The Dodeca Symposium at Kscope17

Parallel Lines

One way or the other

Tim Tow, president, CEO, and general Applied OLAP grand visionary has wanted a Dodeca symposium for ages – Five years?  Seven?  A long time for sure. – and come this Kscope17 it has finally happened.  

That’s right – this Sunday, 25 June 2017, at Kscope17, you can see the best spreadsheet management tool – aka what Excel and Essbase should be – in its very own track running at the same time as Oracle's symposiums.  This is big news both for Applied OLAP and ODTUG as there has never been a parallel (or any kind of for that matter) non-Oracle symposium at any Kscope.  Congratulations are due to Tim and his team for making this finally happens.

Sunday Geek

Do Symposiums have roadmaps?  New product announcements?  Customer presentations?  Deep dives?  Q&A with product management and development?  Dodeca has that and more.

If you use Essbase and you’re not using Dodeca, you owe it to yourself to attend.

This is all taking place in the Peony room at the JW Marriott San Antonio hotel.

Picture this

Sunday isn’t the end of Dodeca content at Kscope for there are sessions throughout the week.  Note that these are almost exclusively by customers, not consultants aka The Wretched of the Earth.  NB – I am a consultant and I heartily encourage you to come to my sessions but there can be no greater recommendation than that of a satisfied buyer.  Ask the geek who owns one.

Applied OLAP: Dodeca Customer Panel - Dodeca Customers Make Essbase Their Secret Weapon

Tim Tow , Applied OLAP, Inc.

When: Jun 27, 2017, Tuesday Vendor Presentation, 9:45 am - 10:45 am

Room: Grand Oaks H

Topic: Vendor Presentation - Subtopic: Vendor Presentation

Learn how Abbott, The Kroger Company, Wells Fargo, Williams Energy , and LinkedIn combine Dodeca and Essbase to solve their business needs. Like many companies, they have diverse requirements. Join this session to find out how they implemented and build upon their Essbase footprint with the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System. Participate in the Q&A session and ask questions directly to the panel. Dodeca - not just for planning, reporting, and analysis.

Essbase Does It, but Dodeca Makes It Easy! (The Sequel)

Stuart Yasukochi , Abbott (formerly St. Jude Medical, Inc.)

Co-presenter(s): Doug Pearce, Analysis Team

When: Jun 27, 2017, Tuesday Session 8 , 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Room: Grand Oaks G

Topic: Essbase - Subtopic: Essbase-related technologies

St. Jude Medical identified three key technical hurdles to converting their worldwide planning applications to a single ASO database. Learn how Currency Translation, Workforce, and Supporting Details’ complex functionality was achieved using core Essbase functionality with Dodeca’s versatility. Seamless integration between relational input views and Essbase provided for employee-level workforce planning and generalized supporting details inputs. Simple operations in BSO are not so simple in ASO such as currency conversion. Join us to learn how SJM was able to surmount these obstacles with increased efficiency and reduced complexity.

Did You Know Your Local Grocer Uses Essbase?

Elizabeth Ferrell , Kroger

When: Jun 27, 2017, Tuesday Session 9, 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Room: Peony

Topic: EPM Business Content - Subtopic: EPM/BI Strategies

Kroger is scaling Oracle Hyperion Essbase to 25,000 users and putting timely data in the hands of the tactical resources in thousands of stores. Stores can drill through to invoices, write back their labor estimates, and manage allocation factors that are critical to corporate through the Dodeca interface.

Introduction to Java and the Essbase Java API

Tim Tow , Applied OLAP, Inc.

When: Jun 28, 2017, Wednesday Session 13, 11:15 am - 12:15 pm

Room: Grand Oaks H

Topic: Essbase - Subtopic: Other Essbase

Many Essbase customers and partners have requirements that extend beyond the 'out-of-the-box' capabilities shipped with the product. Thankfully, Essbase is a platform that features a very robust Java API that provides nearly endless possibilities allowing customers the ability to leverage their Essbase investment. Attend this session to learn the basics of how to get started with the Java programming language and with the Essbase Java API.

We Make Energy Happen: Oracle EPM Client Success Story at Williams

David Wells , Williams

Co-presenter(s): Arijit Chanda, Williams

When: Jun 28, 2017, Wednesday Session 16 , 4:15 pm - 5:15 pm

Room: Grand Oaks H

Topic: Essbase - Subtopic: Essbase-related technologies

After an enterprise-wide reorganization, the FP&A group was faced with growing business requirements, slow and outdated systems, missed deadlines, and frustrated users. Learn how Williams super-charged its EPM environment using Planning, Essbase ASO, and Dodeca to cut processing times from four hours to 15 minutes and increase data capacity by over 10 times. With the system bottlenecks removed, the finance organization is not only meeting deadlines, but performing more comprehensive analyses and other projects neglected previously due to system restraints.

That’s an unprecedented amount of content for a non-Oracle product and proof, if proof be needed, that Dodeca and Applied OLAP are leaders in the Oracle EPM space.

I know but I don’t know

The story of my life although I’m pretty sure I know that I don’t know.  But do you need to be in this perpetual state of barely self-aware ignorance when it comes to Essbase and spreadsheets?  No.  And how do you solve that?  Attend Kscope17 (natch) and the Dodeca sessions starting with this Sunday’s (just two short days from now) symposium.

Will anything happen?

You will learn how and why Dodeca customers love Dodeca.  

You will learn how you can Make Essbase Great Again.

Geek of Glass

In case it isn’t obvious I am a huge fan of Dodeca (I even wrote a book chapter about it).  Also, if you clicked on the links in this post you’ll have noticed that I am also quite a Blondie fan although even I can’t stretch a connection between the two.

Join me, the Applied OLAP team, and most of all Dodeca’s satisfied customers this Sunday, won’t you?

Be seeing you.

Kscope15 day 1 & 2 as it happens

An important note about tonight if you are from South Florida

If you’re from South Florida, they are having a meetup in my suite tonight from 8:00 pm till ???.

For details, see Jessica Cordova’s booth at the Welcome Reception – ARC EPM – for a flyer providing the room number and all details.  You can also contact Jessica on @JCordovaEPM.

Saturday, 20 June 2015

Late again

I know, I know, I said that I would do this live, and here I am a day tardy.  I will try harder today.

Volunteer day

Saturday is always Kscope’s volunteer day.  This year was actually focused on technology so the typical unskilled-labor-is-best-for-Cameron-as-he-is-hopeless event didn’t happen.  

Brekkers

Here’s the kickoff to the day.  Yes, ODTUG feeds you, just the first of the very best extant Oracle conference.

Dear Leader

Monty is hard to miss:  the cowboy hat, the cowboy boots, the Texas accent, the larger than life personality, and did I mention he’s a really great ODTUG president?  This is the kickoff where the geeks get their direction.

And the geeks breaking off to their STEM stations.

Riding that bike

I was the part of the team that used muscle power to generate electricity and then to the really important thing – smoothies.  Yes, they taste better when you make the blender spin.  It’s also good to be at least moderately fit.  I wish I had my heart monitor on.

Here’s my good buddy Joe Aultman about to take up the mantle of a riding a bike that might not be totally suited to his height.

Presentations

Yes, yr. obt. svt. is presenting with Tim German aka @CubeCoderDotCom.   Here we are rehearsing, with @henry_robin providing a critique.

And that’s it for Saturday

OMG, I am already exhausted.  We’ll see if I can manage to get a wee bit of sleep before the rest of the week wipes me out.

Today, 21 June

The Sunday Symposiums are one of the greatest parts of Kscope.  Oracle Product Management part the curtains and talk about the product roadmaps.  This session is safe harbored and we are not allowed to blog or tweet about the session so you will see some people pictures but no product details.  More’s the pity if you aren’t here.

The EPM content Big Wig

Here’s Opal Alapat, aka @opal_EPM about to kick off the sessions that I am not allowed to talk about.  Did I mention that you should be here?  To those of you who have twigged onto the value of the Sunday Symposiums, huzzah.  For those of you have not…tsk, tsk, tsk.

That’s all for now

What I can write about, I will, but as noted my hands are somewhat tied.

Be seeing you.

Oracle OpenWorld, day 1

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 Day 1

The craziness has begun

To be absolutely accurate, I’m actually on day three of OpenWorld 2014 as I attended the ACE Directors briefing (Ooh, name dropping.  All I can say is that there are ACE Directors and then there ACE Directors.  I’m definitely in the how-on-earth-did-I-get-here? category and I think I’m not the only one who agrees with that.) on Thursday and Friday last.  

Part one

I am now sitting in the first session of the ODTUG symposium and am listening to Jon Rambeau of US Analytics presenting his session:  Why does EPM seem so challenging?  A good practices guide to EPM implementations

Part two

Ron Dimon is now presenting his session on The ROI of EPM as a Management Process.  Like Jon’s session, this is not a technical session but a functional one.  We EPMers have to walk both sides of the street; I tend towards the technical but I have to do functional as well.  This is all good stuff.

Part three

I’m now sitting in on Scott Leshinski’s session:  Managing Your Company’s Cash: Using EPM to Capitalize on Future Growth [UGF9092].  Don’t you wish you were here?  Why aren’t you?

How does ODTUG end up at OpenWorld?

Oracle quite graciously gives each major user group a room to present symposiums – we have fantastic content this year (every year, actually) and I’m really looking forward to the rest of the sessions today.  Thanks again, Oracle, for your openness and support of ODTUG.

What’s next?

I’m going to continue liveblogging today’s Hyperion EPM symposium and the rest of OpenWorld and keep you unbelievably jealous up to date on what’s happening at OpenWorld 2014.  Keep on checking this blog post for more information.

In addition to the symposium, I have a (we’ll be part of the great podcast series that Bob Rhubart puts out through the OTN ArchBeat  podcast program) recording session for a podcast with Gurcan Orhan, Michael Rainey, and Christophe Dupupet on my very favorite data integration tool, Oracle Data Integrator.  I have some exciting news about the future of ODI and EPM that I’ll try to get out.  :)  

Alas and alack, I will miss a few sessions but again, the I-wish-I-had-a-clone-for-this-conference theme holds true.  

Be seeing you.

Kscope14 Day 1

If you’re not here, you don’t know what you’re missing

Sunday at ODTUG Kscope14 is where Oracle let down their collective hair and tell us, under Safe Harbor, where our beloved tools are going in the next year.  Note – this happens before Oracle holds their own, little known conference.  This is preview, in a word, awesome.

But of course that Safe Harbor means I can’t tell you anything about the content.  Nope, sorry, not going to do it.  I want Oracle to come back next year.   And I’d like to not get sued.

What I can relate

As I type this, the audience is grilling Matt Bradley.  Matt is brave.

And  I can tell you is that Oracle has (or will, later in the day) talked about:

• EPM Strategy and Interactive Keynote
• EPM Reporting with OBIEE
• DRM
• Planning Suite
• FDMEE
• Essbase
• Smart View
• Wrapup

Don’t you wish you were here?  You can be if you aren’t already.  Just attend Kscope15.

See you there!

P.S.

As I can, I will update this blog as the day goes on.

Planning -- OMG, so cool.  And I have to leave and do ODTUG stuff.  Arrgh.  Way to go Shankar!

Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! Symposiums at the smokin’ ODTUG Kscope14

Introduction

You have to be of a certain age (middle) and have a certain interest (cars) and it likely doesn’t hurt to have roots in a certain place (the Midwest) to know this man and this sound and this place.  At least click on the sound link – so cool.

What, gasser racing isn’t your thing?  Hard to believe but I am told it is true.  And it all happened on Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!

What’s your Sunday?

If you are at ODTUG Kscope14, I daresay you’ll be at the Sunday Symposiums, where we get to hear, direct from Oracle, where the products we use are going.  If the past is prologue to the future, I can say that what gets announced on Sunday is the early jump on what Oracle will be announcing at Oracle Open World. That’s pretty cool – Oracle use Kscope as the preview venue, not their own conference.  We are insanely lucky.

Who will be speaking, and on what?

Oh, just a few topics:

• Apex – Joel Kallman, Patrick Wolf, Marc Sewtz, David Peake, Shakeeb Rahman, Jason Straub
• ADF – Geoff Poremba, Shay Shmeltzer, Joe Huang, Doug Clarke
• Business Intelligence – Stewart Bryson (the first non-Oracle employee on this list), Richard Tomlinson, Mike Durran, Matt Millela (Matt, you’ve left us EPMers!)
• As this is actually something I sort of tangentially do, I should note that the always entertaining Matt will be speaking on Oracle BI Mobile
• Database and Developer’s Toolkit – Kris Rice, Steven Fuerenstein, Mark Drake, Jeff Smith, Kuassi Menshah
• EPM (This is going to be more in depth because this is what Essbase hackers really care about.)
• Matt Bradley – EPM Strategy and Interactive Keynote
• Rich Wilkie and Al Marciante – Financial Close Suite
• Mitch Campbell – Reporting
• Robert Peel and Al Marciante – DRM
• Mike Case and Rich Wilkie – FDMEE
• Gabby Rubin and Steve Liebermensch – Essbase
• Matt Millela – Smart View (Matt, you didn’t leave us)
• EPM Business Content
• Gary Crisci and Ron Dimon – The ROI of EPM as a Management Process
• Michael Heukels – The Current State of Affairs in Financial Planning
• Mike Nader and Dave Collins – Driving the Future of Strategic Planning
• Rich Wilkie – Streamlining the Financial Close

Don’t you wish there were more than one of you?

I wouldn’t inflict two Camerons on the world, but I do sort of wish I could bounce back and forth between the EPM, Business Intelligence, and EPM Business Content symposiums.  As always with Kscope we are spoilt for choice.  Alas, I cannot be in two places at once, but I sure wish I could.

The Sunday Symposiums are likely worth the price of admission all on their own.  I think overall Kscope is fantastic value for money and Sunday is just the icing on the cake.

If you are not coming this year, I have to wonder why and hope to see you next year.

Be seeing you.