OAUG Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management 2010 Regional Conferences

I am currently on the steering committee for the new OAUG Connection Point - Enterprise Performance Management regional conferences that will begin in 2010. In order to start getting the word out I thought I would provide a little preview.

• The conferences will be 2 days
• The conferences will be called: OAUG Connection Point – Enterprise Performance Management” with a tag line of: “Providing excellence in education & training to the Oracle Hyperion and Business Intelligence communities”
• The purpose of these regional conferences is to provide training and education to the business user community with content soley focused on Hyperion and Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE)
• The first conference is scheduled for February 23 & 24 2010 at the Grand Hyatt Jersey City, New Jersey

If you are an Oracle partner that provides offerings around Hyperion and/or OBIEE and want to become a sponsor please contact me asap.

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.

Kerdock OBIEE OpenWold 2009 Presentation

For those of you that will be attending OpenWorld next month, I wanted to let you know that Kerdock has been selected to present. Our presentation will be a case study on our OBIEE implementation at NetApp and we will be providing a demonstration of the solution. So I encourage you to come by and check it out as I think it will be informative. The presentation details are as follows:

Title: NetApp Integrates SABA and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for LMS Dashboards
Track: Enterprise Performance Management/Business Intelligence
Date: 13-OCT-09
Time: 14:30 - 15:30
Venue: Marriott Hotel Room: Salon 10/11

OAUG OBI SIG Webcast - Humana Case Study

Be sure to attend the next OAUG OBI SIG webcast. Details as follows:

Title: Humana Gains Efficiency with Oracle BI & Essbase
Date: Monday, September 28th
Time: Noon CST

Webcast Link: https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/cmn_jm_hub.uix?mID=15771510
Conference Id: 157715103

Dial In Number: 1-866-682-4770
Conference Id: 3679513
Passcode: 0988

OAUG OBI SIG Meeting Oct 11th, 2009 - Agenda

For those of you who are attending OpenWorld this October make sure to attend the OAUG OBI SIG meeting as we are going to have some great discussions around OBIEE. Below is the agenda for the meeting:

OBISIG Meeting AgendaDate: Sunday, October 11th, 2009
Time: 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Pacific Time
Location: Moscone Center West, Room 2014
Admission: Admission is open to ALL attendees of OpenWorld, free ofcharge.

Program:
3:00 – 3:05: Intro – About the OBISIG – OpenWorld BI Events of Interest – OBISIG Board
3:05 – 3:30: Oracle Business Intelligence – Direction & Vision – Joe Thomas, OracleCorp
3:30 – 5:00: Oracle BI Round Table Discussion – Customers, Partners & Oracle Corporation

During the BI Round Table hear the following customers tell their BI Stories and answer questions from the audience : Humana, Epcor, & Black & Decker

Post Twitter updates from delivers

A few days ago I read on a blog a question about posting to Twitter from Delivers via the advanced tab. So I ventured to try this myself and here are my results. It's very cool to be able to send Twitter updates via Delivers since this would essentially leverage Twitter's ability to notify both email and phone devices (iphone/blackberry/etc) with little to no hassle. I'm not going to get into the details on how to build the Java class, but here's how I did it:

I used Twitter4J as my library to log-in and post Twitter updates. I could create my own URL wrappers but why re-invent the lemonade right? so go and grab a copy of Twitter4J from http://yusuke.homeip.net/twitter4j/en/index.html and use your favorite IDE (I used Eclipse) to create your java class.

In order to pass the Twitter username and password I used the parameter values that you can setup in the Advanced tab of the iBot creation wizard. Then I referenced those two parameters within my java class like so:

Twitter twitter = new Twitter(jobInfo.parameter(0),jobInfo.parameter(1));

For the content to post, I used a modified version (removed HTML tags) of the Corporate Overview sample that is included with the Paint dashboard sample (Shared Folders/Paint Demo/Sales Summaries/Regional Analysis/Corporate Overview) which is a narrative view. I modified it and saved it to "My Folders". This is the text that will be posted to Twitter.

I setup the iBot as follows:

• Class Name: com.kerdock.delivers.DeliversToTwitter (the name of my Java class)
• ClassPath: kdqobiee.jar (the name of the jar containing the above class)
• Additional Class Path(s): twitter4j.jar (downloaded from the URL referenced above)
• Results: Pass delivery content to Java Program
• Other Parameters: two parameters containing my twitter username and password

Then I copied the jars (kdqobiee.jar and twitter4j.jar) to the appropriate folder (in my case is C:\OracleBI\web\javahost\lib)

Finally, when I save my iBot, my twitter status is updated with the text from the Answers view:

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