DEV EPM

Hi all! I told you that it would be extremely hard to do a living blog of Kscope15 and this is because we don’t get any free timing when we are there. So many things to do, so many people to talk, so many presentations to see… I really envy Cameron… He is able to attend the conference, participate in its organization, go to parties, speak his sessions and yet blog about it in the speed of light. I think that he doesn’t sleep at all 🙂

Of course that it would be an extremely long post if we decided to write down the details of 4 days of Kscope in here (and we want to encourage you to be there next time to see with your own eyes!) so we will just do a resume of it all and hope that you get the essence of the greatest EPM conference in the world. Saturday and Sunday was already covered in the past posts, so let’s get straight from Monday to Thursday. I’ll not do it in a chronological way, but instead I’ll divide it by topics, so I can group things together.

DEVEPM’s session

Monday was one of the most intense for us because that was the day of our presentation. I think it was our best Kscope presentation so far! It had a good amount of people, they asked very good questions and the feedback was pretty awesome. It was great to present on Monday morning because then we could relax and enjoy the conference. Past years it was on Wednesday and Tuesday, so that “pressure” of having a session to present keeps lingering until you actually present it. Thanks for all that attended our session! It was an honor to have you there!

Sessions that DEVEPM has attended

We will not describe one by one here, but basically we were looking for presentations about the new version of EPM 11.1.2.4 and mainly because this new EPM version and ODI have some problems to work together. Essbase and ODI are still working fine. Planning on the other hand had its support cancelled by Oracle last year (the announcement was on Kscope14), but thanks to the community public petition, Oracle reconsidered this topic and said that the ODI KM was going to be supported in the future. And guess what we found at Kscope15? Oracle is already supporting ODI and Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.4!!! See ODI patch 20957183 (UNABLE TO USE ODI 11.1.1.6 TO LOAD PLANNING 11.1.2.4) on Oracle Support site for more details about it. We will be applying this patch in our environment in order to test it, so you should expect a blog post about it in the next few days!!!

Another thing to figure out was about HFM Data and Metadata integrations. Oracle has definitely cancelled ODI support for it, so we needed to see how is the best way to load data and metadata in HFM from now on. Honestly, all options that were shown are not good compared to ODI (sorry, but that’s true). ODI was very straight forward: you have data or metadata sitting in some Oracle table (probably already altered using some ETL logic on it), then you would just need to create one ODI interface to load it to HFM and that was it. Simple, clean, straight forward approach. Now, for this new version of HFM, things gets way harder, especially if your environment does not contain FDMEE, EPMA or DRM.

When we talk about data loads to HFM, it seems that FDMEE is the way to go. In the majority of the cases, where the data goes thought an ETL process before it is sent to HFM, you will need to load this data to FDMEE open interface table, use FDMEE open interface adaptor to load it to FDMEE and then have FDMEE loading the final data to HFM. Yeah, it’s a long chain of events that needs to be done now, a new tool to figure out how to use it and so on. The “good” news that we heard in one of the FDMEE presentations was that in the next release of FDMEE, Oracle will enhance its open adaptor interface, so you won’t need to load the open interface table first and then call FDMEE. FDMEE will be able to go straight to the Oracle tables and load it to FDMEE, reducing one loading step. Anyway, it still seems over-complex to do something that was very easy to do. We will also post some blogs about FDMEE integration in the near future. We also participated in a Hands-on lab provided by Kscope/Peloton (yep! Kscope is a full package and it also contains hands on training!) about FDMEE. Of course that no one can master a tool in 2 and a half hours, but at least you can get to know the basics to start playing with the tool.

HFM Metadata integration gets even worse. If your metadata comes directly from EBS, than you are good and you may also use FDMEE for that. But this won’t be the case in the majority of cases in the real world. If metadata comes from an Oracle table for example, then you will need to go either EPMA, or do your own custom code using the new HFM API, or use DRM. Those that already uses EPMA may be thinking that it’s not that bad, but Oracle also announced at Kscope15 that EPMA will not have any further enhancement from now on. Oracle will still support it, but no new enhancements. Oracle’s recommendation is that, if you are implementing something new and this would require a new implementation of EPMA, maybe this is a perfect time to reconsider that. Nobody will want to create a new project based on a tool that will not evolve anymore (and obviously, will eventually be decommissioned). Our options then reside on custom development using HFM API or DRM to export the metadata in a format that HFM is able to understand and import it. We will definitely be working on this topic and post about it as soon as we get some results.

There were several other fantastic sessions that we attended and we could keep writing in here (and you may be sure that they will have some sort of influence in our future posts), but then this blog post would become almost a book. So I’ll just talk about one more session that was about Drill Bridge. Those that don’t know yet what this tool is, PLEASE take a look at its page. Jason Jones is the creator of Drill Bridge tool and he was able to explain the tool, install it, configure a drill definition, show to the audience it working and reply to the audience answers in less than 60 minutes!!! That was really impressive. Today we go over a big complexity, generally using Essbase Studio to be able to create drill reports for Essbase, but Drill Bridge make things extremely (I really mean extremely) easy to install, setup and run. Congrats Jason for your great work, we will definitely try it out and see how it goes in our environments.

Networking + fun = a world of possibilities

The best place for having both networking and fun at the same time is definitely Kscope. Here are some of the things that we did during our stay there (sorry if I forgot something) apart from the sessions themselves:

• General Session with Don McMillan (Technically Funny): extremely fun session and also we found out that Kscope16 will be held on Chicago!!! It will be awesome as always!
• EPM Olympics at Monday Community Night;
• Cameron’s and Natalie’s meetup;
• ODTUG interview: Yeah, they were crazy enough to interview us 🙂 We will share the link once it is available;
• Oracle ACE and Speakers Reception;
• Saturday Real Deep Dive and Thursday Deep Dive;
• Bunch of Happy Hours with fantastic networking;
• Exhibitor’s square;
• Special Event at Nikki Beach: This was awesome, just awesome party;

And I think that’s it guys. Kscope15 just finished and we all are missing it already. It is just too good to be able to participate in such a great conference. Thanks ODTUG for organizing it! It’s great to see such a perfect work and dedication that you guys put to make it all happen. DEVEPM will definitely work hard to get selected again for Kscope16 🙂 !

See ya!