Latest News from Oracle Open World

29th Oct 2009

This year’s Oracle Open World was as impressive as always, it didn’t appear that the GFC had done anything to hamper the turnout or the enthusiasm of the 45,000 attendees.  However the appearance of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a key note speaker did remind us that California has been hit a bit harder than everyone else, at one point I thought he was going to lock us in when he demanded everyone stay and spend money!

The following update covers the main areas of interest for Hyperion and Oracle BI users.  We will provide a more detailed overview on the key themes, product directions and strategies at our User Group meetings.  If you can’t make it along to the next meeting and want some more information on anything we’ve covered please give us a ring.

The key theme from Open World is that the EPM and BI space is getting bigger, better and more integrated all the time with more presentations, products and customers than any other year we have attended.  There are product developments and clearer strategic directions in most areas, highlighted below are the main ones.

Hyperion Planning – There will be a new release out next year, v11.1.2, which will include a new Public Sector Planning and Budgeting module, improved usability for planners and improved administration functionality.

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) – v11g will be released next year, it will provide full integration with Planning and HFM and will be the main BI tool going forward, highlights of the next release include; Essbase integration, capability to do asymmetric drilling, BI search integration, improved visualisations and interactive exploration using sliders.

Hyperion Financial Management – Integration with Governance, Risk and Compliance, integration with OBIEE, starter kits for IFRS, Japan and Sustainability Reporting and Application Copy Utility for Enterprise Performance Management Architect (EPMA)

Smart View – Will be the main MS integration product across all of the Oracle products and will be part of a continual improvement process, highlights include; functional parity with the web, enhanced Office 07 look and feel and integration into Outlook tasks.

Financial Data Quality Manager – Improved ERP integrator support for Essbase loads and drill through to ERP, migration for detailed members maps, source integration and localisation.

Essbase – Got a lot of air time at this year’s event and it appears that the power of Essbase will be harnessed throughout the whole EPM/BI product set.  New features include improved EPMA Essbase deployment, improved Life Cycle Management (LCM) features, studio usability and functional enhancements, Essbase/EAS/APS functional enhancements and improved security synch.

Financial Reporting – Improvements scheduled for v11.1.2 release include, Budget books support, updated PDF generation, related content enhancements, MS Word integration as Word tables, LCM support for annotations and book reporting and html publishing enhancements.

Interactive Reporting – It was confirmed that IR will be replaced in the medium term by OBIEE as the main reporting tool for Hyperion applications but it will continue to be supported.  Oracle showcased a migration facility that will create OBIEE repositories from Interactive Reporting BQY’s which will be very useful when the time for migration comes along.