UKOUG BI & Analytics Special Event, London
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.