OWB11g and other ODTUG Kaleidoscope Papers, plus News on Hyperion

I was taking a look through the BI&DW presentation extracts for the upcoming ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2007 event next June, and I noticed quite a few that I'm keen to attend. The event is in Daytona Beach, Florida, and compared to the recent Collaborate event there's quite a few presentations by various Oracle BI product managers and product "champions"; as well as the Oracle talks, there's ones by Michael Armstrong-Smith, David Fuston, Michael Snyder and of course yours truly. Anyway, here's ones that I'm particularly looking forward to:

• "Business Intelligence and Service-Oriented Architectures", Phil Bates - Phil is the man within Oracle in EMEA for BI and SOA, I spent a few hours with Phil at events in the USA and UK but have never heard his formal BI & SOA talk. Should be useful and I'll be using it as input into my next seminar series in the UK
• 'Warehouse Builder 11g—What Is New and Where Do We Go From Here?' and "Driving Your Data Integration Through Business Rules with OWB 11g Release 1", Jean-Pierre Djicks - expect to see me at the front furiously taking notes on what's coming up in OWB11g - rules-based mappings, support for real-time and SOA - should be good.
• "Enterprise Planning and Budgeting—Three Case Studies", David Fuston - This will be interesting, EPB has pretty much been a slow-motion car wreck over the past five years, it'll be interesting to see whether David has managed to get it working or it's more a case of "it's useful in limited circumstances, but still not a replacement for OFA".
• "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Architectural Overview", Kurt Wolff - Kurt's one of the original guys from NQuire, no-one knows more about OBI EE internals than this man. Hopefully it's not too much of a beginners talk, at the least I'll be able to button-hole him afterwards with all my technical questions.
• "Oracle Data Integrator for OWB Developers" and "Oracle Business Intelligence Enteprise Edition for Discoverer Users" - two talks by myself on what these new tools offer traditional OWB and Disco users, how you migrate and/or interoperate, where the products are going and how they'll co-exist with the existing tools. Lots of demos as well, come along to see all the products in action and get some development tips from me.

On the subject of conferences, I also noted a very interesting and well informed blog posting by Michael Bowen on the recent Hyperion Conference in the States, and the message Oracle gave to Hyperion customers on how their products will fit in with the existing Oracle product line-up. You're best off reading Michael's posting to get the full details, but it seems to me that Hyperion products that are likely to be adopted are System 9, their CPM framework, together with products such as Hyperion Planning, Crystal Ball, Scorecard, Strategic Planning, FM and MDM, with Essbase and EIS being a bit less clear (read: probably maintained, but not the strategic direction for Oracle in their particular product segment) and OBI EE, Oracle Alerts and Oracle packaged BI apps staying on.

I'll be honest and say I know very little about Hyperion, or the CPM segment in general, but Mike's analysis seems reasonable and I'll be at the Hyperion event myself in Lyon later next month to hear it all in person. Take a look at the article if you get a chance.