OBIEE

BI Market: Dashboard Management (Vendors and Products) – 2011

July 20, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Posts /by Adam Getz

Dashboard management systems are intended to facilitate and support the information and decision-making needs of management by providing easy access to key business information in a highly graphical and intuitive format. Fundamentally, a dashboard is a graphical business tool that displays a set of KPIs (key performance indicators), metrics, and any other relevant information to a business user, manager, or key decision-maker in a single consolidated view and allows for organizational performance to be easily measured and monitored. Dashboard data is often displayed as aggregate information and contains data that consolidated from multiple data sources scattered throughout an organization. Dashboards are commonly interactive and provide users users the ability to drill into particular aspects of the display and/or rapidly switch between views of the data.

In 2011, the market leading vendors for dashboard management systems include: SAP Business Objects, Oracle, IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, Microsoft, SAS, QlikTech, LogiXML, Corda, Dundas, iDashboards, Pentaho, & Jaspersoft.

BI Market: Ad-Hoc Query & Analysis (Vendors and Products) – 2011

July 19, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Posts /by Adam Getz

Query and analysis solutions enable business users and analysts to rapidly generate business queries and reports from enterprise data based upon business question of the data. Also known as “ad-hoc” querying, these tools typically provide intuitive, graphical interfaces that shields users from technical complexities and allows users to leverage business terminology instead of the more technical database names. The business focus of these tools allows nontechnical professionals to be comfortable with their data and allows them to quickly and efficiently satisfy their own information needsin real time with minimal assistance from system developers. Commonly, query and analysis environments include a middleware layer that converts database conventions into business nomenclature that is more intuitive and understanding to end-users. Moreover, query & analysis environments give users the capability to access and analyze data in a unique and personal manner. Utilized primarily by business users, query and analysis solutions provide an environment that enables interactive methods to query data, present data in an ad-hoc manner, and find information on an as-needed basis.

In 2011, the market leading vendors for ad-hoc query and analysis include: SAP Business Objects, Oracle, IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, Microsoft, Information Builders (IBI), Pentaho, Jaspersoft, & SAS.

Components of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) – Oracle Delivers

June 22, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Oracle Delivers is a component of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite that provides activity monitoring and alerting that can reach users via multiple channels such as:

• Email

• Dashboards

• Mobile devices

Oracle Delivers includes a web-based self-service alert creation and subscription portal, and a workflow engine that allows for initiation and passing of contextual information to other alerts. Furthermore, it can dynamically determine recipients and personalized content to reach the right users at the right time with the right information.

In a nutshell, Oracle Delivers notifies business users with relevant reports and data when events occur. Notifications can be sent and received utilizing most common communication channels.

Components of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) – Oracle Publisher

June 16, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Oracle Publisher (formerly XML Publisher) is a component of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite is an enterprise-level operational reporting tool that separates the data from the presentation. This means that developers from the information technology department can define the data sources, and business users can specify the report layout. The same data source can be used by multiple report templates. By separating the task of finding the data from the task of deciding how to present them, the business user can define a report template with exactly the format he or she wishes.

Rather then having an independent report design environment, Oracle Publisher leverages both MS Word and Adobe Acrobat as a user interface for the creation of richly-formatted operational reports.

Components of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) – Oracle Answers

June 14, 2011/1 Comment/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Oracle Answers is a component of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite that provides ad-hoc query and analysis capabilities to end-users. Users can processes data from multiple data sources in a pure web environment. In addition, users are isolated from underlying data structures as they view and work with a logical view of the information. This logical view of the information is presented to the user in business terms. The interface of Oracle Answers is highly-intuitive and enables end-users to create:: • Queries; • Data tables; • Interactive charts and graphs; • Pivot tables; • Reports; • Prompts

Oracle Answers provides a point-and-click interface that allows end-user to develop robust ad-hoc queries and reports. Users simply drag-n-drop fields to create layouts with reports, queries, and charts on the right-hand side of the application. Data fields are subsequently on listed on the left-hand side.

In addition, Oracle Answers is tightly integrated Oracle Interactive Dashboards. Reports, prompts, tables, charts, & graphs created in Oracle Answers can be easily saved, shared, modified, formatted, or integrated within dashboards of the Oracle Interactive Dashboards application.

Components of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) – Oracle Interactive Dashboards

June 13, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Oracle Interactive Dashboards is a presentation component of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) suite and provides versatile, web-based dashboards that displays information in a highly-intuitive format to help end-users’ decision making. The user interface is completely graphical while access to the information is interactive and based on the individual’s role and identity. Further, the user has full capability for modifying and interacting with data utilizing the following controls …: • Live reports; • Charts; • Tables; • Prompts; • Pivot tables

Additionally, the Oracle Interactive Dashboards provides the user with full capability of drilling, navigating, modifying, and interacting with data sets. This concept is commonly referred to as “guided analysis“. Oracle Interactive Dashboards can retrieve and aggregate content from a wide variety of sources, including the traditional databases, data warehouses and data marts, shared file servers, and document repositories.

Oracle Interactive Dashboards provide personalized views of corporate and external information. A dashboard consists of one or more pages, which appear as tabs across the top of the dashboard. Pages can display anything that you can access or open with your Web browser, such as saved queries and requests, alerts from Oracle Delivers, images, charts, tables, text, and links to Web sites and documents.

Differences in Oracle BI (Platform vs. Analytical Applications)

June 9, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

A key way to understand the differences between the Oracle BI Platform and Oracle BI Analytical Applications is to identify that the platform contains the environment and tools for custom building business intelligence solutions, while the analytical applications contain complete, pre-built solutions that can be rapidly configured. Oracle BI Analytical Applications utilize all of the tools within the Oracle BI Platform as well as several additional tools, and all of the components of the Oracle BI Platform are bundled within Oracle BI Analytical Applications. Moreover, within the Analytical Applications, Oracle has leveraged its experience in providing industry-specific business solutions to deliver comprehensive and fully-inclusive business intelligence solutions for numerous common business functions.

Another important concept in the differentiation of the Oracle BI Platform and Oracle BI Analytical Applications is the amount of content delivered in the metadata or middleware layer. In a nutshell, the metadata layer within Oracle BI creates a semantic model over an organization’s entire data set, consists of the information that characterizes data, and describes how the organizational data should be presented by the user interface of the business intelligence environment.

The Oracle BI Platform is delivered without any pre-existing metadata as it only contains the tools for developing metadata.

However, Oracle BI Analytical Applications come delivered with a rich set of metadata elements at all three layers (physical, logical, and presentation) and come delivered with the mappings between the levels already being developed and configured as well as physical connections already being defined.

Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Analytical Applications

June 7, 2011/1 Comment/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Rather than just being a platform or development environment, Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Analytical Applications are fully inclusive business intelligence solutions that incorporate all of the key metrics, workflows, and business processes for a particular business function. Bundled within theses solutions are numerous pre-built components including:: • Dashboards; • Metrics; • Reports; • Drill-down paths; • Dimensional models; • Naming standards; • Database objects; • ETL routines; • Metadata; • Security

In addition, Oracle BI Analytical Applications contain universal adapters that allow for rapid integration and direct connections with leading commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) packages including SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Siebel applications systems.

Oracle BI Analytical Applications come bundled with best practices and industry standards built-in. Additionally, they include all of the functionality required to conduct business intelligence for many common business functions including financials, human resources, sales, service, contact centers, marketing, supply chains, order management and fulfillment business areas.

Fundamentally, Oracle BI Analytical Applications are built upon the Oracle BI Platform and provide complete end-to-end, prebuilt business intelligence solutions that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence to all members of an organization including senior executives, mid-level managers, and front-line employees. So rather than developing custom business intelligence solutions for each business area and function, the use of Oracle BI Analytical Applications allows an organization the ability to rapidly configure a ready-built solution utilizing the complete Oracle BI Platform.

Oracle BI Analytical Applications come bundled with two main additional pre-built back-end repositories:: • Business Analytics Warehouse; • ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) Repository

The Business Analytics Warehouse (BAW) is a completely pre-built data warehouse that physically contains all of necessary dimension and fact table needed for the business intelligence applications. The BAW is fully-compliant with the dimensional modeling methodology developed by Ralph Kimball and supports many advanced techniques including slowly changing dimensions, conformed dimensions, aggregate tables, hierarchy tables, and surrogate keys.

The ETL repository includes all of the routines for extracting of data to a staging area, transforming the data into a common format, the loading of date into data warehouse tables, changed data capture, and seeding data for common dimensions. In addition, the powerful ETL repository consist of two main components, Informatica which is the ETL engine that contains the data integration routines, and the DAC (Data Warehouse Application Console) which is the “ETL orchestration tool” that controls application configuration, execution & recovery, and monitoring.

Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Platform

June 3, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

The Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is a set of functions and tools that incorporate a number of advanced business intelligence products. In addition to providing a broad set of functions and tools, the Oracle BI Platform is built upon a proven, modern web services-oriented architecture that provides the foundation of the construction of complete business intelligence solutions. In addition, the platform delivers a full range of capabilities related to business intelligence capabilities including…: • Dashboards; • Ad-hoc queries; • Alerts and notifications; • Operational reports; • Predictive intelligence; • Disconnected analytics; • Microsoft Office integration

Fundamentally, the Oracle BI Platform comes with the tools and functions for developing sophisticated custom business intelligence environments like the one pictured here …

At its core, the Oracle BI Platform is an innovative next-generation business intelligence environment that offers the software tools for building enterprise BI solutions from data spanning both Oracle and non-Oracle data sources and applications. The Oracle BI Platform has been meticulously designed to allow for pervasive use within an organization. This sophisticated environment includes a full range of easy-to-use and intuitive end-user tools such as interactive dashboards, advanced reporting and publishing, full ad-hoc analysis over the web, proactive detection and alerts, mobile analytics, Microsoft Office integration, web services and business process integration.

The Oracle BI platform provides transparent and seamless access to numerous heterogeneous data sources. This highly developed platform also allows for development of custom business intelligence implementations that access data from traditional relational databases, OLTP & ODS systems, data warehouses and data marts, flat files, and web services. Further in 2008, Oracle released the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Plus Platform, which provides direct connections to Hyperion data sources including Essbase and its related financial performance management applications.

The Oracle BI Platform has been developed over several years and includes the most advanced features from the former NQuire and Siebel Analytics products recently acquired by Oracle Corporation.

Oracle’s Business Intelligence Foundation

February 20, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Oracle’s Business Intelligence Foundation is a complete enterprise business intelligence solution that delivers capabilities for reporting, ad-hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards, and scorecards. In addition, the Oracle BI Foundation includes a common enterprise information model, which is a unified metadata model accessed by end user tools, allowing a “model once and deploy everywhere” paradigm. In addition, the Oracle BI Foundation allows users to access and interact with information in multiple ways, including web-based dashboards, collaboration workspaces, search bars, ERP and CRM applications, mobile devices, and MS Office applications.

Product Areas of Oracle BI Foundation

• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE Plus)
• Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One (OBISE One)
• Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition (OBISE)
• Oracle BI Publisher
• Oracle Essbase
• Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD)
• Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management
• Oracle Essbase Analytics Link