Thoughts on OpenWorld 2009

Have finally caught up after getting back from OpenWorld 2009 and just wanted to post a few thoughts on the conference.

1) OBIEE continues to be a point of emphasis amongst all of the Oracle products. In the key note given by Charles Phillips and Safra Katz, several of the industry verticle product managers i.e. Retail, etc. provided demos that clearly showed OBIEE elements embedded in their applications.

2) At the demo grounds, one of the OBIEE developers walked me through the new OBIEE 11G product and was shown a lot of the new features such as:

• new scorecarding capabilities
• new Adobe visualization capabilities
• ability to create custom aggregates and custom calculations
• new "selector" capabilities and use of "saved selections" (much like old OFA product)
• on-line drill capabilities (similar to Discoverer OLAP)
• enhancements to the UI i.e. look and feel
• ability to create custom right click menus which will allow you to call other apps such as BPEL, Workflow, etc...

3) At the demo grounds I spent some time with the developer of the new Hyperion IR to OBIEE migration utility and in my opinion the product works pretty well. There are obviously some limitations i.e does not create new Interactive Dashboards and does not handle your custom java code from Hyperion IR. Oracle is also looking at developing a similar migration utility that would migrate Business Objects Universes to OBIEE but don't quote me on that.

4) Spoke to a lot of clients who are currently evaluating OBIEE and many are considering going the "buy" route and implementing the BI Apps.