Many companies which are using Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) for business analytics are faced with the dilemma of how to advance their analytics solutions and which business analytics tool strategy should they define and follow. Decision what to do usually has a long-term effect and is not always easy.
In case of OBI, there was quite a lot of uncertainties for several years. The tool itself didn’t see many changes and (major) updates. If there were any, such as Mobile Apps Developer (MAD), these were not particularly successful and have proved as "dead end". Oracle BICS (BI Cloud Service) was also a kind of failure as it was never became a successful product.
It is not a surprise that many OBI users, even though they invested a lot into Dashboards or BI Publisher reports decided to abandon OBI in favour of new tools such as such as Tableau or PowerBI.
Oracle Analytics is a successor of Oracle Business Intelligence
It is funny, but I’ve spoken to many OBI users who were not aware of this and were wondering what to do with their OBI. Even 3+ years after the new Oracle Analytics Strategy was publicly announced, some people are still in the dark (!?).
With new Oracle Analytics, Oracle has managed to fill the gap and in my opinion Oracle Analytics is now a worthy competitor with many cool features and functions, that is constantly gaining on popularity and has been positioned neck-to-neck with other established analytics tools providers in the space of Analytics.
But the question for doubtful OBI users still remains. Should they migrate to new Oracle Analytics or should they move to some other BI tools’ vendor?
Cloud vs. On-premise dilemma
I am deliberately talking about Oracle Analytics. Oracle Analytics is available in the cloud and on-premise. What is the most important, Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) have more or less the same features.
The only differences are related to the features that are unique to cloud or on-premise infrastructure. For example, OAC deployment is very like “one-click” install, whereas OAS install requires some more administration and is very similar to OBI install. You know, the usual stuff like database for FMW repository, WebLogic server, ....
The other differences that can be observed are because OAC and OAS releases are not 100% synchronised. OAC release cycle is approximately 3 months, whereas OAS is released in 12-15 month cycles. That is why we can use Semantic Modeler in OAC (however still as preview), and in OAS Semantic Modeler is not available.
Of course, all general cloud benefits apply when using OAC. For example, using OAC means much less administration than it is required with OAS. OAC, is actually running as Platform as a Service (PaaS) which doesn’t provide system level access, therefore there isn’t much to do at all. Everything is more or less managed by the platform.
For example, one of the tasks left to be managed by users is adding or removing CPUs. In case of OAS, all administration including backups, patching and similar, is still domain of the user.
Preserve investments and gain new features of a modern, augmented business analytics platform
Preserving investments in analytics can be split into two categories:
- preserving existing licenses and
- preserving analytics solution itself.
Many companies using OBI have made quite significant investments in OBI licencing over the years. This investment in licenses is preserved when moving to Oracle Analytics, regardless of cloud or on-premise.
In case of Oracle Analytics Server licenses, practically nothing is changed. Users with valid support agreements for OBI licenses would continue with Oracle Support as usual. All supported OBI licenses continue to be supported as Oracle Analytics. What is nice here, users gain additional functionality like Data Visualisation, Data Flows, or Machine Learning for free at no additional cost.
For those who would like to migrate to Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle provides an option to use existing OBI licenses with Bring Your Own License (BYOG) licensing option which recalculates existing OBI licenses to OCI subscription.
From technical point of view, existing OBI users can migrate either to Oracle Analytics Server or Oracle Analytics Cloud. In both examples, they can expect the functionality of both to be the same. Migration from OBI to OAS or OAC is practically identical, but of course there are some specifics of the platform chosen.
When upgrading to Oracle Analytics Interactive Dashboards and Analyses, BI Publisher Reports and Metadata Repository is migrated with practically no change is required. Existing solutions are migrated and functionally unchanged. Of course, as always, there could be small details which are often encountered and need resolution:
For example:
- Gauge Views are no longer supported in Oracle Analytics. Analyses using Gauges will have to be corrected and updated.
- Connection Pools settings might be different in the cloud if there is a database migration to the cloud as well.
- Security settings might represent a major part of the migration/upgrade effort. We have encountered many issues related to the security and all of these have to handled carefully.
When companies are migrating from OBI to Oracle Analytics, they gain all of the new features of a modern, augmented business analytics platform. And there are just too many (!).
It is true, Interactive Dashboards and Analyses and BI Publisher hasn’t gone through many changes, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. One most visible is new UI which has much cleaner and modern look & feel that previous versions of OBI.
But the rest of the tool is completely new. Even for those who are familiar with Visual Analyzer from OBI 12c, Data Visualization and all other new tools are something completely different.
I don’t want to go into details (see my other blog posts), so here are just a few features and innovations in Oracle Analytics that are really important:
- Self-service Analytics: Advanced and end users are empowered to create their own highly interactive and visual analyses, they are able to tell stories of their findings and are able to effectively collaborate with their colleagues and peers. Using Auto Insights, users don’t even need to know how to create visualisation as Oracle Analytics does that for them automatically and users just need to choose which to include in analyses.
- Self-service Data Management: Users can manage their own data, load data into system, mash these data and analyse them on the spot.
- Self-service Augmentation: Machine Learning is built-in Oracle Analytics and is available to users in form of data exploration, data preparation and data enrichment. In data visualisations, users have the ability to add analytics functions such as trend, forecast, clusters, outliers and few others just by clicking one button. It’s out-of-the-box. On top of that a wide range of Machine Learning algorithms are available to business users who do not require deep knowledge of Data Science at all to run their own predictions.
- Data Governance: In my view semantic modeling used to be one of the key strength of Oracle Business Intelligence in the past. And still is in Oracle Analytics. With one major difference, We’ve got a new tools for BI developers and architects called Semantic Modeller. Semantic Modeller is now integral part of Oracle Analytics and is replacing good old BI Administration Tool.
Conclusion
With Oracle Analytics, Oracle is clearly pointing the direction in analytics. It is becoming one of the key analytics tools/platform players in the market and all who have patiently waiting for a breakthrough can move to Oracle Analytics without a fear that this is going to be another dead end with Oracle. Certainly, it’s not gonna happen.
For those who would stay on-premise, Oracle Analytics represents safe option for going forward, to stay on-premise, preserve existing investment and still gain all the features and functions of the new tools. And if the want to move to the cloud, that is more or less just lift and shift exercise.
For those who decide to move to the cloud now, they will gain all the features and functions instantly as their are available in Oracle Analytics. And maybe even more important, Oracle Analytics is one of services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and as such it can easy connect to other services available in Oracle Data Lakehouse ecosystem. And, current users of OBI will preserve their investment as well.