An Update on the BI Forum, OBIEE EMG and US Conferences

It's been particularly hectic over the past few weeks, with several new projects kicking off, training being delivered around Europe and a couple of trips over to the States, but I'm back in the UK now gradually catching up with blog posts and articles. As it's been so long since I posted an update on the blog, here's news of a few things that might be of interest to readers, including news on conferences and our new venture led by Venkat Janakiraman.

First up is the BI Forum 2010, which we're running in Brighton in May and which has now reached capacity.

Like last year, we're hosting an expert-level OBIEE, ODI and Essbase conference in our home town, with numbers limited to 50 so that we can maximize opportunities for networking. This year we have Kurt Wolff coming over as our special guest, who will be running a one-day masterclass on the day before the event opens proper, and we also have Phil Bates, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Architect, proving the opening keynote after Kurt's masterclass. Many thanks to everyone who has registered and we look forward to seeing you all in a couple of months, and if you weren't able to register in time we'll post all the proceeding on our website after it has closed.

I'm also pleased to announce the OBIEE Enterprise Methodology Group, a collaboration between a number of OBIEE industry gurus to provide a forum for design, architecture and performance-optimization discussions, and based on an original idea for the Oracle ADF community by Chris Muir and Simon Haslam (thanks, Chris and Simon!)

Designed to complement the OTN OBIEE Forum, this group, organized in conjunction with the ODTUG BI&DW SIG and independent of any vendor or partner, aims to foster discussion of "big picture" OBIEE questions and has a number of moderators who will aim to keep the conversation "on-track". Membership is free (although we do ask that you fill in a survey at the time of applying, so we can better understand members backgrounds) and the site is hosted on Google Groups, at http://groups.google.com/group/obiee-enterprise-methodology. If this sounds of interest to you, go over to the website and sign up, and post a question or design tip to start things going.

Moving on to conferences, there are two great events coming up in the States in the next few months. Collaborate'10, and in particular the "Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days 2010" event that's running as part of the IOUG Forum at Collaborate, takes place in Las Vegas from April 18th-22nd at the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

Dan Vlamis and Shyam Nath, two good friends of mine and members of the BIWA board have worked particularly hard to put an excellent tools, database and applications BI content stream together for the event, and Rittman Mead be strongly participating over the week of the conference. I will be running a one-day "Deep Dive" event on the Sunday as part of the IOUG Forum, where I'll be taking a detailed look at some key OBIEE design techniques including data modeling and support for Essbase, whilst Peter Scott, Stewart Bryson and myself will be running regular conference sessions during the week.

There are also a number of "hands-on" sessions during the main conference including a chance to try out the new Simba Technologies MS Excel interface for Oracle OLAP, a hands-on with Stewart Bryson on Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g Release 2, and other sessions including ones on Oracle Data Mining and Oracle BI Enterprise Edition. You can register for the Collaborate'10 through the BIWA website using this link, which gives you access to additional member benefits and discounts.

On a similar topic, another event in the States and one that I've been particularly closely involved in. ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 is being held in Washington D.C from June 27th - July 1st.

Before I joined the ODTUG Board in late 2009 I also volunteered as the Kaleidoscope BI, DW and Hyperion Reporting Tools content lead, helping set the agenda along with the Kaleidoscope conference committee. In particular, I was especially keen to make Kaleidoscope the premier US event for OBIEE, OWB and ODI content, building on the work that Edward Roske, Tim Tow and the Hyperion SIG committee did last year for the various Hyperion and Essbase streams and leveraging ODTUG's focus on developers and tools.

For this year's Kaleidoscope, we've got a number of exclusive sessions from Oracle product managers, including sessions on ODI 11g, the BI Apps / Essbase Integrator, the new OBIEE-optimized SmartView, as well as lots of sessions on OBIEE 11g. As Kaleidoscope is a relatively small conference (compared to Collaborate) we've also got a great opportunity to get all of the BI, DW and Hyperion speakers and delegates together during the event, and I'll be planning a social event for any delegates and speakers who want to venture into DC for one of the evenings. And, even better, the World Cup will be on with several of the second round matches due to be played at the start of Kaleidoscope week, so we'll get a chance to pull up a chair, crack open a Sam Adams and watch a few of the games whilst discussing Oracle BI technology.

Again, you can register for Kaleidoscope using this link, where you'll also be able to sign-up for a free one-day Oracle EPM and Essbase Symposium on the Sunday before the main conference opens.

Finally, a bit of news on Rittman Mead overseas. Venkat Janakiraman, who'll you'll certainly know from this blog and his previous Oracle blog on Wordpress.com, recently opened up our new office in Bangalore as Rittman Mead Consulting Pvt Ltd. Venkat's been a fantastic person to work with, and he's now building a local team in India to work alongside Rittman Mead in the UK, Benelux and the USA on projects, training and support. We've been very impressed over the past few years with some of the super-smart people coming out of the Oracle IT industry in India, and Venkat will be building up an expert-services team that will support our activities in Europe in the US as well as running their own projects in India and Asia-Pacific, starting with Ram Chaitanya and Jay Gandhi who joined us in the past few weeks.

If you're based around Bangalore and have a consulting, pre-sales or training background in Oracle BI and EPM and would be interested in working with Venkat, drop him a line and we'd be pleased to hear from you. Similarly, if you are looking for an expert-services, training and support within APAC, drop us a line and we'd be pleased to help.