Collaborate Thoughts

Sorry I have been so busy and not able to post a play-by-play account of Collaborate. My friend Edward Roske did manage to post often from Collaborate and I recommend you read his comments at http://looksmarter.blogspot.com/. I don't know how he kept up; he must have been blogging the entire time he wasn't presenting..

As for my overall impression.. It does seem to me, and to others I talked with, like this is the replacement for the Hyperion Solutions conferences of the past. It did seem a bit light on 'how customer A implemented Hyperion product XYZ' types of presentations but hopefully there will be more submissions in future years. Edward Roske and Tracy McMullen from interRel did many, many presentations; they did invest a bunch of time in submitting/writing many of the presentations. The best presentation I saw was, however, a non-technical presentation by John Scott of interRel about the good, bad and ugly of budget and forecasting systems. John used to be the Global Domain Lead for Hyperion Planning and talked not only about how budgets can be good, but also on how they can lead to 'bad' behavior such as causing people to protect their budget dollars even when the business could be optimized by a lower budget..

The OAUG SIG meeting was interesting; Edward wrote about many of the details but there is one thing I wanted to point out about the benefits of SIG membership. Oracle E-Business Suites customers were facing a deadline on upgrading a specific version before it went to 'Sustaining Support' which is the lowest level on their support matrix; the SIG convinced Oracle to extend that support by (at-least) one year. The lesson? Those of you on Essbase 7X may want to join the OAUG SIG 'in-force' and together work to make sure 7X does not go to 'Sustaining Support'.

On the Essbase roadmap topic, there was an excellent presentation made by Aneel Shenker; he was gracious enough to give me a copy of the slides and I will post a my thoughts of the new features coming in Essbase 11.1.1, formerly known as "Kennedy" and "Essbase 9.5" next week. That being said, if you want to know the real scoop on this release, the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference in New Orleans will dedicate the entire day Sunday, June 15, to the topic and will feature the Hyperion developers who wrote the product and know it through and through. I encourage you all to register for this conference soon as there is limited space available. Information on this conference is at http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/hyperion.html.