About the Oracle BI Developer (NDA) Day at the BI Forum Events

We were pleased to finally launch the website and registration page for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2012 yesterday, and something that's new this year is an extra day, at the end, run in conjunction with Oracle BI Product Development and ourselves.

The history of this is that, at the end of last year's Oracle Openworld in San Francisco, I, along with Christian Screen (CapGemini) and Kevin McGinley (Accenture) organized a trip up to Redwood Shores to meet with the development team behind OBIEE. We spent the best part of the day with them, going through their plans and ideas for OBIEE, and gave our feedback on what we thought of this. What was unique about the event was that, in return for everyone attending getting their companies to sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements), Oracle could be a lot more open about product direction, plans and so on. The reason that Oracle are so cagey in public about the details of future product direction is that US revenue recognition rules then require them to implement publicly declared features within a particular period, with that period being shorter the more specific those details become. That's why Oracle never explicitly say too much about what's coming in each release (including release dates), and it's why you get those big disclaimers in front of any forward-looking presentation at Openworld.

But the developer community does, of course, have some valuable insights that Oracle are interested in hearing, and as developers we're keen to hear what's coming up with the product. Hence, we organized the event last year which was a great success, and we persuaded Oracle to run another event of this type, at the end of each of our BI Forum sessions. The rationale behind this was that, with the BI Forum attendees, we've got a great group of intensive-users of OBIEE and related products, who'll be able to give some great insights into the product and validate some of their design decisions.

So these days are running at the end of each BI Forum event (Friday, 11th May 2012 in Brighton, UK and Friday, 18th May 2012 in Atlanta, GA), and attendance is free. In theory we'll open up each event to anyone who wants to attend and can get the Oracle-provided NDA signed, but the venue only has limited capacity and we'll need to give priority to BI Forum attendees. If definitely can't make the BI Forum but would like to attend, drop me an email and let me know about some of the work you're doing with OBIEE, and I'll see if we can squeeze you in nearer to the date. In the meantime, the web page for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2012 is now online, which also has links to the registration forms for Brighton and Atlanta. Any questions, drop me an email or add a comment.