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.