Interview with Phil Bates, Oracle Business Intelligence Architect : Part 1

Mark Rittman

Apr 22, 2008 • 4 min read

One of the things you might not know about product development for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition is that a lot of it happens down the road from us, in Bristol in the UK. Oracle's team in Bristol and the UK were originally responsible for Oracle Discoverer, and over the past year or so have taken on development of some of the more interesting aspects of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, including integration with Service Orientated Architecture, enhancements to the Presentation Server tools and integration with the Hyperion toolsets.

The team down at Bristol have been excellent supporters of the UK Oracle User Group over the years, with product managers such as Mike Durran and Paolo Fragapone presenting at our last BI & Performance Management Special Event on the Oracle BI Apps roadmap and integration of OBIEE and Business Activity Monitoring. One of the talks I most look forward though to at events such as these are the product updates from Phil Bates, who is also based down in Bristol and works on the architecture and product direction for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Many of the postings on this blog such as those on OBIEE architecture, development techniques and integration with Fusion Middleware have come after discussions with Phil and Mike, and I was especially pleased when Phil agreed to do a short interview for this blog on what he does and where he sees Oracle BI going in the next few years.

It's a fairly long interview so I'll run it in two parts;, with the first part talking about his role, the main development themes for Oracle BI over the next few years, and how he sees the integration with the Hyperion tools progressing. Phil has kindly agreed to answer any questions you might have around Oracle's BI product strategy and the answers he gives during the interview; if you've got a question, leave a comment on this article or the one later on this week, and Phil will reply when he gets back from traveling in a week or so's time.

[Mark Rittman] "Tell me a bit about what you do and what your responsibilities are regarding Oracle Business Intelligence?"

[Phil Bates] "My focus is principally on the vision, direction, architecture and development strategy for our Business Intelligence products. In practice this involves working across our product development teams to ensure we consistently innovate business intelligence functionality within a coherent, high quality, secure and manageable infrastructure. On a day-to-day basis I find my work involves a pretty varied and interesting set of activities including:

Working with development teams to explore and design new product features;
Establishing technical strategies for tighter integration between components and to improve the ease of use and manageability of the products;
Identifying how we can better integrate business intelligence with middleware and applications;
Defining how to leverage Oracle and third party technologies and applications within Oracle Business Intelligence;
Collaborating with our product management and marketing teams to develop and articulate our product vision and priorities.

I also spend a significant amount of time with customers and partners. I see this is an essential part of an architect's role: working directly with customers and partners enables us to shape our product strategy, define priorities, develop and refine our understanding of requirements."

[MR] "Looking to the future and in particular over the next couple of years, what do you think the main themes will be in the development of Oracle's business intelligence tools?"

[PB] "From a business perspective, the key themes will include;

Enabling customers to better achieve end-to-end enterprise business insight and performance management
Extending the scope and coverage of prepackaged BI applications (in terms of content, source systems and integration with CRM/ERP/EPM applications)
Making business intelligence more accessible and actionable through a greater number of delivery vehicles and channels
Integrating business intelligence more thoroughly into the business processes people are seeking to understand and optimize.
Making business intelligence easier to manage, scale and secure.

[MR] "How do Oracle intend to incorporate Hyperion's tools into Oracle Business Intelligence? What will the main customer benefits be?"

[PB] "The strategy here is to protect, extend and evolve. Protect means ensuring customers existing investments in Hyperion, and Oracle technologies are covered by our lifetime support policies. At the same time we are extending the capabilities in the components from Hyperion and Oracle and have a significant set of new releases planned over the next 18 months or so, each packed with new features. Some of these features extend the products to ensure we continue to have best of breed capabilities across our BI product suite and continue to lead the market from a functional perspective. Other features - such as common platform certification, dashboard interoperability and Essbase integration with BI EE - enable us to evolve the product capabilities to make it easier to use the components from Oracle and Hyperion together. These evolution features in turn enable us to incrementally deliver a deeply integrated end-to-end enterprise performance management experience.

So we will continue to see a pragmatic, incremental product strategy that allows customers to benefit from innovative new features with their existing products while at the same time extending their capability to gain consistent insight across the full enterprise performance management lifecyle - i.e. from planning and budgeting, monitoring and analysing the operational business processes (marketing, sales, service, supply chain, HR, finance, etc). and managing the end of cycle reporting and consolidation processes. From a technical perspective we will also see an incremental consolidation of infrastructure and a strong focus on improved systems management and lifecycle capabilities to make all of the Oracle/Hyperion BI components and applications easier to manage, secure, deploy and scale. The intention here is to dramatically lower the total cost of ownership of an enterprise business intelligence and performance management system.

Customers will also benefit from increasing integration of the wider product management and lifecycle processes (e.g. more extensive testing and certification, more comprehensive and consistent documentation, extensive education and training programmes, integrated and common support processes) as well as a larger partner ecosystem of systems integrators, VARs and consulting organizations with skills across the combined Oracle/Hyperion Business Intelligence portfolio."

Don't forget, if you've got any questions for Phil on Oracle's BI strategy, add them as comments to the post. I'll be back tomorrow with part 2 of the interview, where Phil talks about the integration of business intelligence and service-orientated architecture, where the metadata layer in Oracle business intelligence is going, and how the front-end tools are likely to be developed over the next few years.

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