Infosys-Oracle Blog : Year 2009 and Oracle Business Intelligence

With the dawning of the year 2009, the Business Intelligence pundits have started making their predictions on how the BI space will look like in this new year, especially in the given economic climate. I have read through a lot of such predictions and outlooks in most of the leading websites and analyst reviews. One theme is where most agree and that is better use of the platform and trying to tap into hidden capabilities of the existing BI platforms in order to get an insight into the organization’s bottom line and spent. I had as well highlight on the same in my last blog that BI is going to be a key enterprise instrument to stay afloat in the changed business scenario.
Keeping the current situation in mind we would like to wonder on what would be Oracle’s game plan in 2009. Based on my close interaction with this technology and Oracle as an organization during the last one year, I see Oracle playing the BI game in four to five broad areas

Packaged BI: Oracle has tasted success with its BI Applications and is the undisputed leader in the space as of today. While most of the modules today cater to integrate ERP analytical functions, it has only a few industry verticals that it caters to. My thinking is that Oracle would come up with a few modules with in its packaged BI offering mapping to certain niche industry verticals.

Consolidation: Years 2005 to 2007 were years of acquisitions and year 2008 is where Oracle started its consolidation with broadly creating its EPM and BI roadmaps. The same would continue with the much awaited 11g release where the Hyperion BI System 9 is completely fused with OBIEE. This would be the birth of a new BI product in the market place and a real ‘fusion’

Marriage of the ETL and ELT: This is something I am waiting for to see the final product resulting out of the marriage of Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle Warehouse Builder. As per Oracle’s product road-map this is where the ETL road map is heading and with the current situation where the market is looking for the best of all the worlds in the ETL space, Oracle may release a beta version of this product earlier than we would have thought. This is another ‘fusion’ that might see light sooner than expected

Stronger Positioning of Data Miner: This is an application in a BI suite which possibly has been very less talked about, leave alone used. It is through a Data Mining technique that an Organization is really able to use strategic benefits from its Business Intelligence investments, the rest is largely tactical. And it is a bit of shame that these tools are never used to the full potential. In the current climate, we could possibly see a stronger demand of the Oracle Data Miner and my belief is that Oracle would also come up with a stronger positioning of this product

Comments

Nice forecast.

The way I see it, BI apps is a rapid-implementation kit that promises speed-to-market, but I am not sure of how effective it will be toward attaining that one-version-of-the-truth goal. Implementing multiple BI Apps packages calls for a federated bus architecture that needs to be carefully implemented with conformed dimensions, but I am skeptical on how easy this will be to do. Much like SAP Business Objects rapid marts. I also hear that BI apps in their standard form will address only about 50% or so of typical customer reqmts; rest is customization. Might as well go the whole hog and build a custom warehouse using OBIEE.

Oracle is promoting ODI as the much hyped ELT tool, but will it provide the flexibility of switching to ETL if required? Not always would you want to ask the DB Engine to do all resource intensive tasks. SAP BO DI provides this flexibility, as does Informatica.

Finally, Oracle seems to be getting it's act together, but there is still less clarity on their plan to support too many overlapping products. On a lighter note, they must begin by cleaning up the BI portion of their website. I always get lost there :)

Posted by: Vinod Shankar | January 22, 2009 7:54 AM

What do you reckon about appliance computing?

Posted by: Rajesh Shashikant Naik | January 29, 2009 7:42 PM

Vinod:
Thanks for your comments. I will possibly not get into BI Apps adequacy at this stage and would reserve a blog for that one.
However, as far as the ELT is concerned I would want to believe that, ELT is way forward. As we often see, all ETL vendors do profess a "database pushdown" in order to handle complex transformations and that is where it is best handled anyway.
Also this gives me a future topic for discussion "To ETL or to ELT" :)

Posted by: Somnath Mukherjee | February 20, 2009 8:11 AM