Oracle BIWA User Community

First of all Happy Holidays! Here is how to make your 2013 great!, kick off your year by attending BIWA Summit Jan 9-10, 2013 by registering here . The BIWA Summit is now less than 4 weeks away! This is an in-person BI /  DW related event organized by IOUG's BIWA SIG . Check out the variety and depth of the topics covered in this event here . There is a broad range of topics from Business Intelligence (OBIEE, BI Publisher), Data Warehousing, Advanced Analytics including the Big Data and the Hyperion EPM including coverage of Essbase. Some uses cases of Engineered systems for BI/DW will be covered as well. My talk is on use of Advanced Analytics within the packaged BI... in other words use of Oracle Data Mining using Spend Classification with Procurement and Spend Analytics ( OBIA stack). .. What else makes BIWA Summit unique?  It's an event that is 100% decided to Business Analytics, i.e. how to gain competitive advantage using data and insights from data. As the speaker

The BIWA Summit speaker line-up has been announced. Check here for the complete list . Here is the list of the four solid keynote speakers: Balaji Yelamnchili Tom Kyte Vaishnavi Sashikanth and Ari Kaplan (a noted Sports Analyst of Major League Baseball fame) The sessions are divided in the following Tracks: BI  (OBIEE, Visualization, Mobile BI, BIP etc.) DW (Data Warehousing, Data Integration and Spatial Intelligence Big Data with Analytics (Concepts of Hadoop, Oracle Big Data Appliance) Advanced Analytics (Oracle Data Mining, Oracle R Enterprise, Spend Classification etc.) and Enterprise Performance Management (Essbase, Hyperion Planning/HFM Infrastructure etc.)  Hands-on Labs on topics like OBIEE, Exalytics, BIP, OLAP, ODM, ORE, Essbase etc. See the detailed list of sessions here  http://www.biwasummit.com/schedule/sessions These sessions will be over two days on Jan 9-10. If you have not registered yet, click here to confirm your seat today.

This post will give you a sneak peak in to the content that you should expect at BIWA Summit Jan 9-10, 2013 at Hotel Sofitel, Redwood City, CA. This place is within walking distance from Oracle Head Quarters and the cylinder (DB) shaped buildings. The BIWA Summit kicks off with the Welcome reception on Tue night at Hotel Sofitel. Next morning, Tom Kyte will kick-off the event with his keynote. Expect a total of 4 BI and related Keynotes, about 8 Hands-on Labs and several sessions spanning tracks like BI, DW, Big Data, Advanced Analytics and EPM. There is also a sub-track on Spatial Analytics. Here are the keynotes: Day 1 Tom Kyte - What's new from Oracle in BI and Data Warehousing           Balaji Yelamanchili - Fast and Furious : A Sneak Peak into the Future of Oracle BI Day 2 Vaishnavi Sashikanth - Making Big Data Analytics Accessible            Ari Kaplan - Sports Analytics in Action The featured talks include: Mark Rittman, Rittman Mead - Big Data at the Speed of

The BIWA Summit Jan 9-10, 2013 registration opened last week. Take a look at the BIWA Summit website here . Registration starts at $299 for IOUG members ($349 for non-members). To make the most of the event, plan to stay at Hotel Sofitel where the event will take place. This will allow you to take full advantage of the off-hour events and networking with Professionals from North America and other countries like UK, Belgium and so on... Here I would like to quote a few pointers from Tom Singer's article recently published in a magazine. Tom is a "Network Catalyst" who I met in a CIO event a few years ago... His 10 Tips to maximize the Conference-Networking experience go as follows: 1) Create a Plan - Have a game-plan ahead of time about what kind of people you want to meet and get to know. If for e.g. I am working on an OLAP project, I would perhaps like to meet experts like Dan Vlamis, who is one of the top experts. I may look for some customers who recently implemen

The BIWA Summit is a no-frills events where the goal is to attract the best minds of the World in the space of Oracle BI, Advanced Analytics, Big Data and related fields. The event will be in Hotel Sofitel. Click here to register for the event.   Registration starts at $249 for IOUG members or $299 for non-members. We encourage you to stay in the hotel, so that you can maximize you opportunities for professional networking. We will announce more in-formal events around the two-day event on Jan 9-10.  If you stay at Hotel Sofitel, you will be able to get the free shuttle from San Francisco airport, the details are here:  http://www.sofitel.com/gb/hotel-0922-sofitel-san-francisco-bay/location.shtml The property overlooks a Lake and is walking distance to the Oracle HQ cylindrical offices that represent the Databases. If you are coming from out of town, we suggest you come by Jan 8, early evening. The parking is free at Hotel Sofitel for local residents to Bay Area. If you can, we

========================================= The next Oracle BIWA Summit, organized by the leading Oracle Special Interest Group (SIG) for Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Analytics professionals, will be held on Jan 9,10 2013, at The Oracle HQ Sofitel Hotel , in Redwood City, CA.  The Oracle BIWA Summit brings together Oracle ACE experts, customers who are currently using or planning to use Oracle BI, Warehousing and Analytics products and technologies, partners and Oracle Product Managers, Support Personnel and Development Managers.  Everything and everyone that you will need to be successful in your Oracle “BIWA” implementations will be at the Oracle BIWA Summit, Jan 9-10, 2013. The Call for Speakers is now Open. Please submit your Speaker Proposals at: http://BIWA13.org BIWA SIG is part of IOUG ========================================== The Focus Areas for Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics -BIWA Summit include: 1)      Advanced A

I decided to sit closer to the front in the morning keynote today to get better pictures than the comfort of the desk and power outlet in the assigned seating for Bloggers. My picture of Big Data slide by Intel, in Diane's keynote, was re-tweeted by @OracleOpenworld. I found the Intel keynote by Diane Bryant really high quality. She was able to bring in the right themes like Business Intelligence ( 5 + 6  =10 where 5 BI professionals in 6 months can create an ROI of $10m !), Big Data, in-memory database (TimesTen) and the convergence of Server processing, networking and storage. One striking contrast in the Intel keynote was focus on IT and the Business Transformation enabler. I did not see any thrust on traditional IT shops being asked to "outsource" the core IT to Public or Private Cloud. The Oracle keynote on Sunday seemed to focus in that direction. The Customer Experience Conference starts today as well....

The focus at Oracle Openworld 2013 is on Cloud model of computing, the shift from CAPEX to OPEX. In other words, Oracle is trying to convey that instead of upfront investments in larger systems and infrastructure, customer now have the choice to "pay as they go" in the Cloud computing. The slide used by Larry in his Tue keynote about the uptake of Fusion Applications,  https://twitter.com/shyamvaran/status/253264386804826112/photo/1 shows that most of the "Fusion Customers"  which I believe now includes Taleo customs as well, are Public Cloud based. Oracle is talking about Private Cloud, my understanding is that in this model, Oracle would offer to manage the infrastrucutre in the customer premises where customers are not comfortable that data or application should leave their premises. http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/private/overview/index.html However, it seems customers will pay based on some degree of usage / computing power or storage, even in the Pr

The Oracle Openworld 2012 is here... Sunday is dedicated to the User Groups. Moscone W is full of User Group / SIG driven sessions. These help to provide a user perspective to the Oracle stack and is a great place to network with the Oracle User Group Leaders...and of course all the active User Group members. My session is at 2:15 PM on Sunday at Moscone W L2 (Rm 2020). My focus is Oracle BI Applications - a Deep Dive... I plan to cover about Advanced Analytics as well as BI Apps and Advanced Analytics comes together. Look forward to the Keynote today evening... let us see what is announced today v/s what is held back for Wed keynotes...

IOUG's Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics (BIWA) SIG will re-introduce the in-person BIWA Summit, on Jan 9, 10 (Wed, Thur) 2013. The location of this event will be Sofitel Hotel, close to Oracle Head Quarters, in Redwood City, CA. This place is nearby to San Francisco (SFO) airport and also  well connected to Oakland (OAK) and San Jose (SJC) airports.  Click here to register for the event.   Registration starts at $249 for IOUG members or $299 for non-members. The 2 to 2 1/2 day event will have in-person session in tracks like BI, DW, Advanced Analytics and Big Data. The Oracle's Engineered systems run across this stack, so look forward to some use cases of engineered systems for BI/DW or Big Data as well. The BIWA Summit, had hand on lab (HoL) as well, free to the registered attendees. To see the content from the last BIWA Summit check here . If you would like to speak at BIWA Summit 2013 or be a hands on lab facilitator, please submit your proposal he

Oracle Openworld 2012 is just a week away! The User Groups take the center stage on Sunday at Moscone West.  Here are a few IOUG / BI related sessions, I would suggest to attend: 1) CON7484, Shyam Varan Nath, IBM / BIWA at 2:15 PM  (Room 2020) Deep Dive to Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 2) Choose one of these at 3:30 PM CON2644, Mark Rittman, RM Oracle Exalytics and TimesTen for Exalytics Best Practices CON5395, Stewart Bryson, RM Replacing a Legacy Data Warehouse: A Case Study on OBIEE as a Migration Hub 3) UGF10575,  at 8:00 AM (Room 2020) 3D BI: Building new Flexibility in Enterprise-Wide Decision-Making with Oracle BI 4) Big Data Talks from at 9 AM (Room 2020) UGF10408, Andy Flower Big Data – A BIG part of Information Management 5) UGF10407, Ian Abramson, at 10:30 AM (Room 2020) Big Data: The Future is Now 6) UGF10406, Steve Johnston, 12:30 PM (Room 2020) Big Data, Integration and Governance - Ask the Experts Panel Apart from this, there will

Why you should attend the Free Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) BI, Warehousing and Analytics (BIWA) SIG 2-Day Virtual Summit August 15-16, 2012 10.  Learn from Industry leaders and Oracle experts about best practices, customer examples, “How to” and visions for the future that you can put to work in your company immediately 9.  It’s FREE!! 8.  It’s a Virtual Conference so you don’t have to leave your desk or incur travel expenses 7.  You can pick and choose and dial-in for just the sessions that most interest you. 6.  Lean about OBIEE, Exadata, Big Data, Endeca, Exalytics and more... 5.  Come see how Big Data Analytics and Predictive Analytics can give your company a competitive advantage 4.  You can watch and listen while you are still working (or eating!)! 3.  Ask questions, get answers from experts and other Oracle users 2.  See how you can gain more business value from your investment in Oracle BI, Warehousing and Analytics technology …and last…. 1.  Did we mentio

BIWA Virtual Summit 2012 is approaching soon! So why should you attend it?  This two day event packs 10+ Virtual sessions, about an hours each, that covers all aspects of BI and Advanced Analytics. If terms like "Data Scientist" intrigues you, then you will find all that you need to know it in the BIWA Summit. Day 1 kicks off with a key note by James Taylor. It is followed by a session by Charlie Berger on all about advanced analytics. The day continues with session that feature Oracle VP of BI Robert Stackowiak where he will cover Exadata and Big Data. Marty Gubar will take a deep dive into how to harness Big Data for business use. This is followed by Dan Vlamis who will talk about all kinds of visualization of OLAP data. Day 2 features a key note by Oracle VI Balaji, Sunil Ranka on OBIEE performance tuning, Jeff on Essbase, Matt from Oracle on newly acquired Endeca and Florian on Oracle BI Applications. So if you have not registered yet, do it now... https://www1.

BIWA Virtual Summit 2012 (Aug 15 - 16), 11 AM to 5 PM ET  From Business Intelligence to Predictive Analytics  (Day 1 Keynote) James Taylor, CEO, Decision Management Solutions Abstract: The data you have, the way you analyze it, and the way you act on this analysis drives better business outcomes.  James Taylor, CEO of Decision Management Solutions, Faculty Member at International Institute for Analytics and the leading expert in Decision Management shows that to make the most of your data, you need to do more than just adopt predictive analytics - you need to deeply embed predictive analytics in your day to day operational systems. Companies that use predictive analytics to get more value from their data are outperforming their competitors in areas such as underwriting, origination, marketing, customer retention, fraud detection, collections and more. In this opening keynote, James shows you how to build on your investments in BI - reporting, visualization and dashboards – and ac

The First ever BIWA Virtual Summit will be held on Aug 15 - 16, 2012. This will be a virtual only event spread over two days.  Each day the event will be between 11 AM ET and 5 PM ET, mostly in 1 hr sessions. ( Link to Abstracts ) You need to register for each day separately. Day 1, Wed Aug 15, 2012 Data  Warehousing and Advanced Analytics Focus (Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/485134176 ) 11 AM ET AM   Key Note From Business Intelligence to Predictive Analytics James Taylor, CEO Decision Management Services Noon ET       Oracle Advanced Analytics, Data Mining, Predictive Analytics, Big Data, Exalytics - What, Where, When? Charlie Berger, Oracle Corporation 1 PM ET.       Oracle in an Integrated Big Data & Analytics Infrastructure by Bob Stakowiak, Oracle 2 PM ET.       Uncover the Value in Big Data with Oracle's Big Data Platform by Marty Gubar 3 PM ET.       Visualizing OLAP Data with Multiple Products, Dan Vlamis, Vlamis 4 P

One of the news worthy item today was  Oracle plans new cloud-based products, first Ellison tweet Larry Ellison will do his first Tweet in early June to mark the announcement of the new Cloud based offerings from Oracle. Today web based software accounts for $1 billion or so in revenues for Oracle. I noted Tom Kyte (@OracleAskTom) recently started tweeting as well! There was an article recently in Computerworld  Why Oracle Fusion Apps customers overwhelmingly prefer cloud deployment   where Oracle Fusion Applications customers have shown interest in the hosted applications by Oracle. Most of the early Fusion Application customers are on the "Cloud for the initial years. I understand, this frees the customer from the worries of infrastructure for this new technology and worry on the business adoption of the Fusion Applications as it gradually replaces Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, Peoplesoft and Siebel Applications. This is the SaaS or the Sofware as a Service model for d

The week of Collaborate conference 2012 is over! It turned out to be a action packed week. It started on Saturday with a full day IOUG board meeting. I have been nominated to the IOUG Board for 2012-213 and will be taking care of Product Integration Portfolio with focus on Exa-systems. On Sunday, we conducted the Deep Dive on Oracle BI Applications (OBIA) along with a friend JV and Oracle Product Management folks. This was intense 5 hr class between 9 am and 3 pm on Sunday and had 20+ attendees. The day ended with IOUG SIG reception were Mark Townsend was recognized for his contributions to IOUG community, posthumously. It was nice meeting Dr DBA or Ken Jacobs in the event, even though he has retied from Oracle. The BIWA SIG board had dinner the same night and discussed possibilities of BIWA SIG and the Quest BI SIG working closer in future. Monday morning was no rocket science! It was key note with Mark Kelly... I was lucky to obtain his autographed book and here is the picture with

It is that time of year!   Collaborate  2012 is less than two weeks away. This time it is in Las Vegas, April 22-26. It has been alternating between Orlando, FL and Las Vega, NV, tow cities that are very conference friendly. The event will be full of exciting content in the BI, DW & EPM (BIWA) Track, starting with the Deep Dive on Oracle Business Intelligence Applications on Sunday. The Mon-Wed will be filled with several sessions from customers, implementer and Oracle Product Managers. Apart from regular sessions and Panel discussions, take advantage of the Hands on Labs, at no extra cost on a variety of topics from OBIEE, Spatial/MapViewer to Advanced Analytics such as Oracle Data Mining, Oracle Enterprise R and OLAP.  In the Hands on Labs (HoL) you actually work on a computer, on a virtual machine and get to carry out the exercises in 1-2 hr session.  Add these to your schedule if you want to join these sessions and come in early. I have to jump on an IOUG call, so more late

The coverage of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications for Oracle and SAP  ERP continues to extend. The most recent addition from April 4, 2012 is the the new Oracle Manufacturing Analytics and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics Applications including the connectors for IBM Maximo. This was released through the Extension Pack for 7.9.6.3 branch.  At the same time Oracle extended the coverage for the SAP customers from Finance to Sales & Distribution and Materials Management with the support for Procurement and Supply Chain Performance Applications on the 7.9.7.1 branch.  I have come across companies that are a mix of Oracle and SAP either by choice such as PeopleSoft for HCM and SAP for Finance and Manufacturing or due to acquisitions. With the availability of coverage for back-office applications (ERP) for both Oracle and SAP, now customers have increased choice for packaged applications. The new applications such as the Manufacturing and Enterprise Asset Manageme

Gartner spends a lot of time reviewing the major Business Intelligence platform vendors and talking to the users of BI to come up with the updates in the Magic Quadrant. Here is the latest one released in Feb 2012. As you can see the notables in the Leaders Quadrant are Oracle taking the top stop in ability to execute with OBIEE and BI Applications (OBIA)  and IBM establishing itself as the visionary with Cognos and related offerings. Look at my similar posting from Jan 2010 here (  http://oraclebiwasig.blogspot.com/2010/01/gartner-2010-magic-quadrant-for.html  )  The BI Platform leaders in Jan 2010 were Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAS, Microstrategy, SAP (Business Objects) and Information Builders. Compared to 2010, now QlikTech has entered the leaders quadrant. Gartner quotes "QlikTech is a marketing juggernaut; it has brand recognition many times more prominent than a firm with its current market share would expect." I have heard of QlikView when Oracle talks of visuali