• Vlamis Software Solutions Celebrates 25 Years!
• BIWA Summit 2017
• Oracle Synopsis Released for Mobile
• OBIEE 12.2.1.2 and DVD 2.0 Released
• New Data Discovery and Visual Analytics Course
• Have You Visited the Oracle BI Public Store?
• Oracle BICS and DVCS Price Drop
• Recent and Future Presentations

2017 marks the 25th anniversary of Vlamis Software Solutions. We have updated our logo to commemorate this landmark year of our consulting business. Look for this new logo on our website, Twitter, and on other communications from us.

After graduating from Brown University with a degree in Computer Science and working in the Boston area for Information Resources, Inc (IRI), our president and founder, Dan Vlamis moved to Kansas City in January 1992 to live closer to his family. While looking for a job, he accepted a three-week consulting assignment in Australia. Upon returning from the trip, he found that other companies were interested in the skills we would now call Business Intelligence that he acquired while working for IRI. Jeff Wexler, a fellow employee at IRI helped Dan secure several of those consulting opportunities. Dan filed the paperwork with the State of Missouri in April 1992 to officially form Vlamis Software Solutions.

Since our inception, Vlamis Software Solutions has maintained involvement in several Oracle User Groups including the Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) and ODTUG. Over the years, Vlamis has been published in many issues of Oracle Magazine and given more than 300 presentations. Presentations given after 2001 are freely available on our website. Dan currently serves on the board of the BIWA SIG of the IOUG and serves as co-chair of BIWA Summit. Vlamis Software Solutions is a sponsor of the Oracle Data Warehouse and Big Data Global Leaders program where we have presented with clients.

For more information on Vlamis Software Solutions, please visit our history page.

We had a great time at BIWA Summit 2017. There were a number of great presentations and we are very happy to see such enthusiasm by all who attended! Vlamis Software Solutions gave a number of presentations at BIWA Summit 2017 which are now available to view on our website.

This year we participated in the following presentations:
• Data Visualization for Oracle BI 12c and Visual Analyzer
• Business Analytics in the Oracle 12.2 Database: Analytic Views
• Data Visualization at SoundExchange - A Case Study
• Hands on Lab: Learn Predictive Analytics in 2 hours!! Oracle Data Miner
• From Zero to Oracle BI Cloud Administrator Hero
• Moving Virtual Machines to the Cloud (and Back) Painlessly?
• Clustering Data with Oracle Data Mining and Oracle Business Intelligence
• Forecasting and Time Series Analysis in Oracle Business Intelligence
• Oracle BI at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Hands on Lab: Deploy Custom Maps in OBIEE for Free

Thank you to all those who attended our sessions at BIWA Summit!

BIWA Summit 2017 presentations are now available for download!
• Visit the Sessions page
• Select the date of the presentation (Jan 31, Feb 1, or Feb 2) and optionally filter using the track dropdown
• Navigate to the presentation you wish to view
• Select the "READ MORE" button
• The download link appears after the description. If there is no download link, it has not been uploaded yet.

Oracle Synopsis extends Oracle’s data visualization engine to mobile devices, namely cell phones. If you have ever tried to look at a spreadsheet on a cell phone, you can appreciate how challenging that interface is for reading spreadsheet data. Once you install Synopsis, you can get a “synopsis” of the data in a spreadsheet by simply sending a CSV, XLS, or XLSX file to Synopsis. Synopsis provides a series of graphs that summarize the data by all of the columns in the spreadsheet. Synopsis (totally free!) is available to download for Android and (just recently) iOS users. Once installed, opening any csv, xls, or xlsx file is easy—just send it to Synopsis. The user is able to change chart type, modify fields, filter the data, and share visualizations with others, including on social media. See the tweet that Dan shared the day that Synopsis came out on iOS. People outside the Oracle community can use this just as easily – no Oracle license, servers, anything is required.

The above visualization of Budget (Est) by Year was made with Synopsis from the included sample data.

Creating visualizations in Synopsis is so easy your marketing guy can do it!

Since our prior newsletter in November 2016, Oracle has released an update to Oracle BI and Data Visualization Desktop. With this release, it's clear that DVD will become the way that serious data visualization developers create new Oracle BI visualizations. New features for these products include:
DVD 2.0
• Improved data prep with Data Flows
• New more intuitive pages for creating data sources
• 25+ new data sources
• New smart insights feature to help you better understand data
• 8 new visualizations
• New BI Ask feature
• Multiple Canvases added with easier to use interface
• Printing, email and export to pdf and PowerPoint options
• New SDK for developing 1st Class Custom Visualizations

OBIEE 12.2.1.2
• Export/Import Visual Analyzer projects
• Single sign-on to Visual Analyzer

To see a live demo of these new features see Dan Vlamis and Arthur Dayton present DVD 12.2.2 and OBIEE 12.2.1.2. New Features last December!

Interested in Data Discovery and Visual Analytics but not sure how to get started? We have developed a new 2-day course designed to get you and your team going with Data Discovery and Visual Analytics.

This two-day course covers a wealth of material in the latest discipline of visual analytics. You’ll learn how to speed read data sets, systematically reveal correlations, and develop evidenced based insights in a fraction of the time spent using traditional business intelligence tools. You’ll learn about how to connect to a wide variety of on premise and cloud-based data sources and how to enrich your internal data sets through mashups with easily available external data resources. You’ll see how predictive analytics can reveal not only past patterns, but future likelihoods. You’ll learn all of this through hands-on exercises and self-guided discovery with live data and the latest in visual analytics software from Oracle. Our expert instructors have years of practical experience working with America’s largest and most successful organizations.

Day 1
• The process of data discovery
• Human cognition foundations of visual analytics
• Connecting to and loading data sets
• Reading data distributions quickly
• Exploring data through frameworks
• Exploring data through hypothesis testing
• Foundational visualizations for discovery and their use cases

Day 2
• Data mashups and enrichments
• Prepping data with visual data flows
• Expanding data sets with calculated measures
• Adding predictive analytics
• Visualizing time, change, and thresholds
• Multidimensional analysis through visual analytics
• Telling data stories visually

Interested in more information? Visit our Training page!

The Oracle BI Public store is a great resource to download visualizations for Oracle Business Intelligence, Data Visualization Cloud Service, Business Intelligence Cloud Service, and Data Visualization Desktop.

The Oracle BI Public store is available to everyone and has some great samples and useful extras!

What are you waiting for? Unlock the power of the Oracle BI Public Store!

Oracle has announced updated pricing for their Business Intelligence Cloud Service and Data Visualization Cloud Service products. New product prices are:
• $150.00/month/user for BICS (10 user minimum and schema as a service required)
• $75.00/month/user for DVCS (5 user minimum)

BIWA Summit - January 31 - February 2, 2017
• Data Visualization for Oracle BI 12c and Visual Analyzer
• Business Analytics in the Oracle 12.2 Database: Analytic Views
• Data Visualization at SoundExchange - A Case Study
• Hands on Lab: Learn Predictive Analytics in 2 hours!! Oracle Data Miner
• From Zero to Oracle BI Cloud Administrator Hero
• Moving Virtual Machines to the Cloud (and Back) Painlessly?
• Clustering Data with Oracle Data Mining and Oracle Business Intelligence
• Forecasting and Time Series Analysis in Oracle Business Intelligence
• Oracle BI at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Hands on Lab: Deploy Custom Maps in OBIEE for Free

RMOUG Training Days - February 7-9, 2017
• Data Visualization for Oracle BI 12c and Visual Analyzer

SROAUG Spring Conference - February 24, 2017
• Getting Started with Advanced Analytics in Finance, Marketing, and Operations

Collaborate - IOUG - April 2-6, 2017
• Oracle Big Data Science

Collaborate - OAUG - April 2-6, 2017
• Developing a strategic connection with business: Oracle Business Analytics at Beckman Coulter

ODTUG Kscope - June 25-29, 2017
• Starting with Oracle Data Science in the Cloud