Endeca (discontinued) vs. Oracle Analytics Server

Best fit for this product: - Advanced or Sophisticated Enterprise Search platform: If you spend effort on your search capabilities, Endeca is the tool. - If you are looking for capabilities to search and navigate similar to a relational-database system, then Endeca is not the best fit. - If you are spending effort to drive customer experience, especially around customer interaction with your web application, Endeca can help with that in a multichannel environment.

The entire deployment and configuration stage was easy and it was accessible across the organization in a matter of days. Oracle Analytics Server being a cloud-based solution helped right from Input of Bulk Data to Info preparation, Data cleaning, and finally Data Modeling. Everything was visual and the Help Wizard was very intuitive.

Incentivized

• Provides exact, correct counts of items in its dimensions.
• Allows for flexible, out-of-the-box boosting of content (based on combo of any/all of: user profile, date, dimension being browsed and search keyword).
• It has a reasonably good admin interface for the administration of boosting/promotion rules for the business user.

• Oracle helps with easy customization of reports.
• It helps with the creation of dashboards and the integration of different data sources.
• Oracle BI was a package used for multiple users across our organization - publishing and distributing reports was a breeze.

Incentivized

• Endeca's page builder is not fit to be an enterprise product - it is just BAD!
• It is not easy for a non-user to understand Endeca quickly
• Multi-index search (or any complex search implementation) is not easy to setup in Endeca

Incentivized

• More AI but with human back up.
• Less mumbo jumbo so even IT guys/gals can more easily work.
• More statistics (math) and orientation for those not familiar with it.
• More live as well as virtual (live) show casing of real situations in business.

Incentivized

If the solution is implemented well and the business understands the purpose of the Endeca stack, it offers a great way for a business to explore and benefit from its existing data. From my experience, the Endeca solution has exposed data patterns to a business that were not thought about or explored before because of the lack of available tools to properly expose these patterns

Scalability and rich integration capabilities. In the future, if we go with Hyperion for the Financial Consolidation and planning purposes -BI integration with Hyperion is going to be much simpler as it has native interface connectivity and even integration capabilities with well known CRM products (Siebel) and ERP Products (Oracle EBS, Peoplesoft, SAP) is going to be easy and straight forward.

The system itself is very usable, and with proper training is very sensible in its organization and method of operation. There are some downsides in initial setup in the way things are imported (or not in some cases) in setting up properties and dimensions. Overall however it's amazingly flexible in terms of the content it can index and make available for search.

For me or a staff memeber that uses it frequently, its usability is sufficient. However newbies could have a few issues but find their workflow

Incentivized

No problems, it's that simple.

Incentivized

Other than anomalies or expected quirks, there were never any earth-shattering delays.

Incentivized

Support has been very good, and the trainers for the various Endeca courses have all been very willing to help long after the classes have been completed, so in the instances where we're waiting on support from Oracle, it's often that the members of their training arm can help us out as well.

It's fast, efficient and easy to work with. Scheduling could help when planning out a day however overall it's a big plus when rolling out and supporting Oracle.

Incentivized

The training is actually really good, and absolutely necessary - although this is software that has great documentation, the documentation itself is so vast, that it would be difficult to learn haphazardly, not to mention being incredibly time consuming to do so. Online training probably would have been fine except for the fact that having someone look over your shoulder to see where you're going wrong is helpful. This also allowed our team to sit in a single room and converse about functionality, etc. that would have been difficult to facilitate via an online class.

Oracle University offers very in-depth training.

We did some online Q&A with the Oracle team, but I would definitely recommend doing an in person class if you have a large team that will be attending - there's definitely no replacements for a large class of technically oriented staff members who can drive conversation about specific topics that might surface.

It was a private training site.

Incentivized

There were some features we were hoping to get implemented in this particular release of Endeca, but were unable to facilitate those requirements due mostly to timeline. Having seen several other implementations, we will definitely have future iterations to add functionality and improve upon our implementation of Endeca. For the time being, we are satisfied with our implementation as it turned out.

A properly implemented Endeca solution performs extremely well on the largest of datasets and it positions your organization to immediately achieve your ROI.

Oracle Endeca was the best option that we evaluated by far. It gave us the most flexibility and ability to meet our objectives and had features that were not offered by the competing products we evaluated, but which we very much wanted, and this was why we decided to go with Oracle Endeca versus another platform

Incentivized

Oracle BI works pretty well and has been well acknowledged and appreciated by the business users and power users who develop reports and dashboards. Compared to other tools, Oracle BI object development is easier and has a quick turnout. Using Oracle BI with Essbase and Oracle Exadata db, we believe the performance rendering data is quite good. We are using MicroStrategy as well almost equally, but for critical reporting needs considering the back end is Oracle and Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications (OFSAA) we have chosen OBIEE.

Incentivized

We have seen the results of this in our initial research and are not surprised that Oracle does this like it does soo many other things in this area, so well.

Incentivized

• It is a searching tool, and hard to estimate its impact on conversion.
• It does its job regarding better searching; In terms of efficiency, it's hard to say: it has big learning curve. It requires a dedicated Endeca developer to work on it.
• Compared to Solr, it is way too complicated.

• We've used OBIEE (or it's previous named product) for over 13 years and it's still the most used tool for BI by the business.
• We moved our largest business system off of Business Object into OBI so we could gain improved performance, reliability, and easier management of metadata.