Oracle Announce Future Fusion BI Strategy

Well, Oracle have finally announced what their future BI strategy is going to be, and it looks pretty exciting. It's been a fairly open secret that Siebel Analytics was going to be the centrepiece of Oracle's Fusion BI Strategy going forward, but there's been various rumours going around about exactly how that might happen, going from OracleBI Discoverer being put into maintenance mode and eventually desupported to Enterprise Planning and Budgeting and Daily Business Intelligence being dropped in favour of Siebel's CPM solution. Now that the news is out the truth is as usual somewhere in between, and it's actually very positive both in terms of the new products that Oracle will be offering, which are a generation or two beyond what Oracle are currently offering, and the existing line-up, which will be maintained, enhanced over time, and also integrated into the next-generation line-up of products. Note that all of this is first impressions, not the official views of Oracle or the company I work for, and no doubt a lot more of it will become clear over the next few months.

To start off with, the big news sources are the following:

• Webcast by Thomas Kurian on the specifics about Oracle's future BI platform and analytics tools (63 minutes)
• Webcast by Steve Miranda on how these technologies will be deployed in the various Oracle ERP applications (48 minutes)
• Oracle.com page on Oracle Business Intelligence Solutions, outlines Oracle's three BI areas - packaged BI apps, the new BI Suites and Oracle DW
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suites homepage
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, the edition derived from Siebel Analytics
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition, what we now refer to as Oracle Business Intelligence 10g
• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition components
• "Next Oracle Fusion Milestone: An Enterprise-Wide, Hot-Pluggable BI Infrastructure that Combines Leadership in Applications, Databases and Middleware" press release

All of this has been made available following Oracle's Business Intelligence Strategy Briefing, in New York yesterday (March 22nd 2006). As most of you will be aware, Oracle have been on a buying spree over the last couple of years, and are integrating the technologies they've acquired from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and now Siebel with their existing E-Business Suite technologies into something they're calling Project Fusion. Up until now, there's been little specific about business intelligence in Project Fusion, but with the purchase of Siebel at the start of 2006, Oracle suddenly had a best of breed BI platform called Siebel Analytics (see this earlier posting) that they could build their Fusion BI platform on. Pretty much for the last couple of months rumours have been circulating that Siebel Analytics would form the centrepiece of Fusion BI and this briefing was where they announced it. So what does it all mean in practice?

The big bit of product news is that going forward, there will be three product editions for Oracle Business Intelligence. "Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition" will be based on the Siebel Analytics product set that Oracle acquired as part of the Siebel purchase, and which Siebel themselves acquired from a company they bought called nQuire. "Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition" is the new name for what is current Oracle Business Intelligence 10g", whilst "Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One" will be a cut-down version of the Enterprise Edition for small to medium-sized businesses.

On to the new Enterprise Edition first though. As my article from January explained, Siebel Analytics is based around a product called Siebel Analytic Server and Oracle have now re-branded this as Oracle Analytic Server. This product edition comes with a set of analytic products that Siebel sold as "Siebel Analytics" and which, whilst delivered as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware (more on this in a moment) is database agnostic and works against both Oracle and non-Oracle datasources. The products within this suite are:

• Oracle Analytic Server
• Oracle Query and Analysis
• Oracle Dashboards
• Oracle Reporting & Publishing
• Oracle Sense & Respond
• Oracle Offline Analytics
• Oracle MSFT Office Add-in
• Oracle Server Administration

From sitting through the presentation and reading elsewhere, Oracle Analytic Server is a standalone analytic engine that brings in metadata from Oracle, non-Oracle, SAP BW, MDX-compatible and other data sources, makes the data available to the analytic applications, and fires through queries to the underlying data sources as SQL, MDX and so on. There's an offiline edition that allows people to take their applications on a laptop and do analysis remotely (something that's been missing with Oracle's current lineup of products) and a tool called Oracle Answers (which I think is the "Oracle Query and Analysis" mentioned in the list) which appears to be the ad-hoc query element of the lineup. Apart from the analytic server though, the real jewel in the product line-up is Oracle Dashboards, an Ajax / DHTML application that is differentiated from Discoverer and Portal in that it's Ajax (therefore behaves more like a desktop app than an HTML page), is multi-framed, and you can perform analysis within the dashboard - with Portal all you can do is launch out into Discoverer, you can't manipulate reports within the dashboard page. Here's a screenshot from Siebel Analytics:

Thomas Kurian's presentation then went on to talk about the architecture of the Enterprise Edition, which I can only assume at this point is ported "as is" from Siebel Analytics, and he went on to talk about some of the features of the product suite, which includes an "Enterprise Semantic Model", a layer of abstraction above the actual data that describes it in terms of dimensions, hierarchies, measures and so on - much as you get with the logical dimensional model currently provided with Oracle OLAP, and something that Microsoft are also attempting with their Unified Dimensional Model.

The platform also feature something called the "Enterprise Service Bus", a real-time messaging-based alternative to traditional ETL that moves data as it's needed into the analytic engine; an open report format editor, predictive analytics, and intelligent "bots" that give you something he referred to as "information magnetism" - key information finds you, you don't need to go and hunt it out. Anyway, if you get a chance, sit through the presentation, there's tons of details about what's in the Enterprise Edition, the only difficult bit is working out what products are from Siebel (I assume most of them) and what are Oracle's own ones - Kurian refers to all the products as Oracle ones and makes references to customers that must surely have been Siebel Analytics ones. There is mention of a few Oracle products though - the BPEL engine, Oracle Balanced Scorecard (which becomes part of a larger framework and gets it data from Oracle Analytics Server).

Now while most of the presentation was about this new Enterprise Edition, there was also talk about a "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition", which as I mentioned earlier is what we currently refer to as Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, with OracleBI Discoverer, Reports, Warehouse Builder, BI Beans and the Spreadsheet Add-in, and "Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One", which is actually a cut down version of Enterprise Edition with just the analytics engine, Oracle Warehouse Builder (which isn't part of the Enterprise Edition, but is part of the Standard Edition), Query & Analysis (aka "Oracle Answers"), Dashboards, Oracle Standard Edition One database and Server Administration. So what's the upgrade path then between these various versions, and where we are now?

To answer this question, it's worth looking at a couple of Kurian's slides that were very interesting. The first one was on the product packaging going on from today, which listed out the products per edition as I've mentioned earlier:

The second was on the product roadmap going on from here:

Of course this is where it gets quite interesting. Both the current version of Oracle Business Intelligence, and the new suite based on Siebel Analytics, will be available as from now. By the summer of 2006, the next release of Application Server (10.1.3.3) will be available, and it will include the new Oracle BI Publisher (I assume this is XML Publisher 5.x Enterprise, as I've been previewing earlier this month) and migration tools to migrate Oracle Reports RDFs to BI Publisher. This version is also where Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 "Paris" will be released.

At the end of Calendar Year 2006, Application Server 10.1.3.4 will be available, which features "Discoverer unification with Oracle Analytic Server" and a "New Analytics Solution". This bit seemed fairly key and so I made a note of Thomas Kurian's words around Discoverer's future:

"10.1.3.4 integrates the analytic capability that Discoverer had with the analytic engine from Siebel ... Discoverer had a lot of sophistication in how it did both relational analysis and OLAP analysis with the oracle database. We're [going to] make Discoverer basically a pluggable data source under the analytic server so that your Discoverer End User Layer as well as your underlying analytics, the things that you did against analytic workspaces can be seamlessly migrated forward to this unified platform."

So what does this mean for Oracle Discoverer and the OLAP Option? Well, reading between the lines and trying to interpret what he's saying, firstly all of the existing Business Intelligence 10g line-up will be available as now but packaged as the BI Suite Standard Edition. Kurian made a point that there's still a key, relevant role for in-database analytics and this is where the OLAP Option, analytic SQL and the Data Mining Option will be used. For customers wishing to add business intelligence to their Oracle database, the Standard Edition is the correct product suite. With the Enterprise Edition though, the suite derived from Siebel Analytics, it seems that Oracle OLAP can be a data source for Oracle Analytic Server (via an SQL OLAP_TABLE command), as can Microsoft Analysis Services, SAP BW and any other RDBMS or MDX-compatible datasource. Discoverer, depending on whether you go on the table above or what Kurian then said, will either be a data source (presumably this is a Discoverer EUL, not Discoverer Plus or the server element of Discoverer) or query tool that can also now report against data in the Analytic Server. If it's the latter, and it can now report against both relational, Oracle OLAP and now Oracle Analytic Server data, then it'll be a pretty powerful tool. If it's the former (a data source) then what they're talking about is providing a migration path to Oracle Analytic Server and Oracle Query & Reporting / "Oracle Answers". In reality it's probably a bit of both but we'll have to wait and find out what the specifics are. Beyond this 10.1.3.4 release is the first 11g release of Application Server, which I guess is where the next generation products will start to appear, rather than re-badged Siebel ones with a degree of Oracle tools and database integration.

In terms of futures for Oracle OLAP, the announcement means that there will currently be two analytic engines with a degree of overlap but where each has its advantages depending on your needs, and time will tell whether the features and benefits of both will converge into a single engine. My take is that Oracle OLAP is more probably powerful than the Siebel engine for doing multi-dimensional OLAP analysis, doing multi-dimensional programming and doing high-end OLAP things like forecasting and statistical analysis, and don't of course forget that Oracle OLAP is integrated with the database, with a single security model, SQL access, multi-dimensional datatypes and all the other things that made Oracle OLAP (and Express Server before that) a more functional and performant engine than MS Analysis Services and Hyperion Essbase. What Oracle Analytic Server will bring to the party though is integration with other MDX OLAP engines like MS AS and SAP BW, real-time data integration, alerting and other features that you don't currently get with Oracle OLAP, plus it works with all the Siebel Analytics prebuilt vertical applications.

So, some very exciting and interesting times are ahead of us. In my view this is even more important than when Oracle bought IRI back in the mid-90's and integrated an OLAP server into their product line-up, and more important than when Oracle made Discoverer a Web-based tool or when they launched Oracle Business Intelligence 10g. One good thing is that the products are available now, and are very respected in the market, so we're not talking about vapourware or also something that's going to make the current product line-up redundant - it's add-on, additional functionality that extends what's already possible with Oracle's BI tools. The news around Discoverer is particularly encouraging, with a migration path to Oracle Analytics and support for Discoverer as an Oracle Analytics Server ad-hoc query tool. Oracle Portal seems also to be part of the future product line-up (the demo during the presentation used Portal as the integration point for all the query tools) and there's a definite continuing role for the OLAP Option as an in-database OLAP engine for customers using the Standard Edition to do their analytics - remember not all customers will want to use the full next-generation suite of products and will want to continue using Discoverer, Reports, Oracle OLAP and so on to provide their business intelligence.

Going into the future, keep an eye on this site and also the one for the company I work for, SolStonePlus, as we're going to be at the forefront of both making the most of what is now Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition, and spearheading the move into the adoption of Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Enterprise Edition. In particular, once we've had a chance to evaluate the technology, we're going to run a series of workshops and seminars on adopting this new technology, so watch this space for more news over the next few months. Until then, if anyone has any more news or feedback, add a comment or let me know via email.