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Oracle Releases Major Upgrade to BI Suite| January 30, 2007 | Data Management | Competitive Intelligence Report Analyst: James Kobielus
On January 29th Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3 (Oracle BI EE R3). This latest release of Oracle’s flagship BI suite includes enhancements in usability, visualization, data modeling, data-mart automation, development, report design, platform integration, application integration, data integration, workflow integration, portal integration, desktop integration, information delivery, mobile-user support, caching, performance, scalability, workload management, load balancing, and security. Analytical Summary • Current Perspective: Positive on Oracle’s launch of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3 (BI EE R3). Oracle’s release of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 10g Release confirms its status as a best-of-breed BI vendor and positions it well to challenge Business Objects, Cognos, and others for dominance in this fast-growing market segment. Oracle provides considerable new functionality in Oracle BI EE R3, providing incentives for existing customers to migrate up from prior versions of the suite. • Vendor Importance: High to Oracle, because the vendor pre-announced Oracle BI EE R3 in fall 2006 and needed to deliver it soon so as to maintain its aggressive pace in the BI market and to steal the spotlight from Microsoft’s forthcoming Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. • Market Impact: High on the BI market segment. Oracle has long been a dominant vendor in DBMS, DW, MDM, and other key DM market segments, and the latest version of its BI suite gives it a formidable platform for grabbing market share from longstanding BI market leaders such as Business Objects and Cognos. Recommended Competitor Actions • Rival BI vendors should point out that Oracle BI EE R3, though feature-rich, has no clear differentiators. In particular, leading BI/CPM pure-plays such as Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, and SAS should state their products already provide most of the usability, visualization, integration, information delivery, performance, scalability, high-availability, security, and other features found in the latest version of Oracle’s BI suite. • Rival BI vendors must make sure that their respective product sets match up feature by feature against Oracle’s formidable new suite. In particular, BI competitors that cannot match Oracle’s ability to bundle its BI suite with same-vendor SOA/ESB suites/tools, must ensure that they implement SOA/Web services standards thoroughly and have tight, certified integration with best-of-breed SOA/ESB suites from Oracle, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and others. • SOA suite vendors that have BI products should revisit their product roadmaps to make sure they are addressing the unified value proposition, platform integration, and the wide range of new functionality available in Oracle BI EE R3. SAP should place a higher priority on enhancing its SAP NetWeaver BI product, which is, due in great part to the vendor’s chronic inattention, seldom on enterprises’ short list of best-of-breed BI products. Microsoft, on the other hand, should accelerate the ongoing field testing of its forthcoming Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, which is not due until later this year. Already, Oracle has stolen much of Microsoft’s thunder with the release of Oracle BI EE R3. Recommended End User / Customer Actions • Current users of Oracle BI EE should evaluate the latest version of the suite and consider upgrading as soon as they can justify the migration and set aside the necessary budget allocation. The vendor provides considerable new functionality in Oracle BI EE R3, providing incentives for existing customers to migrate up from prior versions of the suite, as well as from Siebel Analytics and other, legacy Oracle BI offerings. • Current users of Oracle’s DBMS, portal, application server, integration tools, and other SOA suite components should evaluate the new Oracle BI EE R3 and consider adopting it as their company-standard BI environment. Oracle has integrated the new BI suite tightly with the other components of its best-of-breed Fusion Middleware product family, helping existing Oracle shops to leverage and extend their investments in the vendor’s diverse wares. • Current users of rivals’ DBMS, OLAP, data warehousing (DW), DI, and other DM offerings should evaluate the new Oracle BI EE R3 and consider adopting it as their company-standard BI environment. Oracle has implemented tighter interoperability between its BI suite and various third-party OLAP, DW, and DI products. This latest release provides increased certification and native, optimized support for the latest releases of IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, NCR Teradata, and SAP Business Information Warehouse. • Current users of rivals’ BI products should reassess their strategic corporate BI vendor in light of the release of Oracle BI EE R3. Most large enterprises should include Oracle in their short list of strategic BI vendors. Given Oracle’s thorough implementation of SOA in this and other components of its Fusion Middleware product family, prospective customers have considerable flexibility to change over to Oracle BI EE R3 should their current BI vendors not keep up with the industry high bar that Oracle has clearly attained.
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