Essbase Reimagined: Kscope25 Unveils a New Era of Oracle Innovation
Every year the Oracle Developer & Technology User Group (ODTUG) hosts a user’s conference called Kscope. Billed as the "Premier education conference for Oracle technology users" the conference focuses on key Oracle communities including Apex, Analytics, Database and EPM. I have attended many Kscope conferences over the years and I am glad to see the conference is getting back on its feet after the whole covid era. This year’s Kscope was in Grapevine Texas, just outside Dallas, and while attendance is still down from pre-covid times, the attendees and partners who did make it this year offered a good deal of enthusiasm and passion in their related communities and creative solutions leveraging Oracle tools.
This year my focus was Essbase, and I had the opportunity to sit down with the new Vice-President of development that oversees the Essbase product, Ekrem Soylemez. Ekrem is a nice guy and graciously sat down with me, Joe Malewicki and Tim Tow, the founder of Applied Olap and pioneering user of Essbase. We discussed the roadmap for Essbase, how companies use Essbase outside EPM, things we'd like to see from the Essbase team, and how the community might better partner with Oracle regarding Essbase.
Some highlights from the roadmap:
Current version of Essbase is 21.7.x
Essbase 21.8 is projected to be released in limited availability later this year with general availability in 2026.
Essbase 26 will be the next major release projected May 2026
Future Essbase releases will be delivered in three variants:
An Independent Deployment, for use outside the OCI cloud space, as Essbase Marketplace.
Essbase Marketplace, an automated stack deployment of Essbase for use in OCI.
And coming soon, embedded as a feature in Oracle's Autonomous Database (ADB).
Yes, bundled with Autonomous Database! Users of ADB will be able to activate an instance of Essbase inside the ADB management console and deploy cubes for any purpose. One of the key drivers of this is Essbase's federated partition capability which leverages ADB as the datastore and exposes the Essbase structure across relational tables. This allows the use of other Analytic Reporting tools to use Essbase data and leverage some AI features in the ADB that Essbase data can benefit from.
Oracle is excited about this new offering, and as an Essbase solution provider I am excited Oracle is looking forward to new ways to leverage Essbase outside the EPM space. During our meeting we discussed Essbase as a part of ADB and provided some thoughts on how companies might leverage these new capabilities and offered thoughts on features and use cases Oracle might consider during development. It was collaborative! Ekrem listened to our feedback and agreed to continue the discussion as Essbase moves forward.
I was happy with the direction the discussion took, and I believe my colleagues felt the same. Tim Tow even came up with a new rallying phrase to keep the momentum going and reinvigorate interest in the Essbase community.
Next year’s Kscope will be held in Denver, Colorado. My team is already thinking about how we can continue contributing and collaborating with Oracle and the broader community to help usher in a new era of innovation and relevance for Essbase.
If you want to talk more about what we learned, and how it might impact your EPM or Essbase environments, contact use today. We'd love to share what we have learned and how your company can stay current in the fast-moving EPM or Essbase world.