Essbase 12C is here or is it?

A few weeks ago when I was at Oracle Open World, there was a big to do, partially started my me. Someone had posted that Essbase 12C had been released.  Thinking quickly, I immediately found the readme and saw that EAS and Essbase Studio were not supported. I couldn’t fathom that, going back to command line to  build cubes? and how would load rules get created.
I was hoping that perhaps, it had the new simplified interface that Gabby Rubin has been hinting about (and I actually got to see at OOW  -- It is awesome), but alas no.
It turns out this 12C release is for use with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 12c that was released the Friday before.  It does have cool things we can expect later in our own EPM version of Essbase.

First it is the new JAVA kernel, so I’m happy to let the OBIEE people debug it for us. This Java is supposed to be first released as EssCloud service. so don’t expect it any time soon in-house. I would say on premise, but apparently Larry is rebranding on premise to be some kind of private cloud, or so the story goes.
Second, It supports all of the functions including cross-dim in hybrid mode. That is huge. It means they figured out cross dim issue performance. I can’t wait to try it.

Finally, They are putting Essbase in memory. The real use case for Essbase with OBIEE is for OBIEE to spin off Essbase cubes for caching data to make OBIEE reports faster. we won’t be able to get at these cubes, but OBIEE reports will be.
So for OBIEE (at least) a REALLY cool version of Essbase is available, but for us EPM-ers we will have to wait. may uncle Gabby, will give me a version for Hanukkah to play with. or a version for each night. I love new toys.