Migrating Brio/Hyperion IR to OBIEE

First, I will start off with a little bit of Kerdock history. Back in 2002 when Kerdock was founded we started out as a Brio Partner. Since 2002, the BI industry has experienced a lot of consolidation. As a result, Kerdock has realigned itself twice due to the acquisitions by Hyperion and then Oracle. Kerdock today is totally aligned with Oracle and has maintained Certified Advantage Partner status which is the highest partner level offered by Oracle.

As a result of Kerdock's roots, we have worked with many clients over the years who have implemented Brio and/or Hyperion IR to solve their business intelligence needs. More recently we have been engaged in OBIEE implementations and therefore have experience working with all of the OBIEE + tool sets. Today when we meet with our legacy Hyperion clients we are starting to see more interest in OBIEE for the following reasons:

1. They have implemented v 11.x of Hyperion and would like to take advantage of the tighter integration between OBIEE and the Hyperion Workspace
2. They are on an older version of Brio or Hyperion IR and are facing support issues
3. They would like to take advantage of the enterprise framework of OBIEE such as the common information model (OBIEE Repository) to reduce report maintenance
4. They would like to take advantage of he OBIEE web based infrastructure that makes it easy to integrate with other Oracle applications as well as 3rd party applications such as Microsoft Sharepoint and Adobe Flex

So recently I attended an Oracle webcast that discussed a new migration utility that converts Hyperion BQYs to OBIEE Answers Requests and therefore make the move to OBIEE less time consuming and costly. I was pleasantly surprised at the extent of the process as it goes beyond what the Discoverer to OBIEE migration accomplishes.

The Translation workbench will require clients to be on version 9.x of Hyperion and version 10.1.3.x of OBIEE. If you are a client who is pre-system 9 you will have one additional step to migrate your BQY's to a system 9 environment. The workbench will soon be a beta release and clients can work with partners such as Kerdock or Oracle to start migrating their BQYs to Answers. The migration process at a high level involves 5 steps:

1. Import data sources - physical tables, columns
2. Accumulate BQY DM dimensions and extend physical layer
3. Generate standard names, star schemas, and presentation folders
4. Regenerate BI Repository that supports BQY reports
5. Generate Answers request definitions - criteria, pivots, charts

General release of the migration utility will not be out till some time next calendar year so if you are interested in utilizing this utility within the next few months please feel free to contact me. My email address is jim.glazar@kerdock.com