Oracle Analytics Server, replacing the former Oracle BI Foundation Suite is a business intelligence reporting and analytics platform. It provides users with a series of integrated tools for ad-hoc query and analysis, dashboard and scorecard creation, enterprise reporting, mobile analytics, multidimensional OLAP, and predictive analytics.
It is well suited for projects that are more discovery related. If this is a one-time project that we create a visual for, this would definitely make sense to use. If this is an ongoing analysis (monthly for example), we might look to another software that we would be able to automate a little further in how the visualization comes together
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.
In comparison to other tools such as GraphWiz or Circos, Gephi comes with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that makes it easy to load your data, and quickly start building all sorts of different graphs. There's absolutely no code that needs to be written for either loading or modeling. And without downloading additional plug-ins, Gephi ships with quite a few standard graph models, as well as some "fun" extras such as the Sierpinski triangle, and a variety of force atlas types.
Most of the layout types (maybe all) are highly configurable, which can make for extremely customized and unique displays of your data. Again, none of this requires the user to write any code. That said, it is possible to script custom functionality for your models, or even update the Java source code yourself, if you feel like getting technical. Gephi builds are available on GitHub, and the developers encourage people to contribute ideas, improvements, and plug-ins.
There's a plug-in for Gephi that allows for streaming data to update your model. This essentially allows you to create near realtime graphs of your data in motion. This plug-in was by far the biggest reaston we invested time in the product; to create animated data visualizations without exhaustive hours in development.
I (and many others) have had to expand Gephi's memory manually by experimenting with the configuration file. I'm glad it's possible, but it should be easier.
Gephi sometimes crashes inexplicably and loses your work, so I have developed a habit of explicitly exporting versions of my graphs as csv's, but I think this should be handled automatically in Gephi.
Because it is prone to crash, ideally, Gephi would help the user manage his/her use, by estimating processing and memory for very large tasks and prompting the user to confirm their requests before executing. Instead, I just tend to avoid certain functions.
While Gephi isn't perfect, it's a powerful tool for mathematical graph modelling that's hard to find in other products, particularly by way of its interface. It grants non-software developers access to a point-and-click way of creating accurate, beautiful visualizations that would normally take hours in other applications. The fact that it allows for live streaming data is also something that's hard to come by, at least for visualization software
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.
Gephi is very intuitive and the fact that it shows its process helps the user understand what's going on. However, the animation features can really slow it down and there isn't a way to shut them off. Furthermore, the failures on saving mean you frequently have to start over. These problems disrupt the workflow and can be frustrating.
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.
A properly implemented Endeca solution performs extremely well on the largest of datasets and it positions your organization to immediately achieve your ROI.
The interactivity in Gephi and the quality of the output figures are impressive. However, the selling point was the fact that we were able to link Gephi into our pipeline using Java's interface. Other products were less customizable and lacking of the sophistication Gephi provided without too much pain during the liking process.
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.
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.
I have only used the product for education purposes. I will not be the best person to provide details about ROI and business efficiency and customer service. I was personally very excited about the tool and am continuing my work on the tool.
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.
