Oracle BIWA User Community

While we had a Panel focusing on the Critical Success Factors of BI Implementations, I though I would list the CSF's of the BIWA conference here. Since, this was the second BIWA Summit, we had some history behind us. However, just like Jeanne Harris said the biggest fallacy "if you will build a DW, they will come" - the conferences have to deal with the same issues. With a fairly successful inagural BIWA Summit in 2007, we kind of assumed the same attitude, you organize a BIWA Summit and the attendees will come. As we got closer to the event, we had to re-look the strategy and go out and "Push" the information to attract more attendees. Finally, we managed to attract attendees from all over as shown in the visual that Dan Vlamis created for the opening ceremony. We realised there is no substitute for experience in hosting a conference. To list a few we had Dan Vlamis the conferece chair with 26 years of experience in the field related to Oracle technologies. D

Last Year Mark Rittman was a keynoe speaker and he blogged the event, this time Peter Scott created some blog entries . However, unlike blogging by the speakers themselves, we encouraged media to blog about the event. Here are a few of these blog entries: The blog by James Taylor Links: Live from BIWA Summit - Competing on Analytics Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM) Critical Success Factors for successful BI and analytic implementations From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets Getting to the Right Price with Oracle Data Mining Oracle's BI Strategy Intelligent OLAP: Data Mining and OLAP Fraud Detection with Oracle Data Mining

First of all Thanks to all the attendees, speakers and Sponsors/Partners for making this event a success! The BIWA Board deserves an applause for working for close to an year to organize this event. While it is hard to single out any particular Board member, we decided to award Mark Hornick and Tony Jedlinski - the BIWA 'Haydu' Contribution Award for 2008. BIWA SIG as a user driven group, tries to balance the voice of the actual users, vendors and the Oracle Product managers, VP's etc. Being not too long after the announcement of Oracle HP Machine with Exadata storage, it was inevitable to avoid the presence of Exadata in a far too obvious way. It is indeed a "BIG" invention, just to highlight how big is the 'X' box, I took the picture with me in the frame! However, is the real word ready for Exadata, or there are other choices for the companies in 1-25 TB range? Our Platinum Sponsor IBM, helped ot fill that space. They showcased their tight relationship

Dec 2, day 1 of the Summit is over. Three keynotes, BI Panel, Lightening round by the Exhibiting sponsors and the IBM Platinum reception, along with the countless Sessions and the hands-on labs! As BIWA SIG is totally run by volunteers, it is important to take time to thank them for their efforts. Last year at Reston, BIWA awarded John Haydu, the BIWA Contribution Award 2007. This year, John would be again a worthy recipient so instead of giving him the award, we decided to name the award as BIWA 'Haydu' Contribution Award. The recipients for this year are: Mark Hornick and Tony Jedlinksi Both, were instrumental in implementing the BI to run the BI conference. They together devised the system that managed the abstract submission and selection progress. Then as we got closer to the event, we used the Admin's dashboard with critical reports to monitor the registration sources and numbers to keep a strict eye on the conference and take remediation steps to steer it towards a