My proof for calling this day 1 is that the wireless internet access for the conference actually went up and is working today. Today I spent in the BI Customer Advisory Council. Its an invite only event for people in the Oracle BI space. I got lucky enough to be added to the CAB when I was working at Polk and they were gracious enough to let me continue to be a member when I joined TUSC.
A key note that I got out the meeting was that BI is officially considered the 4th leg of Oracle with the Database, Applications and Middleware. With the purchase of the Siebel suite Oracle is definitely taking BI seriously and coming back with a vengence.
Some future / current features coming in the products
Discoverer workbooks are going to be a source for XML Publisher
XML publisher to get pixel perfect rendering, seems to be one of the next logical replacements for reports (if we didn’t see that already)
In the Siebel suite there are APIs to access metadata layer, control users and role membership. If I get a chance to get this up and running it would be great to integrate this with the Oracle Identity Manager (Xcellerate) product for provisioning.
Right now the Siebel product doesn’t do Oracle OLAP (or at least easily) but the new Answers Plus product will integrate this in.
There is the idea of a “Common Enterprise Information Model” within the new Oracle BI Suite that allows you to physically or virtually connect and expose data to any and all of the Oracle BI products. This is a great concept that very much brings a Hibernate environment to the Oracle BI stack. Now it won’t care what my data sources are, Oracle DB, Excel spreadsheets, web service data feeds, it won’t matter. Will this replace classic datawarehousing? I doubt it…at least for now with current technology.
There is the concept of an iBot, that triggers to run data at a scheduled time. Its much more flexible than the current scheduling built into Discoverer that we see today which would make customers happy. There are some cool features where based on results of the report or query you can send messages to the dashboard, send a page, or kickoff BPEL process.
Most importantly to me, the Linux release of the Oracle BI EE stack is coming around the September timeframe.
That was all, a very short day back on the Metro and in bed before everything starts tomorrow.