Oracle Takes Aim at Enterprise BI Market

Computerworld - Oracle Corp. last week moved to stake a claim in the increasingly crowded enterprise business intelligence market with a new suite of tools and applications.

The Oracle Business Intelligence Suite will be part of Oracle's Fusion Middleware product family and will be offered in three editions: an entry-level bundle targeting Microsoft Corp. at the low end, a standard edition, and an enterprise edition for high-end users. The enterprise edition, which targets BI vendors such as Business Objects SA, SAS Institute Inc. and Cognos Inc., will integrate analytic tools and applications from Siebel Systems Inc. with Oracle BI tools. It will use Fusion Middleware to link into non-Oracle applications, data sources and tools.

James Archuleta, director of CRM at Alaska Airlines Inc. in Seattle, said the Oracle tools will eventually help ease integration among his Oracle database, Siebel analytic applications and PeopleSoft back-office applications.

"We're looking at Oracle being able to sell us one package at one point in time where ... we'll have one set of developers who have one skill set—Oracle Fusion," he said.

Still, Archuleta said he hopes Oracle will be receptive to the airline's suggestion that Oracle integrate the analytic tools from Siebel with a statistical tool for more heavy-duty analysis in the future.

"We trick Siebel analytics to do this, but it doesn't have the horsepower that a statistical package does," he said.

Basheer Khan, managing partner at systems integrator Innowave Technology LLC in Irvine, Calif., and an official of the Oracle Applications User Group, said most Oracle users have been forced to use disparate BI tools that were packaged with PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards or Oracle enterprise applications in the past.

The new BI suite from Oracle will provide a single option for these users, he added.

Oracle President Charles Phillips said BI will be a "fourth leg" of products for the vendor, along with its database, enterprise application and middleware product lines. The new suite will include query and analysis, enterprise reporting, dashboards, workflow, business activity monitoring, and integration with Microsoft Office and Excel. It will tie together best-of-breed products on top of a common metadata model and user interface to allow users to get more consistent reports and results from analyses of data sources across the enterprise, Oracle executives said.

Keith Gile, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said that Oracle has not had a strong BI strategy. Instead, its BI tools have been part of the database, application server or enterprise applications, he noted.