentation “Creating Hybrid Essbase/Relational OBIEE Logical Models”.

I’d like to welcome Venkat to the team. One of the reasons that Stewart and I were drawn to working with Mark and Jon and forming Rittman Mead America was their ability to identify and recruit world class talent. Venkat is a great example of such talent and we are very happy to have him on board.

A highlight of this conference for me was finally meeting Stanley. We may have been roommates at Collaborate, I really can’t say, I was pretty jet lagged at the time because I had flown there directly from Singapore. But this time we got to meet and he was good enough to pose for a picture with me, no autograph though. Stanley is Dan Norris’ Oracle Ace vest, he has his own twitter tag #stanleyace and his own blog (http://www.wtfistheacevest.com/). Apparently, he had gone diving with Dan in Monterey Bay over the weekend, and frankly he did not smell like he had showered since. This is why I only half have my arm over his sholder. Happy travels Stanley.

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