NAVTEQ Announces Vlamis as Partner

July 21st, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

NAVTEQ issued a press release today announcing that Vlamis Software Solutions, Inc. is an authorized reseller of NAVTEQ data.  With the launch of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, creating visually-attractive and functional maps with geographic drill-down, color coding, and spatial analysis as a pre-integrated component has never been easier.  The bundling of the NAVTEQ® map delivered in Oracle Data Format along with Oracle-based Business Intelligence solutions provides our customers with a set of industry-leading data and tools to give them a competitive edge.

For more information, see the full press release on NAVTEQ’s web site.

Plan on seeing more about this partnership in the future.  Contact us for more about how you can use geospatial data for business intelligence analysis.

Posted in Maps/NAVTEQ, News | No Comments »

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Launched in US

July 21st, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

Oracle held their “Live Event: Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence 11g” at Lincoln Center in New York City on July 20, 2010.  We were there to see exactly how they would introduce the product to the US audience.  Oracle was quick to point out that this was not a real “launch event”, since it was already launched in London earlier in the month, but it did give a chance for a US audience to see the product live in person.

I was generally impressed with the way the event came off.  The presentations were well done, and the demos showed the features of the software well.  I especially enjoyed seeing how the features were presented, since I’m a technical person at heart.  I even learned a few tricks that I have missed while exploring the product on my own during the beta period.  For example, I had missed that you can type into the search bar at top of the “Global Header” and easily search the catalog for something like all of the maps.  I knew BI Search was a feature in the product, but hadn’t had a chance to “look for it” yet.  It was there all the time!

In hindsight, it’s hard to see how I missed it, but that’s what you can expect from 11g—there’s so much that’s new that you can stare right at something and miss it.

Oracle spent a lot of time showing the OLAP features of the product.  It was emphasized again that these features, such as hierarchical columns, custom groupings, and stepwise selection are available no matter what the storage mechanism is, whether it be relational, MOLAP, or ROLAP.  I was also pleased to see the inclusion of the new map view in the product.  They showed creating a map view from scratch and it showed quite well.

Oracle is still mum on the question of pricing for the scorecard capability. Consensus is that this will be an extra cost option to OBIEE, but until there’s availability, they will not announce pricing.

It was good to see the product presented so well.  It certainly showed well.  Please let us know if you’d like to learn more about the product.  Given what was shown in the live event, I believe we can talk about almost everything in the product now.  We look forward to working with you all on implementations.

Posted in Business Intelligence, Events, OBIEE | No Comments »

Vlamis at Tuesday OBIEE 11g Launch in NYC

July 16th, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

Hello, all.  I just thought I’ d let you all know that I plan to be at the launch event for Oracle Business Intelligence 11g at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, July 20.  If any of you are going to be there, please let me know–maybe we can get together.  Oracle is downplaying the event a bit, since it’s already been “launched” in London earlier in July.  But it’s an opportunity to meet with folks that are passionate about this release and hook up with some clients of ours, and allows me to hand-deliver press releases about our relationship with NAVTEQ.  It is scheduled to hit the wires on Tuesday as well.

Posted in Business Intelligence, Events, News | No Comments »

BIWA Techcast – Data Visualization with OBIEE 11g

July 12th, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

See new visualization features in OBIEE 11g!

Dan Vlamis and Tim Vlamis will present “Data Visualization Best Practices Using OBIEE 11g: Improve your BI & EPM reports, dashboards, and queries” as part of the BIWA Techcast series on July 14 at 11:00am Central time.  This will be one of the first times that you can see OBIEE 11g features, now that it has been officially announced.  For details see the BIWA SIG web site or click here to register and to connect to the webcast.

Here is the abstract for the presentation:

Now updated for OBIEE 11g!  As BI and EPM systems continue to grow in scope and importance throughout corporations and organizations of all sizes, the need for superior data visualization skills and knowledge has never been more urgent. You’ll learn when and how to use bar charts, pie charts, line charts, and bubble charts, how and when to incorporate motion into your management dashboards, and how to avoid the ten most common errors of uninformed BI systems designers. We’ll cover the latest in Oracle BI tools including OBIEE 10g and OBIEE 11g.  See specific examples of how OBIEE 11g will enable new types of data visualizations including sliders, VCR controls, zoomable graphs, and maps. Join BI mavens Dan Vlamis and Tim Vlamis for an entertaining session on how to strengthen your BI and EPM presentations, avoid the big mistakes that undermine the acceptance of analytical systems and visualizations, and leverage the tremendous power of Oracle BI and EPM toolsets.

We hope you can join us!

Posted in Business Intelligence, Events, News, OBIEE, Product Updates, Tips and Techniques | 1 Comment »

Oracle OBIEE11g Launched – Soon to Ship!

July 7th, 2010 by Chris Claterbos

Today Oracle had a Marketing Launch of Oracle OBIEE 11g in London. While this was not an announcement of the launch of the actual product but rather the locked down set of features and demonstrated the product slated for production very soon.

With this launch we can now come out and talk about the product! Vlamis Software has been an active member of the beta testing since last year. And while it has been a very long wait I am glad to say that it is finally getting close to the finish line. And it is VERY IMPRESSIVE!

I would like to take a few minutes to go over the key features that are of special interest to many of our customers and those wanting to do more extensive OLAP based analysis with OBIEE.

Metadata Changes

Outwardly the Admin Tool has not changed much. But there are a few notable changes, support for dimension hierarchies, tighter Essbase OLAP integration and Security and instance management is now handled with WebLogic.

It is now easy to now support hierarchies in queries, simply take the dimension hierarchy in the logical layer and place it in the presentation layer and save the repository. Now you will be able to use hierarchical columns (discussed later). Essbase support is much better in this release as well. Many of the special “tweaks” we had to do before are no longer required. WebLogic is now the the primary application server and Weblogic Server is now used for user security, in lieu of the repository manager. For those of us not used to using WebLogic this has been the biggest change to get used to. Once you get used to using it things are easier to do than before, and it all stays up! WebLogic is also used to deploy the rpd file and webcat. Multiple instances can be started up and maintained all from the central management console.

New Look and Feel

There is now a new unified startup page where you can now see a listing of the objects you recently interacted with, including queries, dashboards, or reports. There are also easy links to create a new Analysis (Answers), Report (BI Publisher), Prompts, Dashboard, Scorecard etc.

It is now much easier to do things and see what you have been doing.

New Analysis Features

There are now a lot of new features added to provide a more OLAP-style interaction with data. These include:
- Hierarchical Columns
- Member Selection Steps
- Custom Groups
- Calculated Items
- Hierarchy / Member Browsing Selections

These features are available for all dimensional data, including relational, and Oracle OLAP and Oracle Essbase data. This included tabular reports and pivot tables (crosstabs). The pivot table also supports drag and drop swapping of dimensions. It is very easy to drag the down dimension and swap it with the across dimension just like we would do in windows based applications like Discoverer! We can also swap with the page dimension. This is a big addition!

New Prompts

There are also several new prompts such as check boxes, radio buttons and most importantly a list box. The new prompt builder allows you to build a prompt by combining these prompts into a single prompt.

I was able to build a Level Selector, where I use a choice list to provide the user a list of available levels and once a level is select a list box displays the members in that level so that the desired member or members can be selected.

Maps

There are also a lot more things to discuss but I wanted to close with one new feature we at Vlamis Software are very excited about. OBIEE11g now supports mapping of the data! Instead of showing the data on a chart you can now show the data on a map. If you can provide geo-coded dimensional data you can plot data on a map. This add a new way companies can visualize their bi data. We are also working with NAVTEQ, the provider of map data, to help bring this data to OBIEE11g customers.

That’s all for now.. There is much more to cover but will have to wait for another day! I plan on doing a full review as we get to the actual release.

Posted in Business Intelligence, News, OBIEE, Product Updates | No Comments »

BIWA at Collaborate 2011

June 30th, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

As a followup to my blog posting about Collaborate 2010, I thought I’d just add that BIWA will be participating in Collaborate 11, in Orange County Convention Center, in Orlando Florida, April 10-14, 2011.  Look for more information soon, including the “call for presentations” at http://collaborate11.ioug.org.

Posted in Events | 2 Comments »

Color is a Funny Thing

May 13th, 2010 by Tim Vlamis

In the visualization of data and BI dashboard design, color is often overlooked and overused as an element of design, despite the central role it plays throughout our lives in how we dress ourselves, paint our houses, and display monthly sales figures.

Randall Munroe’s Blag on XKCD.com (a robust sense of humor is required and rewarded on this übergeek comic site) recently released the results of a color survey that included more than 5 million named colors recorded over 222,500 user sessions. It is impossible to read much of the results and not burst out laughing and also realize that color is both intensely personal and emotional. Why do we pay it so much attention at some times and so little at others?

Part of the reason is that color is highly context sensitive, that is, we perceive colors to be very different depending on the background on which they appear and whatever colors happen to be adjacent to them. When Dan and I were giving a presentation titled “Data Visualization Best Practices: Know How to Improve Your BI and EPM Reports, Dashboards, and Queries at Collaborate 2010” a couple of weeks ago, we threw in some slides featuring some traditional “optical illusions” including some with color (mis)perception. Invariably, more people comment on the optical illusions than on the more substantive parts of presentation, despite the fact that most of us have been exposed to them since we’ve been in the fourth grade.

The best “simple” advice I have is to use color sparingly and carefully. Don’t underestimate its power.

Posted in Business Intelligence, Tips and Techniques | 1 Comment »

Collaborate Conference Summary

May 7th, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

We made it through the Collaborate conference! It was a whirlwind of activity, with Vlamis Software presence from Saturday through the closing session on Thursday. Here are some of the Vlamis Software (and associated BIWA SIG) highlights:

Saturday: Dan attended Collaborate conference committee kickoff meeting. Really good group of people to work with!

Sunday: Dan set up hands on lab (HOL) room. Everything worked! By the way, the HOLs were a huge hit. We ran 6 different HOL sessions, using 2 virtual machines on 20 computers, servicing as many 60 people at a time. We received great feedback on the sessions and I believe people really appreciated having a chance to actually touch and feel the software. HOL sessions included:

  • OBIEE (presented by KPI Partners)
  • BI Publisher (presented by BI Publisher product management)
  • Oracle Warehouse Builder (presented by Rittman Mead)
  • Oracle Data Mining (presented by Rexer Analytics)
  • Oracle OLAP (presented by OLAP product management with help from Vlamis Software)
  • Excel running against Oracle OLAP (presented by Simba)

Our thanks go out to the above excellent instructors, to KPI Partners for sponsoring the hands-on labs and to our very own Jonathan Clark of Vlamis Software for working with all of the instructors to get the PCs configured for the labs.

Monday: Lots of sessions to attend. Also, the trade show floor opened up. Vlamis Software had a booth at the show and we received a lot of traffic throughout the show. Our notebooks and pens were a big hit. We raffled off a copy of the book Oracle Essbase & Oracle OLAP: The Guide to Oracle’s Multidimensional Solution. We will be mailing out a copy of the book to the winner soon.

Tuesday: More sessions followed by the BIWA Reception, with Robert Gersten, Sr. VP of BI Development at OracleI. It was great to be able to slow down and actually talk with some of you in the BIWA community. I (along with Karl Rexer) was honored to receive the 2010 BIWA Haydu Contribution Award for outstanding contribution to BIWA SIG.  Very nice!

Wednesday: More sessions. Vlamis Software was involved in three different sessions that morning:

Thursday: Dan participated in the closing debate: Should I Stay (10g, MySQL)
or Should I Go (11gR2+)? Dan argued for Going to 11gR2+

After a whirlwind week, it was nice to head home. Lots of great contacts. I’m looking forward to Collaborate 2011!

Posted in Events, News | No Comments »

Book Review: How We Decide

April 10th, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

What if the purpose of a BI system is not to help decision makers make informed decisions, but rather to provide data to our emotional brain so that they make more effective gut decisions?

I recently read Jonah Lehrer’s book, How We Decide.  In the book, Lehrer contrasts the two ways we as humans make decisions: our rational brain that “thinks” about a problem, and our emotional brain–the fight vs. flight gut decision.

One story told in the book is about making purchasing decisions as in what strawberry jam to buy.  If we overthink this, we will be less likely to be happy with our choice later on.  Thinking about it gets in the way of our emotional brain.

But contestants of Deal or No Deal are often subject to “loss aversion”, because you remember how much you “could have had” in the previous round.  This fools the emotional brain into making the wrong decision.

I could go on and on, contrasting this to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, another great book, but hopefully you have a sense of the book by now.  Just make the gut decision to buy the book.

Posted in Review | No Comments »

Find an Oracle Office

March 31st, 2010 by Dan Vlamis

This is just too cool not to share with you all. I find myself often wanting to work with various Oracle people and wanting to find various Oracle offices. Fortunately, the Oracle ACE Newsletter that Oracle ACEs receive has an answer.

Deepak Vohra, Oracle ACE, has developed an Oracle Map search feature using Google Maps API for locating all Oracle field offices including locations that have been acquired (i.e. Siebel, Sun, etc.). Check it out by entering your home town and see how accurate it is. I found it pretty good!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

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