Well I’ve just got home now after the eleven hour flight from Bangalore, India, after attending the AIOUG Sangam’11 conference on behalf of the Oracle ACE Director program. This is now the second time I’ve attended this event, last year speaking on RPD Modeling techniques and this year, talking about OBIEE 11g Systems Management Tips and Techniques.

Well done to Murali and the AIOUG team for organizing the event, and I was pleased to get a full room for an 8.30am session – the traffic in Bangalore can be a bit interesting and so it was great everyone was there so early. Well done also to Venkatakrishnan Srinivasan, one of my colleagues in Rittman Mead India, who presented a beginners guide to OBIEE 11g Dashboards and Analyses.

Here’s the links to my presentation, and also Venkat’s one on dashboards and analyses:

• OBIEE11g Dashboards and Analyses – Venkatakrishnan Srinivasan
• OBIEE11g Systems Management Tips and Tricks – Mark Rittman (Oracle ACE Director)

So Sangam’11 was actually my second conference of the week, as I was also representing the ACE Director program at the UKOUG Conference and Exhibition 2011 in Birmingham, which also had a number of my Rittman Mead colleagues presenting on topics such as Oracle Golden Gate, Oracle BIEE 11g, Oracle BI Mobile as well as BI project management techniques.

It was actually a pretty hectic three days at the conference, with a great chance to catch up with some old friends, one particularly crazy night, and lots of presentations and participation in talks and round tables. We took a conscious decision not to have an official Rittman Mead stand this year, and instead put all of our energies into presenting and attending talks, and thanks again to the UKOUG for inviting us, and the ACE Director scheme for sponsoring my attendance.

Here’s a photo from the ACE Director meal on the first evening, with fellow ACE Directors Tim Hall, Sten Vesterli (out of shot), Hans Forbrich, Edelweiss Kammermann, Frank Nimphus (Oracle) and others on my table, along with Stewart from Rittman Mead.

And here’s Jon, Stewart and Pythian’s Paul Vallee, at what became our unofficial home for the week, All Bar One just across from the ICC.

Again, the slides from the event are now on our site and available for download, here:

• OBIEE11g Regression & Load Testing – Venkat Janakiraman (Oracle ACE)
• Extending the BI Half-Life – Mike Vickers
• Oracle GoldenGate 101 : A Newbie’s Dive into the Unknown – Borkur Steingrimsson
• Aggregation : Oracle BI Server vs. Oracle Optimizer – Stewart Bryson (Oracle ACE)
• Agile Data Warehousing with Exadata and OBIEE – Stewart Bryson (Oracle ACE)
• OBIEE/ADF Integration using the Action Framework – Mark Rittman (Oracle ACE Director)
• OBIEE11g Answers + Dashboards New Features – Mark Rittman (Oracle ACE Director)

So that’s it for now for conferences, with the next one being RMOUG Training Days in February 2012. Hopefully see some of you there.

Conference season is now upon us, and having just got back from events in the USA and Australia, and with Rittman Mead presenters at conferences in the UK, India and USA over the next few months, I thought I’d be worth posting links to some previous conference presentations and giving everyone a heads-up on where we’ll be over the next few months.

First off, Rittman Mead had a number of presentations at Oracle Openworld, which ran in San Francisco in October 2011. Myself, Stewart Bryson, Venkat J and Jon presented a number of sessions over the weeks, and links to the presentation PDFs are given below:

• OBIEE11g and ADF Integration using the Action Framework (Mark Rittman and Andrejus Baranovskis)
• OBIEE11g Systems Management New Features & Best Practices (Mark Rittman)
• OBIEE11g Architecture & Internals (Mark Rittman)
• OBIEE11g Deployment & Change Management Best Practices (Mark Rittman)
• Aggregation : Oracle BI Server vs. Oracle Optimizer (Stewart Bryson)
• Agile Data Warehousing using OBIEE and Oracle Exadata (Stewart Bryson)
• Packaged Cloud-Based BI using Oracle Golden Gate and Oracle BI Applications (Jon Mead)
• OBIEE11g Security Auditing (Venkatakrishnan J)
• OBIEE11g Regression & Load Testing (Venkatakrishnan J)

In addition, Stewart, Ashley Beauman, Richard Chan and myself were at the ODTUG BI & EPM Seriously Practical Conference in Sydney, Australia. If you were an attendee at the event, you can download the slides from my seven (!) presentations using the email that would have been sent to you last week.

So, going forward from now, Rittman Mead will be presenting at a number of events around the world, including:

• Mark, Venkat, Stewart, Borkur Steingrimsson and Mike Vickers will be presenting at the UKOUG Conference & Exhibition, Birmingham UK, on the 5-7th December 2011
• Mark will be presenting at the All India Oracle User Group Sangam’11 Conference in Bangalore, India on the 9th-10th December 2011
• Stewart, Mark, Borkur and Peter will be presenting at the RMOUG Training Days 2012 event in Denver, Colorado on 14th-16th February 2012
• Finally, Mark will be presenting at the Hotsos Symposium 2012, Dallas Texas on March 4th-8th 2012

In addition, we’re putting the finishing touches to a schedule of public training courses that will run in the UK, India and USA during 2012, and a new run of the very-popular “Training Days” event we organize each year, which next year will focus on OBIEE 11.1.1.6 new features, deployment & change management topics, and Exalytics. Keep checking back to this blog for more details as they become available.

If you follow this blog and the various events we speak at, you might end up thinking that we spend most of our time going to conferences and testing out new Oracle BI products. In fact, of course, most of our time is spent on customer projects and over the past few years, we’ve delivered projects around the world from the smallest PoC through to multi-year, multi-country projects for some of the largest organizations in the world. I was particularly pleased therefore with a couple of things that happened last month that allowed us to spend a bit of time thinking about our customers and clients.

First off, we were very proud to receive the UKOUG Business Intelligence Partner of the Year 2011 Gold award, our third win in this category in four years. We were particularly grateful to receive this award as it was voted on by UKOUG members based on some case studies we submitted, and as the UK is our original, home market it’s great to receive this recognition. Thanks again to everyone who voted for us, and we will strive to live up to your high expectations over the next twelve months.

On the same day as the UKOUG award, we also held a customer appreciation meal before our first ever Customer Advisory Board meeting, up at Horsley Park in Surrey, UK. The idea behind the CAB meeting was to invite some of our best customers and partners up for a day of discussions and workshops, to explain where we thought the Oracle BI industry was going, and also to get feedback from our clients on our plans for products and services in 2012. We were joined by twenty delegates from across our UK client base, along with Frank Buytendijk, who you’ll probably know from Oracle/Hyperion and his work prior to that with Gartner.

The discussions over the day went from a briefing on what’s new from Oracle Openworld (including a very interesting talk around Exalytics), a session led by Frank talking about more abstract elements of BI and performance management, and then sessions from Mike Vickers and Jon Mead on our delivery methodology and what we’ve got planned for 2012. Thanks again to everyone who came along, and we’re thinking about running similar events in the US and India for our clients over there, later in 2012.

I know it sounds corny some times, but its true that it’s our customers that make this all worthwhile. Thanks again to everyone for your support, and we’re looking forward to working with you all next year.