Technology giant Oracle has taken the covers of its latest business intelligence product, claiming it to be the most integrated and complete suite on the market.
Unveiled at an event held in London, Oracle Business Intelligence 11g is said to be the first BI product on the market to provide a unified environment for accessing and analysing data that resides in relational, OLAP, and XML data sources.
It unifies Relational OLAP (R-OLAP), Multidimensional OLAP (M-OLAP) and enterprise reporting on a common technology foundation, which Oracle also said is also an industry first.
It pulls information from Oracle products as well as third-party sources into a single user interface. This lets users customise the data available, with the graphs and charts being updated in real-time to reflect any changes in data. Another new feature of the user interface is map visualisations that are linked to spatial data.
The Action Framework in 11g means that users can initiate actions directly from the dashboard and are made aware of any updates to the data, meaning that all users sharing the information will always be looking at the latest data.
From the management point of view, Oracle has introduced what it says is a deep integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, meaning system admins can manage and monitor BI performance from the same environment used to manage their entire IT stack.
Speaking at the event in London, Oracle’s president Charles Phillips, said: "Our BI strategy has been evolving for years; for any company that starts as a database company that’s not a surprise. We want to capture information securely and present it in an accurate way to the consumers of that data. We’ve taken the idea of an integrated suite and applied it to BI."
"There are a lot of ways to extract information out of systems," Phillips continued, "but you need that information to be consistent; you need to define data elements in the same way. Business intelligence is not BI if you get five different answers to one question. It’s not just the ability to extract data from a single source; you want it to be consistent and defined the same way across all sources and all applications."
Oracle believes this is a step forward from other BI platforms on the market, particularly offerings from the likes of SAP.
"The old way was to have the transaction system and you would dump those transactions into a separate system in a data warehouse, do some analysis, make a decision and then figure out what to do from there. Those things were completely disconnected. This is the first closed-loop BI system." Phillips said.
