Today's Enterprise Reporting
Updated April 29, 2015

Today's Enterprise Reporting

Satyendra Yenugula | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Business Intelligence Foundation Suite

Modules Used

  • Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.7.1

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle BI Foundation Suite

We are in process of re-building the entire BI for our organization and we've selected Oracle Business Intelligence as our Enterprise Reporting platform which we can use for our day to day Analytical and Operational reporting needs. I've personally led, managed and implemented many large scale transformations using this product and seen great results. In my current role, I am in the process of shifting all the existing reporting landscape to Oracle Business Intelligence platform for all the departments
  • Oracle Business Intelligence Reporting platform is well enhanced with many advanced features like Visualization Recommendation for Power users when building the dashboards and Reports like which view to use based on the type of data that we are presenting to the end users.
  • Oracle BI Mobile APP Designer is very rich and has useful functionality to develop the dashboards and reports and display them on the mobile devices via Apps
  • Oracle Essbase, multi-dimensional Online Analytical processing system which uses the advanced calculation engine for financial forecasting, planning and management reporting.
  • Oracle BI Publisher Reporting capabilities caters to the needs of real time pixel perfect reporting with out lot of development time.
  • Overall Oracle BI Foundation Suite is a conglomeration of Enterprise Reporting, Real time quick reporting, multi-dimensional analytical processing, BI Mobile, Geo-spatial capabilities which every organization needs today for Analytical and Reporting needs
  • Oracle BI Reporting Administration needs to be simplified for easier Administration and maintenance. Today Admins need to deal at different levels (Enterprise Manager, Weblogic Console, BI Admin Tool) to handle the day to day Admin and Maintenance operations
  • In order to take advantage of the Geo-Spatial (maps) capabilities you need to have Oracle Database at place as the pre-built maps related data is developed and available only in Oracle Database. Organization who doesn't use Oracle Database have to struggle to get this feature work.
  • BI Mobile APP Designer configuration and set up needs to be simplified when upgrading from previous versions
Compared to Microsoft BI, Oracle BI has got good data modeling, adhoc reporting, scheduling and some rich visualization capabilities which definitely made us to choose Oracle BI against Microsoft BI.

Tableau BI is a very simple and easy tool to implement and helps business users and analysts to do quick reporting and information discovery but this wouldn't be able to serve the needs of an enterprise reporting tool. With Tableau we still need to purchase a tool which will satisfy the enterprise reporting needs. Hence we decided on Oracle BI which gives us the enterprise reporting platform and also the quick reporting capabilities by leveraging the BI publisher reporting capability.
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.
With Oracle Business Intelligence, we can do quick reporting using BI publisher as well as build huge enterprise reporting capability for the entire organization. When one reporting platform is built with the required subject areas then power users and analysts can build their own reports and dashboards with out IT team involvement and this makes the business groups happy as the turn around time to build reports will be in minutes to hours.

Oracle Analytics Server Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
9
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
6
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to PDF
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
9
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
6
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8

Using Oracle BI Foundation Suite

30 - Field, Finance, Accounting, Sales & Marketing
4 - Good SQL Skills, OBIEE Admin and Reporting building skills
  • Adhoc Reporting Capability
  • Ease of use and simplicity in creating reports and dashboards
  • Good scheduling capabilities
  • Good integration capabilities with future CRM and ERP products
  • Real time reporting needs by leveraging the BI publisher
  • In house integration capabilities of Hyperion Applications with BI
  • BI Mobile APP Designer
  • Leverage the power of integration of Essbase cubes with BI platform and report
  • Integrate the Hyperion Financial Applications with BI

Evaluating Oracle BI Foundation Suite and Competitors

Yes - Microsoft BI and SAP Crystal Reports. We replaced these BI Production with Oracle BI foundation suite as this product has rich dash-boarding, interactive reporting, self service functionality and it can truly serve as one enterprise reporting application. Oracle BI Foundation Suite comes with OBIEE reporting platform as well as BI Publisher which can be useful for real-time reporting neeeds
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Product Usability and Scalability is one important factor which pushed our decision towards Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite. Oracle Business Intelligence has many rich features like Interactive Reporting, Self-Service, Mobile, Geo-Spatial reporting. Also this product can be very well integrated with major CRM and Financial Applications like SAP, Siebel, Oracle Ebusiness Suite and Hyperion Applications.
Along with the initial evaluation factors such as one enterprise reporting platform, dashboarding, interactive reporting, Geo-Spatial , Mobile, self-service capabilities I will also look into additional ones like Data Discovery, Hadoop Integration and Data mining functionality, All these factors would help us build a successful one enterprise reporting platform for all organizational analytical, real-time and data discovery reporting needs