New Releases of OBI Software Enable Enterprises to Improve Timely, Accurate, and Role-Based Insight.

To help organizations achieve better business visibility and alignment, Oracle today introduced new releases of its complete, integrated and scalable business intelligence products including Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications and Oracle Real-Time Decisions.

The new product capabilities delivered span out-of-the-box iPad and iPhone support, extended OLAP tools and in-memory platform support, enhanced real-time decision management features, new certifications, and more.

Enterprise-Class Analytics and Actionable Intelligence on the Go
The new Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.5 introduces support for the iPad and iPhone. This release provides on-the-go access to the complete range of alert, ad hoc analysis, dashboard, reporting, scorecard, “what-if” analysis, and unified relational OLAP (R-OLAP) and multidimensional OLAP (M-OLAP) content of Oracle Business Intelligence.

In addition, users now have the ability to initiate actions and workflows directly from their mobile devices – helping to reduce the time needed to make decisions while enabling a more flexible, agile organization. Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.5 content is optimized for use with the iPad and iPhone – without requiring design changes to existing reports and dashboards.

This new product release also introduces extended support for additional data sources including Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database, Oracle OLAP, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW). Oracle Business Intelligence is a component of the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Foundation Suite, which offers organizations a complete, open, and architecturally unified Business Intelligence solutions. The suite serves every class of user, providing multiple channels of information access, and supporting all enterprise BI requirements

Enhanced BI Application Mobile Capabilities, User Experience and Performance
The latest release of Oracle BI Applications is built upon Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.5 — enabling organizations to take advantage of the platform’s enhanced mobile features, user experience, systems management, performance, and scalability. Oracle BI Applications Release 7.9.6.3 benefits include:

Alerts, dashboards and reports are available for secure access and interaction via iPad and iPhone to provide organizational visibility, insight and alignment;
A new user interface featuring a wide range of interactive charting and prompting capabilities, including map visualization options directly linked to spatial data, providing a richer, more intuitive end user experience;
An enhanced Common Enterprise Information Model with 25 conformed dimensions that provides alignment across the enterprise as well as high performance, federated queries against hundreds of data sources in relational, OLAP, and XML formats; and,
Integrated system management services to simplify system configuration, testing, deployment, monitoring, and installation of patches to enable continuous availability, with unmatched query performance, scalability, and security.
Oracle BI Applications are complete, prebuilt analytical solutions for Oracle and non-Oracle applications including SAP. Subject areas include Financial, Human Resources, Procurement and Spend, Projects, Supply Chain and Order Management, Contact Center Telephony, Loyalty, Marketing, Price, Sales, Service, and a range of vertical industries.

Optimizing Customer Interactions with Real-Time Intelligence
o better help organizations optimize their customer interactions, Oracle Real-Time Decisions Release 3.1 introduces “Decision Manager,” an application to manage, monitor, refine, and optimize operational decisions across customer interaction channels. Decision Manager enables business stakeholders to collaboratively define closed-loop analytical business logic for delivering optimized customer experiences. Built using Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), a component of Oracle Fusion Middle ware 11g, Decision Manager offers a collaborative and rich user interface for business stakeholders to:

1. Author and refine their decision eligibility and targeting logic;
2. Search and manage their catalogs of campaigns, offers, products and other enterprise content; and,
3. Analyze the results of their operational decisions to discover new insights.
The application also provides role-based access control, versioning, and audit trail to ensure operational consistency and reduce overall cost of ownership. Oracle Real-Time Decisions is a highly scalable service oriented decision management platform for decision optimization. It leverages real-time and historical data, business rules, predictive models, automation, and self-learning techniques to deliver decisions that adapt over time. Its decision services can be embedded in transactional applications across the enterprise to optimize performance of recurring operational decisions.

Oracle Real-Time Decisions is an open enterprise decision management platform, that integrates easily with any customer touch-points infrastructure for web, contact center, email, kiosks and point-of-sale. It is also available per-integrated with Oracle’s Siebel CRM.

Supporting Quotes
“These new Oracle Business Intelligence product releases build upon the success of Oracle BI 11g and provide customers a wide range of new capabilities that extend intelligence to the iPad and iPhone, offer more powerful visualization, interactivity, performance and scalability features to their ERP and CRM applications, and optimize customer interactions and decisions in real-time,” said Paul Rodwick, vice president of Product Management, Oracle Business Intelligence.

“Oracle continues to deliver new capabilities and enhancements including heterogeneous platform support across Oracle BI Foundation, Oracle BI Applications and Oracle Real-Time Decisions,” said Dan Vesset, vice president, business analytics solutions, IDC. “According to IDC research, worldwide demand for business analytics software continues to grow, and Oracle is positioned to help organizations benefit from the analysis of the vast amounts of data they generate.”

Business Analytics (BA): Are the vendors trying to create the next hype?

Business Analytics: analyzing data
A few business intelligence vendors like IBM Cognos and SAS Institute say the term business intelligence fall short. They find out that business intelligence is all about business analytics: analyzing data to get to know why things happen and what may happen in the future.

Quit common
Business AnalyticsSuch a shift in terminology is quit common in the software branche. Earlier business intelligence software is called performance management, business performance management, corporate performance management and so on. But it is the same software they try to sell.

Business Intelligence Trends :- BI in the cloud

The vendors say: just turn on the tap and ‘drink intelligence’ – BI in the cloud a hype?

A lot of business intelligence vendors are selling their cloud offerings, which seems like ‘heaven on earth’ to us. It’s cheaper, faster, more scalable and more reliable they say. But can true business intelligence be in the cloud? Can we draw parallels between water from the tap and BI in the cloud?

What is true business intelligence?

In our view it’s running your business better using key information about your processes, your clients and the market. To be able to do that you should gather all kinds of data from a variety of source systems inside and outside your company network, integrate the data and transform it into information to produce insights in such a way that we can speak of ‘intelligence’. Each company has it’s own intelligence which can bring a real competitive advantage, allowing companies to swim in the profit pool.

What is a cloud?

A cloud is an infrastructure of hard- and software that can be used for a period of time. You may want to use more disk storage, give more users access to the applications or use more memory. Or maybe at some time you want to drop a group of users, which does not pose a problem with the cloud concept. With your applications in a cloud, it should be really simple to scale up or down. Often you only have to pay for the usage, which can be a real advantage.

There are various types of clouds including; the private cloud and the public cloud. In the public cloud every user uses the same business intelligence software solution, the same version and has the same standard indicators and reports. In this type of cloud there is often very little space for customization as it comes down to the data that can be stored, the transformations and the key performance indicators. If you want high customization for example you should extract data from a source system that other users in the cloud don’t have. This means you should move to a private cloud. In a private cloud, which is almost the same as buying a virtual or dedicated private server from your hosting partner, which we are all familiar with, some of the advantages of being in the cloud will disappear. In a private, highly customized cloud, scaling up isn’t that easy (compared to the scalability of a public cloud), whether it is deployed within the company’s firewall or hosted by a third party.

Tap water and BI in the cloud

Cloud solutions like BI in the cloud are often compared to tap water, at least it is often visualized that way. The vendors are marketing their offerings of BI in the cloud as: just turn on the tap and ‘drink the intelligence’. Maybe it tastes good for a while, but what competitive advantage will this solution really bring to your company if your competitors can do exactly the same? In our view true business intelligence can’t really be in the public cloud. In addition, who likes the idea that someone else is managing their brain?

“The only way to make money in the Cloud is to have a lot of customers. The only way to get a lot of customers quickly is to give everyone the same configurable application and avoid custom development work. In the Cloud, economies of scale are everything. But BI is largely a custom development effort.” Wayne Eckerson, BeyeNETWORK

Tap water is, on average, 500 times cheaper than bottled water, some people would say, boycott the bottle. Could we say the same about BI in relation to the public cloud? Is it, on average, 500 times cheaper than having your own BI infrastructure? Even if that is true, we don’t think it’s wise to move your company specific intelligence to the public cloud, even if it is possible (there are some really nasty integration, security and compliance issues to overcome). However, non-specific highly standardized indicators like the sickness rate could be in the public cloud as a data mart. However you may have to ask yourself if that is true business intelligence. So, don’t boycott the BI bottle!

What is BI – Business Intelligence?

BI is an abbreviation of the two words Business Intelligence, bringing the right information at the right time to the right people in the right format. It is a 5-step process to run your business smarter, starting with registering the right data correctly, collecting the data from multiple sources, transforming, combining and storing it in a data warehouse.

This data should be reported, analyzed and distributed to the right people at the right time in the right format. The figure below shows these steps.