HUG-MN Rocks!

I made my way home from the HUG-MN meeting in Minneapolis. One thing is for certain; the Minneapolis area appears to have a thriving Hyperion community. The meeting was held at the Land-o-Lakes corporate headquarters and there was a crowd of between 70 and 90 users in attendance. The facility was very nice and it should be.. After all, doesn’t everyone have a package of both Land-o-Lakes Salted Butter and Land-o-Lakes Unsalted Butter in their refrigerator?

The first speaker was Kelly Green from Target. He is a frequent contributor to the OTN message board and spoke about their use of Hyperion Reports with HFM. Good job Kelly!

My presentation was an introduction to Dodeca. Most, if not all, of the attendees had never seen Dodeca before so it was exciting to be able to show them what we do. I only had a few slides plus a screencam video from one of our customers that shows off our Intelligent Navigation feature.

My co-speaker was one of our local customers, Chris Lynd, SVP of Financial Systems at U.S. Bank. It was great to sit back and listen to Chris talk about how easy our product is to use and manage. I learned something new in his presentation. Chris said they now have 7,000 users on Dodeca across the world supported by one server and 2 people who create and deploy reports and manage the system; last I heard they only had 5,000 users!

U.S. Bank uses Dodeca with a number of data sources including Essbase, Oracle database and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. One of the reasons Chris chose our product is that Dodeca weaves those data sources together in such a way that his users don’t realize where the data is coming from. They don't really care. They just need to easily get to the information required to do their jobs. Thanks again to Chris for speaking with me at this event.

Meanwhile, attendee Jeff Sims, from Tethys Corp, alerted me to a separate Essbase geeks get-together Wednesday night in Bloomington (near the airport, the infamous Mall of America and, my wife’s favorite, IKEA). I didn’t make it to that meeting; maybe next time. It was fascinating, though, that these two separate events were happening in Minneapolis the same day!

Thanks again to D.J. Hoelscher from Harbinger Consulting Group for arranging for me to speak and to Tony Winkler, the local Oracle representative, for sponsoring the user group.

Collaborate Follow-up

Now that Collaborate is over and I have had a couple of days to recover, I finally have the energy and the time to write down my thoughts.

My trip started out a bit late last Saturday. I headed out to the airport just as a big blob of rain was heading our way. By the time I had the plane loaded and was ready to go, it was an utter deluge. My wife was urging me not to fly off into that stuff and, of course not. There is an old saying about aviation that goes like this: “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” I am quite conservative when it comes to flying my airplane and so we waited it out and watched the Kentucky Derby on the TV in the terminal. My decision was wise as there was a tornado warning with a tornado on the radar just 15 miles into my intended flight path. Within 30 minutes, it was gone and my 3 hour flight to Orlando was smooth; I didn’t even go into the clouds until I was over Ocala on my descent into Orlando Executive Airport.

I got to the hotel about 11 pm and immediately ran into some of my fellow ODTUG board members. We got a late bite to eat at the B-Line Diner at my hotel, the Peabody. The Peabody was the best hotel for conference attendees as it was directly across the street from the site of the conference, the Orange County Convention Center, and was an easy 3 minute walk to the conference. I know some attendees tried to save some pennies by staying at ‘non-conference’ hotels that were located further from the conference, but they ended up renting cars, driving, parking, etc which, in my opinion, is a pain.

Sunday started with the Hyperion SIG meeting. The crowd at the SIG meeting was down from last year and was an indicator of the Hyperion attendance at Collaborate this year. It was significantly down this year. I believe that was due to several reasons:

• The economy and travel freezes at companies;
• The swine-flu scare; and
• Continued confusion on the part of the Hyperion community as to which conference to attend.

The most significant announcement at the Hyperion SIG meeting was that OAUG was planning a standalone Hyperion conference back in Orlando in November. There are several reasons that I believe this conference will not happen including in November. First, it is too soon to put together a standalone conference, plan the agenda, get speakers and get attendees. Nobody has budgeted for it this year and I believe the attendance would be even worse than at Collaborate. Second, it is too close to Oracle Open World and, with all of Oracle focused on Open World, Oracle will not have time to help OAUG by providing speakers or any other help. Personally, I like the idea of a single Hyperion conference and will be working with my ODTUG, OAUG and Oracle colleagues to foster the idea.

Sunday ended with an invitation-only Hyperion SIG meeting co-sponsored by a number of vendors in the Hyperion SIG and BI/DW SIG; we were one of the co-sponsors. The party was at B.B. Kings club just down the street from conference and it was good food, good music and good Hyperion conversation for a few hours.

Monday was the day the conference sessions started and the day the exhibit hall opened. I attend John Kopcke’s EPM vision session that day and it was indicative of the poor attendance at the conference. In the old Hyperion days, John normally did this talk during the keynote in front of thousands of people; at Collaborate 2009, there were just over 100 people in an auditorium designed for 300 plus people.

The Hyperion traffic at the booth was similarly dismal. I think we talked to less than 50 Hyperion users at our booth during the whole conference; that works out to costing us over $200 per contact. I did, however, talk to a number of people who were at Collaborate for the ERP products: E-Business Suite (Oracle Financials), Peoplesoft and J.D. Edwards, and did start the education process on how Hyperion and Essbase can help them. There are a huge number of customers out there that don’t yet know what Essbase is but, when they find out how it can help them, those of us in the Hyperion world will have a career working with them.

My sessions were on Wednesday and, as fellow blogger Edward Roske noted, the attendance seemed to wane during the week. I had 3 people in my 8:30 am session which is simply pathetic; my 11 am session was up to 25 or 30 which was better but no less pathetic. One of the problems with attendance is that one of my sessions was IOUG and one was OAUG; I don’t believe either was tagged as ‘Hyperion’ and you had to search the conference agenda with the keyword ‘Essbase’ to even find them. The two sessions were also in different parts of the conference center. In my opinion, the root problem with scheduling at this conference is that OAUG and IOUG seem to see their own brands as more important than the attendees needs. For the most part, attendees could care less which group is sponsoring a presentation but rather cares about the content; I have stressed this point in my work with the ODTUG board and I plan to provide some constructive comments to help Collaborate easier to navigate next year.

Wednesday ended with the conference party at the Islands of Adventure theme park. I started out the night on the Incredible Hulk roller coaster with fellow Oracle ACE Director, Debra Lilley, Duncan Mills, Sr. Director of Product Management for Oracle JDeveloper, and Stanley, the famed Oracle ACE vest. Duncan and I had the honor of serving as the guide for Stanley on the Incredible Hulk coaster. After that, I grabbed something to eat and rode the Hulk again before meeting up with D.J. Hoelscher and Larry Jack from Applied OLAP partner Harbinger Consulting Group. D.J. and I hit the Incredible Hulk hard and rode it 4 more times including 3 times in the front row and 1 time in the back row.

By the way, the front row of the coaster is a much better place to be; the back does whip you around more if you are into that. For those of you who have never been on it, here is the deal. It starts out like a normal rollercoaster in that it is slowly pulled up a steep grade (inside a tunnel) to begin the fun. About halfway up the incline, horns start blaring and lights start flashing; the cars then get catapulted to 40 mph in about a second, emerge from the tunnel and roll inverted 110 feet off the ground and dive straight down. Way too much fun! For those of you who would like to see it, here is a video from the front-seat perspective.

After the official party, there were a number of unofficial events at the Orlando CityWalk at Universal. I went to Margaritaville with my friends from interRel and later had a Margarita with my friend Andy Jorgensen from Titan (formerly known as Pinnacle and K2 Analytics).

Thursday morning came too early but I wanted to see a presentation on Smart View and Planning, so I was up early and out the door. The presentation was quite good but, as we saw during most of the conference, lightly attended with maybe 30 people in the room. Early in the week, I promised Debra Lilley that I would give Stanley (the ACE vest) an aerial tour of Orlando in my plane. Andy Jorgensen joined us as we took a quick tour of the Conference Center and Lake Apopka at 1,500’. My landing on that flight was perfect; a ‘greaser’ as they say, and thank goodness because, unbeknownst to me, Debra had filmed it on her cell phone and later blogged about it!

After visiting my daughter, a teacher in Port St Lucie, on Thursday night, I flew home uneventfully on Friday morning. Despite the fact that Collaborate was lightly attended, and especially so on the Hyperion side, it was still a fun time and I plan to be back there next year in Las Vegas. Hopefully we can work with the OAUG/IOUG/Quest user group people to make it better.

Collaborate Next Week

I am heading off sometime tomorrow to Collaborate in Orlando. This is one of those trips that makes my airplane pay off as it gives me the ultimate flexibility to arrive and depart whenever I please. Further, it is only a 3 hr trip in my plane and will take less time than any airline option.

Enough about travel, here is a list of things that you won't want to miss in Orlando:

• Sunday, 3:30 – 5:45 - Hyperion SIG meeting. For more information and agenda, see the agenda at http://hyperionsig.oaug.org/News2009SpringAgenda.php. I will be speaking at this event (however briefly).
• Sunday, 6:30 - 8:30 - EPM Reception. This is a private party at BB King's with only 100 tickets available and is sponsored by some of the leading Hyperion vendors (including Applied OLAP). The best way to get a ticket is to attend the Hyperion SIG meeting and ask how you can attend. Note that you have a much better chance of getting a ticket if you are a customer; even sponsors get only 2 tickets per company. As a sponsor, I will be at this reception.
• Monday evening, Tuesday and Wednesday - Exhibitor Showcase. Be sure to drop by Booth 4042, say hello and take a quick look at our revolutionary Dodeca product. We are also launching our new website in conjunction with this show so, if you stop by our booth, you may see our new look. For those of you who know us, you know we have focused on the technology side of our product and now that the product is solid and is being used in mission critical applications in some of the largest companies in the USA, it is time for a coming-out party!
• Wednesday, 8:30 - 9:30 - Session 2597 - How Cantor Fitzgerald Increased User Productivity with Essbase. In this session, I will talk about how one of our customers implemented Dodeca and realized an investment payback of about 30 days. I wonder if we should charge more for Dodeca?
• Wednesday, 11:00 - 12:00 - Session 1753 - Consolidate BI and Planning Applications to Cut Costs and Improve User Productivity Using Essbase. In this session, I will talk about how some of our largest customers, including 2 of the largest banks in the country, have standardized on Dodeca. I will be showing some screencams for a couple of these customers so you can see what they are running today.
• Wednesday night. - Islands of Adventure. I will see you on the Incredible Hulk roller coaster. This coaster has one particular turn and dip that reminds me of my days when I used to fly aerobatics. My current airplane is not made to do aerobatics but rather to go fast!

See you in Orlando!