The New AppliedOLAP.com / Free Tools Access

My team has been hard at work getting our new website out the door, and we feel that it will make for a better experience all-around for our users and the users of the free OLAPUnderground utilities.  To help make the experience better, we have implemented a new download process.  Previously, users who wished to download files selected the files they wished to download and then provided their email address.  Our server then sent an email with temporary links for the download.  The email process sometimes caused issues with email filters or incorrect emails, so we decided to work to provide a better experience by using an off-the-shelf software release component.  As a result of this change, we are now requiring users to have a user account to download software.  Fortunately, the user account is free and you can create your own account in about a minute.

On the new site, all of the free downloads are available from the 'Downloads' section under 'Resources.'

If you are not logged in and you attempt to access the 'Downloads' section of the site, you will be prompted to login or register:

If you already have a www.appliedolap.com account, you can go ahead and login using your existing credentials, but if you don't, simply click the 'Register' button and fill out the registration form that pops up.

Once you have filled out the required information and pressed 'Register', a confirmation e-mail will be sent to the address provided on the registration form.

Click 'OK' and check your inbox for the confirmation e-mail.  Once you click the activation link, all you need to do is login to the site and you will have full access to the 'Downloads' section.  If you are a Dodeca user, we will provide you access to the 'Dodeca' downloads page, but as a free registered user, you will have access to the OLAPUnderground tools, as well as the Next Generation Outline Extractor.

Note:  Your Applied OLAP account username will always be the

e-mail address you used when you registered your account.

Go back to the 'Downloads' section after you log in to access the OLAPUnderground Utilities, as well as the Next Generation Outline Extractor.

We hope you find the new Applied OLAP website informative and easy-to-use.  While you are there, be sure to check out all of the new information about the Dodeca Spreadsheet Management System and sign up for a free, personalized web demo so you can learn how Dodeca can help you.

Oracle Open World 2013 General Session: Empowering Modern Enterprise Performance Management

Here at Oracle Open World 2013, I attended the general session entitled "Empowering Modern Enterprise Performance Management" which was led by Balaji Yelamanchili, Oracle Senior Vice President for Analytics and Performance Management Products.  His keynote focused on the development priorities within the Oracle EPM group.  Those priorities are:

• Continued Investment in Existing Modules
• EPM Applications in the Cloud
• Continued Innovation in New Modules

There are a number of things planned in the area of continued investment in existing modules.  The investment areas include:

• HFM platform work to make HFM cross platform and to improve performance.  In addition, these changes allow HFM to run on Exalytics which puts massive computing power under HFM.  For example, testing of HFM on Exalytics has shown that virtual close becomes a possibility even in complex consolidations.  One test that had 31,000 accounts, 2,000 legal entities and 66 currencies showed a reduction of consolidation time from 7+ hours down to less than 30 minutes.  This type of performance increase, if borne out in the real world, could have a real effect on how and when companies do their consolidations.
• Optimization of Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management for Exalytics.  This scalability allows for implementations that spread further in the company (i.e. more users), but also allow companies to consolidate their applications onto fewer physical machines.
• Packaged OBI Analytics for Hyperion Planning.  The packaged analytics make it easier and faster to deploy Hyperion Planning with an added benefit of reduced consulting costs.

Oracle is continuing its move into the cloud arena with 2 services.

• The Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service ("OPBCS") has been in customer and partner preview for a few months now and is nearly general availability.  Oracle is stressing that this isn't just moving the software to a managed service running on the cloud, but rather is a fundamental new paradigm for planning that focuses on self-serve models that have not existing since the inception of the classic, on-premise Hyperion Planning.  Because OPBCS must run without the need for IT interaction, users must be able to quickly and easily configure what they need from the service.  That being said, Oracle is taking a very conservative strategic approach with their Cloud Planning application as they are not trying to displace traditional on-premise Planning applications and move them to the cloud.  Rather, they are emphasizing the cloud for use in quick-to-deploy departmental applications or as a development platform that can be used to build an application for on-premise deployment.  Oracle expects to make the OPBCS available later this calendar year.
• A new service that was announced at Open World 2013 is the new Financial Reporting Cloud Service.  Based on the slides and the comments made during the presentation, this isn't simply moving the classic Hyperion Financial Reporting application to the cloud, but rather they have imagined and created an application that appears to be targeted for statutory reporting.  How it appears to work is that the developer/administrator creates a framework for the reporting package which may be, for example, a corporate annual report and can assign responsibilities for different parts of the report to team members.  The editing of different components can be completed either via refreshing of data from the corporate data stores for items like a balance sheet or income statement, or edited in Word for things like the management discussion.  The product tracks workflow and approvals and, when complete, produces a PDF of the completed document.  It looks quite different than what we see today in HFR.

For innovation in new modules, Oracle is focused pretty heavily on mobile.  As of now, the focus on mobile has been on information consumption but Oracle plans to work towards full user functionality in the future.  They are using the 90/90 rule as a guide for their mobile effort by focusing on the functionality used by 90% of users 90% of the time.  In addition, they have created some purpose-specific applications such as the new EPM Workflow Mobile App that was created specifically for approval workflows for Planning and Financial Close.

Oracle has been working hard on the EPM Suite, but notice I didn't really say anything about my beloved Essbase.  Balaji did not say much about Essbase in his session, but rather left that for the Essbase Roadmap session that I also attended.  I will work on a blog post on that session soon.

Essbase Meetup in San Francisco This Tuesday!

As you may or may not know, this week is the annual mega-conference Oracle Open World and, in conjunction with the conference, I am hosting, with fellow Oracle ACE Director Cameron Lackpour, an Essbase Meetup this Tuesday evening in San Francisco.  Unlike most events during the week of Open World, our Essbase meetup is open to both Open World attendees and non-attendees, so if you are in the San Francisco area, make your plans to attend.  Last year, we had several Oracle ACEs, ACE Directors, and Oracle product managers who attended; several of the same people have confirmed their attendance this year as well.

The meetup is at Specchio, a great Italian restaurant in the Mission District.  Specchio is co-owned by one of my friends, chef Gino Assaf, and has had some notable guests in the past couple of years including numerous NBA teams and one of my favorite rock bands, The Who.  Specchio is located at 2331 Mission Street in San Francisco.

If possible, please RSVP for the meetup at http://www.meetup.com/Oracle-Open-World-Essbase-EPM-meetup/events/138157192/ so we can get a count for the restaurant.  I hope to see you there!

Kscope13 Top Speaker Award

I thought I would post a quick picture of the award I earned at Kscope13 as one of the Top 5 Speakers at Kscope13 for my presentation entitled "Introducing the Outline Extractor NG (Next Generation)".   The Next Generation Outline Extractor is a complete rewrite of the popular Outline Extractor.  The original extractor was written in VB which hasn't been supported by Microsoft for many years; the new extractor is written in Java.  You can download my slides, and the next generation outline extractor, from our website at http://www.appliedolap.com/downloads.

I was honored to earn the award which is based on some secret formula combining feedback scores from attendees and number of attendees.  I did have a couple of hundred or so attendees at my presentation which, in my opinion, speaks to the popularity of the outline extractor and not to the popularity of me having anything to say... <BigGrin>

Here is a picture of the nice award sent by ODTUG.

Find Your Brilliance

I’d like to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to tell you about one my personal highlight's of Kscope 13 which was held back in June in New Orleans. Every year ODTUG announces who the keynote speaker will be well in advance of the conference. Most of the time, the speaker is a person of note; interesting, relevant, sometimes even inspiring. And then there are those times when, frankly, I’m not particularly interested in them or what they have to say. But this year was different. At the end of January, ODTUG announced that the Kscope 13 keynote speaker would be Doc Hendley.

Who is Doc Hendley, you ask? Well, from my perspective, Doc Hendley is one of the most inspiring and truly extraordinary individuals I’ve ever come across. And after meeting him and having the privilege of spending time with him in New Orleans, I’m proud and truly humbled to be able to call this man a friend. He is truly extraordinary, which is ironic when you consider that Doc thinks of himself as “just an ordinary, regular, everyday guy.”

Let me tell you, Doc is anything but. This is the story of how a boy who grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina saved thousands of lives all the way across the globe and in the process, proved to himself and everyone else that one person – even an ordinary regular everyday person - can do something extraordinary.

Doc was “just a bartender” and musician who worked and played in nightclubs in Raleigh, NC. In fact, bartending was the only job he’d ever had. But in his own words, he was “dying to make a difference in this world.” In 2003, standing behind the bar, he heard that polluted water kills more children globally than HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Tuberculosis combined, yet at that time, no one aware of this crisis.

So what did Doc do? In his words, "He got angry, he got pissed off, he took action." And he did it the only way he knew how. He tapped into the "marginalized people in his community, the bar crowd, the regulars"  – the people that everyone else said were too ordinary - to create Wine to Water, an organization that would take him to the site of the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world – Darfur, Sudan, and eventually to 9 other countries. Doc lived in Darfur for a year, and taught the locals how to clean their water and utilize their own resources to keep it clean.

Ordinary guy? I don’t think so.

I watched his TEDx talk on YouTube before going to Kscope13. I was so moved by what he’d done, so overwhelmed, and so energized, that I made everyone in my company watch it before the conference. I wanted every person who worked for me to hear what Doc had to say, and to understand how we all can change the world if we try.  I love Doc's commitment to his cause and I hope we remain friends for a long time to come.

I know my commitments don't allow me to travel the world helping others like Doc does on a regular basis, but that doesn't mean I can't help.  We decided that Applied OLAP could help support the efforts of Wine to Water and so I presented Doc with a $5,000 check as our small contribution. During his keynote speech, Doc demonstrated, again, how one person, one donation, can change the world. I’m pledging to find a way to make a difference in the world too.

After all, I’m a regular ordinary every day kind of guy too.

Next Generation Essbase Outline Extractor Released!

After a bunch of work, we have finally released the Next Generation Essbase Outline Extractor. So, what is the Next Generation Essbase Outline Extractor?  Well, the original outline extractor was written in Visual Basic and Visual Basic has has not been supported by Microsoft for a number of years.  In addition, the original Essbase Outline Extractor requires the 32-bit runtime client which is getting harder and harder to support.  In addition, users have asked for new functionality over the years and it just wasn't feasible to add the new functionality to a VB based product.

Some people have asked me "What about the new Maxl Outline Extractor?"  That is a good question, but keep in mind it only works with 11.1.2.x and higher plus it gives you an XML output. You still have to do something with the XML format for it to be useful.

The Next Generation Essbase Outline Extractor was completely redesigned from scratch.  The main design goals were:

• Design for long term
• Extensible
• Use Oracle’s strategic technology
• Design for supportability
• Wider adoption
• Wider platform choices
• Less support calls

It was also architected for extensibility to enable new functionality to be added and to allow programmers to write their own extensions to the code.  I chose to write the extractor in Java for a number of reasons.  First, it is Oracle's strategic API for the future which means new features of Essbase will be available in the Java API first.  In addition, Java is multi-platform which means it runs on Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, and MacOS regardless of whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit.  In addition, with the Java API, we can ship a single zip download that has everything it needs (except Java itself).  There is no need for the runtime client with the new extractor!

The new Outline Extractor also supports a number of features.  Many of these features are ne:

• Export one or more dimensions in an outline.
• Filter members to to be exported by dimension.
• Write to multiple outputs on a single pass of the outline.
• Output multiple alias tables into a single output file.
• Write to Hyperion Planning Outline Load Utility format.
• Output to real relational databases via JDBC.

The extractor was also designed to be run by a batch process using Java properties files.  The properties files can be written from the GUI interface and directly executed from the GUI.  There is even built-in functionality that optionally encrypts the username and password on first usage.

Here are a few screenshots of the new extractor.  The first screenshot shows the GUI screen where you can select one or more writers for output.

The second screenshot shows the option screen showing the options for the Load File Text Writer.

The final screenshot shows the execution screen. 

The Next Generation Outline Extractor is available on our website at www.appliedolap.com.  If you have any questions on the new extractor, don't hesitate to contact us at support@appliedolap.com.

EPM 11.1.2.3 Available for Download

Oracle Enterprise Performance Management 11.1.2.3 became available over the weekend, so let the rush of upgrading begin!

Here at Applied OLAP, we have already started our work with Essbase 11.1.2.3.  We have added the new version to our build list and have started testing Dodeca with Essbase 11.1.2.3.  We will make the 11.1.2.3 version of our server available to our customers within a few days.

One interesting fix that we have seen so far is that EPM 11.1.2.3 uses an upgraded version of Java, Java 1.6 update 35.   The previous EPM version, 11.1.2.2, shipped with Java 1.6 update 29 which contained a bug related to the SQL Server JDBC Driver.  The issue, known as the BEAST vulnerability, caused SQL Server JDBC connections to hang unless you made a fix to the Windows registry.  I, for one, am glad that issue is resolved.