First Oracle Business Intelligence 10g News Item Appears

Oracle seeks to broaden BI use with new offering : "Oracle Corp. is poised to make what a company executive calls a "big push" in the business intelligence market in an effort to get customers to take advantage of as much functionality as BI tools have to offer.

At next month’s Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, the company is expected to introduce a new, "comprehensive" product, Oracle Business
Intelligence. The product supports query processing and analysis, along with end-user customization, among other functions, says the executive, Ray
Roccaforte, vice president of server development.

The product is being introduced after Oracle studied the BI market over the past few years and concluded that customers want simplicity in their BI and
data warehousing functions, Roccaforte tells eADT. "When we talk to customers, [we find that] most are getting only a small part of the value they could be getting."

A customer generally garners the data he needs from a lot of applications, yielding separate views of data, and realizes that "we really should have one
central data warehouse," Roccaforte says. "When you add it all up, you get this very complicated picture."

Oracle Business Intelligence is currently bundled with Oracle Application Server but will now become a branded BI offering, Roccaforte says. But he adds that the company will continue to provide support to customers that use the bundled version.

The new product will support query reporting and analysis and end-user customization, Roccaforte says, and it will "greatly reduce" costs for the
customer and be easy to install."

The first official news items about Oracle Business Intelligence 10g (Discoverer "Drake", Excel Add-in, BI Beans) starts to come in. Expect them to
be launched at Open World next month, though whether "launch" actually means"downloadable" isn't certain yet.