I’m pleased to announce that registration for the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2013 is now live, with all details on the BI Forum 2013 web page. This year’s BI Forum takes place on the first two weeks of May, in Brighton and then Atlanta, with numbers limited to around 70 at each venue.

This year, sessions at the two events include such topics as:

• Jeff McQuigg, KPI Partners Inc, “Performance Tuning the BI Apps with a Performance Layer”
• Antony Heljula, Peak Indicators Ltd, ”OBI Performance Tuning – Real Customer Success Stories”
• Florian Schouten, Oracle and Kevin McGinley, Accenture – Oracle BI Applications 11g and ODI 11g Support
• Mike Durran, Oracle, “Virtualizing Exalytics”
• Christian Screen, Capgemini, “How to Create a Plug-In for Oracle BI 11g”
• Edelweiss Kammermann, Awen Consulting, “Integrating Oracle BI, BPM and BAM 11g: The complete cycle of information”
• Adam Bloom, Oracle, “New Developments in BI Multi-tenancy and Cloud”
• Rene Kuipers, VX Company, “It’s all in the genes – The power of Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Database”

and many more others covering OBIEE, ODI, Endeca, Big Data and the BI Applications, from key speakers from the Oracle BI community, and from Oracle’s own product development team.

In addition to the regular presentations, our masterclass this year is on Oracle Data Integration, covering the key techniques and “tips from the field” around tools such as Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle GoldenGate, the Big Data Adapters, together with the recently-updated Oracle Reference Architecture for Information Management and Big Data. Our own Stewart Bryson, Michael Rainey and myself will provide the masterclass, which will run on the day before each event both in Atlanta and Brighton.

Finally, I’m delighted to announce some special guests who’ll be at either Atlanta or Brighton. Over in Atlanta, we’re pleased to have join us none other than Cary Millsap, co-author with Jeff Holt of the seminal Oracle performance book “Optimizing Oracle Performance”, who’ll be speaking about performance, response-time, and how this applies to our world of BI and analytics. We’ll also be joined in Atlanta by Gwen (Chen) Shapira, like myself and Cary an Oracle ACE Director, and who specialises in large data systems, the Oracle database and more recently, big data technologies such as Hadoop, NoSQL and Oracle’s Big Data Appliance. Over in Brighton, we’re delighted to be joined by Datasift’s Toby Potter, a recent speaker at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, and who’ll be speaking to us about including social media data in with our BI analyses.

As with previous BI Forums, we’ve deliberately set up the events to promote networking, discussion and opportunities to meet your peers in the industry. We keep the numbers at each event deliberately low, and we encourage delegates to stay in the hotel that’s also the conference venue, maximising opportunities to meet new people and ask those important questions.

Oracle are again providing a development-focused keynote on the Wednesday evening at both events, and we’ve got a number of meals, social events and other “fun” things planned over duration of the event. So it’s not all technical content – but when it is, it’ll be the best Oracle BI, DW and analytics content you’ll hear this year at any conference, guaranteed.

Details of how to register, dates, the full agenda and so on are at the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2013 web page, but book soon – the event typically sells out well in advance.

Thanks to everyone who submitted abstracts for the BI Forum 2013 events in Brighton and Atlanta, and (whilst I say this every year, and mean it) I think we’ve got the best selection of papers ever. To give you a preview of what might be on the agenda, and to allow anyone who’s thinking about coming to have their voice heard, we’re now running the abstract survey which will be open for the next two weeks, closing on Friday, 22nd February.

For either the Brighton or Atlanta events, score the various abstracts and we’ll use the results plus a bit of editorial discretion, and open registration around the start of March 2013.

Here’s the links to the two event abstract surveys:

• BI Forum 2013 Abstract Survey – Atlanta, GA
• BI Forum 2013 Abstract Survey – Brighton UK

I can also now confirm the dates and venues for the two events:

• Rittman Mead BI Forum 2013 – Hotel Seattle, Brighton, May 8th – 10th 2013
• Rittman Mead BI Forum 2013 – Georgia Tech Hotel & Conference Center, May 15th – 17th 2013

I’m pleased to announce that we’re going back to the Hotel Seattle for the Brighton event, our fourth time at this excellent hotel at Brighton Marina, a mile or so from Central Brighton and just along the beach from the Pier. For Atlanta, we’re going to the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Centre, in Midtown Atlanta and near to many bars, restaurants and the city’s Georgia Tech university district (and bars that serve 420 and Fat Tire, which I’m particularly looking forward to). Both venues feature excellent conference facilities and rooms so that all delegates can stay in the same place, and as usual there’ll be keynotes, dinners inside and outside the hotel, drinks receptions and other networking events.

Be sure to vote on the abstracts if you’re thinking of coming to either event, and check back in early March for details of the final agenda, and how to register.