I bought myself a new server for Christmas. It's a Dell. I'm probably going to buy a new one every three months until I have a nice rack in my home office. I've grown tired of waiting for the guys at corporate to get the virtual lab working. I think I have a better chance of getting a little farm working that I have full access to.
The first task is done. I've got the AV and the network connected. As we speak I'm downloading Essbase 11. I'll follow Tim and the other Ace directors' instructions and put the damned thing together. 2009 is going to be a very deeply technical year for me. I'm just very happy in my job and feel like I've got lots of time and don't need to be such a careerist like I used to be. I can focus on getting deep into some technical matters.
What I'd really like to see is a good understanding, as I said before, of the Java interfaces. I have an old licensed copy of Dodeca around here somewhere. Maybe I'll play with that. But what I really expect to have a lot of fun with is generating a model library complete with fake data for various aspects of the energy industry. I'm so very pleased that my parent company is deep into the energy business, especially with the new acquisition of Piocon. I had a chance to work for Shell Services in Houston way back in the day and it was so cool to work with a company that had the resources to do things right. Same with Northwest Utilities. Back then I used to have to worry about shortcomings with the product. Now there are very few - it's more capable than most IT guy's imaginations - so we'll see if the Oracle engineers have done right by the great spirit of Essbase. I believe they have, which means the new Essbase is going to be all that. Match me up with the right company in energy and it's going to be delicious.
In that vein it will be interesting to see how these carbon management programs get going. I think that anybody who is serious about that is going to go through several generations of thinking their way through managing best practices. That's tailor made for Essbase EPM. Fingers crossed.