BI Blogs

“NEW YORK (Reuters) — Oracle Corp., the world’s top database software maker, is near an agreement to buy Hyperion Solutions Corp., which makes software that lets companies analyze and track their performance, for about $3 billion, The New York Times said on Wednesday in its online edition.

The transaction is expected to be announced as soon as Thursday, and terms were not immediately available, the newspaper said citing unnamed people briefed on the transaction.”

See articles at CNN, New York Times and Houston Chronicle. Hyperion is of course the maker of Essbase, a product I’ve described in the past as “Express done properly” in that they focused on a single product, didn’t get tied up in integrating it with a database, and instead focused on a particular niche, in their case financial analytics. Essbase as a technology is on a par with Express Server and no doubt what Oracle are interested in here is Hyperion’s expertize in the area of analytic financial applications, and their no doubt high-value customer base.

It’ll be interesting to see where they take the Essbase technology - I expect, like Peoplesoft and E-Business Suite, they’ll maintain the two code streams and at some point, incorporate some of the best bits of Essbase in Oracle OLAP - and of course Hyperion own Brio, a ROLAP reporting tool not too dissimilar to Discoverer.

Still, the rumour looks fairly well corrobated and it’ll be interesting to see the industry analysts’ reactions - will it be seen as two legacy OLAP vendors clinging together in the face of Microsoft Analysis Services’s inexorable rise in market share, or will it finally give Oracle access to best-of-breed financial MOLAP applications to sell alongside the mostly ROLAP BI Suite Enterprise Edition? Interesting times indeed.

I’m currently sitting in the departures lounge at Madrid Airport, having just completed the latest round of my BI Seminar at the Oracle offices in town. This is actually quite an auspicious date for myself, as it’s the last day at my current employers, and from tomorrow I’ll be out in the big wide world of self-employment. More on that later.

The trip to Spain didn’t start out so well as yet again, some honest looking person (a business man in a suit, no less) outside the airport told me some story about having lost his wallet, and could I lend him 30 euros so he could get a taxi home. I fell for this once before, with some dishevelled looking bloke at Liverpool Lime Street station telling me he’d lost his ticket and could I possibly help out. In the end I bought him a ticket and gave him my address to send the money to; surprise surprise after a week or so nothing turned up.

This time though, the person involved looked pretty honest, and I thought that I’d like someone to help me out if I was in the same situation. Anyway, I left him my email address for him to PayPal me the money, and, yet again - nothing. I don’t doubt he actually had lost his wallet, but I suspect, when he thought about it the next day, he’d never see me again and it was just as easy to not send the money on. You live and learn.

Anyway, I got to the hotel and after ringing on the bell for about 10 minutes (it was about 10pm and the hotel was in a residential area) someone eventually answered and let me in. After checking in I asked if there was a restaurant or a bar - no there wasn’t actually, and in addition there were no ironing board to go with the (probably broken, they thought) iron. In the end, my rat-like consultant’s cunning kicked in and I was able to create a meal out of snacks harvested from a vending machine, and iron my shirt on a towel placed on a desk.

Anyway, I got to the Oracle office the next day, and the next thing that threw me was the course timetable. Normally, I run four 1.5 hour sessions (a tip from Jonathan Lewis) each day, however in Spain, apparently you work through until about 3pm, then have a long lunch, then come back. Therefore I had to fit my all my four sessions into the “morning”, and get through until 3pm without lunch when we finished for the day (the hotel did provide a buffet breakfast, luckily). Anyway, I was starting to think that this would be a seminar trip where I actually starved to death, but in the end the time went fairly quickly and I found a bar around the corner from the hotel where I could get something to eat around 4ish.

Anyway, the next surprise was that I had two translators provided by Oracle, who sat in a little booth at the back of the room and translated my seminar in real-time. I’ve heard in the past that this can be a little unusual at the start, as some languages (Italian, for example) take a lot more words to say the same thing compared to English. In the end, it worked pretty well - the translators were “Oracle technology-aware” and even raised a few laughs when they translated my poor attempts at humour. One of the unexpected benefits of being translated is that you end up speaking slower and clearer, and you think a bit more about what you’re saying, so I think in actual fact it was probably one of the best received seminars I’ve done.

For now though, the event has finished and I’m back at the airport waiting to go back. You can’t help liking Spain as it reminds you so much of holidays and summer, and apart from getting mugged at the airport and surviving on crisps and water on the first night, again it’s been a great two days. I’m starting to work now on a new seminar for the next Oracle financial year, and this time around, we’ll be able to dig down further with the technology as people will have had more time to use it themselves. For now, I’m thinking about BI EE and SOA, Oracle Data Integrator and Data Mining, but of course although the new cutting-edge stuff is interesting, in reality people are generally working with what’s available now, specifically BI SE and how it’s going to integrate with the new BI EE technologies. We’ll have to wait and see.

Anyway, that’s it for me now. As I said earlier, today’s my last day as Director of Consulting at SolStonePlus, and from tomorrow, I’ll be employee No.1 of my own new startup company. Keep and eye on this site over the next few days and weeks as more details become public, but for me, and for those that will be joining me, this is going to be a pretty exciting time.

Bye for now.

How important is Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) to data Warehousing?

Psyching myself up to new technical post, I almost make it but instead turn out this rant on things being done in the wrong place.

If any of you have got teenage kids you’ll probably know what Myspace is or at least have heard them talking about it. Well try applying the concept inside a business and you begin to start to realise where we are heading here. Employees with their own workspaces and who are members of shared collaborative workspaces. The former is the employee personal workspace, the latter is where people working on projects together and people who are interested in the same information meet, share and collaborate.

In a collaborative workspace you have shared information (e.g. structured and office documents, BI reports, collaborative content) collaboration tools (to email and instant message people, shared calendar, threaded discussions…..), search, shared subscriptions etc. In a personal workspace you have what you are interested in and what is relevant to your role within the enterprise e.g. Your emails, your collaboration tools, your RSS feeds, your favourite content, your blog, your tags etc.

Now add BI and Performance Management into the mix and you get “Intelligent Workspaces” be they collaborative or personal. In intelligent workspaces (some may call them performance workspaces) you can search for reports and metrics, get real-time alerts, subscribe to RSS feeds on BI Metrics and new reports that you am interested in, collaborate with others to share BI. Individuals have MyScorecard with MyObjectives, MyDashboards, MyKPIs, MyAlerts. BI cannot do this on its own. But yet this is what many companies are now demanding. So consider how you plan to integrate. Integrate CPM and BI with portals, collaboration tools and content management to give us role intelligent workspaces all in your browser or integrated into you office applications. If you are already there, please let me here from you and please share your experiences. It would be great to hear from you. If not drop me a note and I’ll try to help out. As always you can get me on mferguson@intelligentbusiness.biz

Amid this fast moving world of BI there are a lot of things on the agenda. BI integration with Portals, Operational BI, events, scorecards, text analytics, enterprise data management, master data management, SOA, process management….etc, etc. With so much on the to do list it is not surprising that some of us might miss a little piece of the puzzle that doesn’t get a lot of air play. Any guesses? Well I would like to make a stand for rules engines. What about the business rules….we use them in deciding on business process behaviour, we use them to route messages on a service bus, we use them to decide how to present data on the screen and we use them for decision making. So where are they? For most of us they are locked away buried in our application logic, and for financial services perhaps in some batch decisioning systems. Yet if there is one thing we need to do it is to separate the rules from the systems that need them - especially in BI. The reason is because they change and in many cases quite often. If we introduce a rules server then we can define business rules that can test BI and help us make decisions.

As we enter the world of automated decisions to assist us in business automation this is one piece of technology we really need. But look beyond BI. You can use this SAME technology for dynamically changing process execution behaviour, for master data synchronisation, alerting and automated action taking and a whole host of other things. Some interesting vendors out there include Corticon, Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor, ILog, PegaSystems and SAS . In addition you can use also find open source rules engines such as the Drools Engine from JBoss. Combing rules engines with scoring models in a workflow can prove very powerful. While many of these vendors are focussed on process management their role in automated decision making is just as useful. If you are using rules in automated decision making to improve business performance and optimisation let me know at mferguson@intelligentbusiness.biz.

Java Data Mining: Strategy, Standard, and Practice: A Practical Guide for architecture, design, and implementation
By Mark F. Hornick, Erik Marcadé, Sunil Venkayala

Seems as if books on BI are just like buses. You wait ages for one and then two turn up together. While your on Amazon ordering your copY the Oracle Data Warehousing (see the posting last week) you could also order Mark Hornick’s

Not Oracle. The use of BI technology to detect fraud

Money laundering and Oracle upgrades lighten a non-blog-worthy week. And more domestic expense on the horizon.