Down the Memory Lane - BIWA SIG to BIWA Users Community to Analytics & Data Summit 2018

Let us go down the memory lane, it all started in 2006, soon after Oracle acquired Siebel. While Siebel was well known for CRM, the Siebel Analytics helped to get Oracle on the BI map. Mid-2006, was a good time to start a Special Interest Group (SIG) with focus on Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence. Same year Oracle acquired Synopsis (Oct 2006) and then Hyperion in 2007. The Technology-centric User Group - IOUG facilitated the start of the DWBI SIG. DBBI SIG's first public appearance was in NYOUG's summer and fall events in New York. Then this SIG was invited to present a session at Oracle Openworld 2006, in the Sunday User Group Day.

After Oracle Openworld, Charlie Berger joined hands with this SIG, and brought along his rich experiences from the Life Science Group called OLSUG. This was the time the SIG realized that its name needed to reflect Advanced Analytics (AA) so the new name BI + DW + AA condensed to BIWA SIGwas adopted and hence the url www.OracleBIWA.org The new logo was adopted ahead of the first BIWA Summit in early October 2007 time frame, that was held in Reston, VA (near Washinton, DC). The BIWA SIG logo had 4 cylinders, where the cylinder represents the RDBMS. The first cylinder on the left has a graphic that shows BI/Reporting and Visualization (Siebel Analytics or OBIEE and Discoverer would be the representative products). The next one shows ETL to represent products like OWB and Synopsis or ODI. The third cylinder shows the Cube representing OLAP and later Essbase type ROLAP or MOLAP stores. Finally, the last bar shows the diamond which represented the Oracle Data Mining feature or ODM, in the database.

The first BIWA Summit tool place on Oct 2nd and 3rd in Reston, VA, Oracle office. It ran out of capacity in the very first year and registration had to be stopped a few days before the event. This event featured keynotes from Ray Roccaforte, Robert (Bob) Stackowiak, Rich Niemiec and Mark Rittman. The event had many sessions and Hands-on Labs. The Oracle Openworld (OOW) was in mid-November that year.

The realization that the event was close to OOW, and that the capacity was limited, in Reston, VA, prompted Charlie Berger to explore the Oracle Conference Center (OCC) in Oracle HQ, Redwood City as the potential future venue. The 2008 BIWA Summit, to week after Thanks Giving in 2008, at the beautiful Oracle Campus. This was the time frame when Exadata was just announced.

The Group has been run by a volunteer of Board of Directors (BoD) and Oracle Advisors Charlie Berger and Mark Hornick. John Haydu from Oracle, was also involved in the early days as well and his efforts won him the BIWA Contribution Award. This Award was later named BIWA Haydu Contribution, in his honor. On the non-Oracle BIWA BoD members, some of the early members were Dan Vlamis, Matt Vranicar, Rich Solari, Karl Rexer, Joe Leva and many more along with me Shyam Varan Nath. BIWA is thankful to all of them for their invaluable voluntary contributions. Dan Vlamis has served along with me, as Co-Chair of the Summit in several years and Matt has provided his expertise to keep the organization fiscally sound, serving as the CFO/Treasurer. Check the late 2017 press release announcing new BoD Members.

The beautiful Oracle HQ campus, the state of the art facilities at OCC, had since then, kept the Summit to the Oracle HQ area. In several of the prior Summits, BIWA partnered with IOUG, NoCOUG and Spatial & Graph SIG in various ways. The event gradually moved to Jan end to early Feb over time.

In 2017, BIWA SIG, became an independent User Group of Oracle and renamed itself to BIWA User Community. Over time, as new technologies such as Cloud Computing, Big Data / Hadoop, Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain have gained popularity, BIWA decided to rename its conference to Analytics and Data Summit - 2018. It shifted to March 2018, due to some planned renovation at OCC. The Group also came with the new logo for this Summit.