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Oracle Mobile App Warms Over Hot BI Suite

Oracle Mobile App Warms Over Hot BI Suite

The number-two player in business intelligence software upgrades products and applications after racking up significant sales gains in 2010.

Oracle announced on Tuesday upgrades to its business intelligence suite and analytic applications, with the highlight being a new mobile client for iPhone and iPad. The revisions weren’t extensive, but they follow on the heels of a significant BI revamp and big sales gains for Oracle in 2010.

The vendor did offer a couple of notable improvements to its core Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) suite with Tuesday’s 11.1.1.5 release, adding a revamped mobile-BI client for iPhone and iPad, and new data sources. Oracle also updated its lineup of prebuilt analytic applications and the Oracle Real-Time Decisions application. There’s more on those details below, but first, about that big sales gain.

Oracle’s last OBIEE release, the July 2010 step up to the 11g platform, was a significant upgrade. It unified acquired Hyperion assets with the rest of OBIEE through a new data modeling environment. This Common Enterprise Information Model provides a federated view across relational data sources, such as Oracle database, and OLAP sources, such as Hyperion Essbase. It also give users an OLAP-style view of information supporting data exploration, filtering and drill-down analysis.

The market has responded, giving Oracle the largest market-share gain of any of the top-five BI, analytics, and performance management vendors in 2010, according to Gartner figures released last month. The top rankings held steady from 2009, with SAP, Oracle, SAS, IBM, and Microsoft taking the first five spots, in that order.

SAP’s sales increased 16.8% to $2.41 billion. SAP has a significant market share lead, but Oracle grew faster, with a 21.9% increase to $1.64 billion. Oracle’s market share increased 1 point while SAP’s rose 0.6 points. Sales at SAS grew 4.7% to $1.38 billion and IBM’s grew 7.6% to $1.28 billion, but their market shares slipped 0.9 points and 0.6 points, respectively, to 13.2% and 11.6%. Microsoft had a 23.6% sales boost to $913 million, good enough for a 0.7% market share increase to 8.7%.

What drove Oracle’s growth? The appeal of consolidating BI investments with the Oracle database, Oracle applications, or both undoubtedly helped, but the 11g release clearly triggered a lot of upgrades. Will the latest 11g upgrade keep the momentum going? The headliner is the new mobile-BI client for iPhone and iPad, so perhaps growing demand for Apple’s fast-selling devices will help.

Oracle new mobile OBIEE client, which adds iPad support and replaces an earlier version released in 2008, is a hybrid app that starts with a native Apple iOS shell but then uses “good Web capabilities,” according to Paul Rodwick, vice president of business intelligence product management at Oracle. It’s not a full native application, like the third-party Roambi application, but nor is it just going into Web-delivered OBIEE screens through mobile browsers.

The app is developed on the Apple IOS and is downloaded from the app store, but it uses device-specific rendering to display BI content, so you don’t have to create separate mobile-only versions of reports and dashboards. Dashboards, for example, are automatically broken into columns when displaying on iPhones, so individual charts and graphs are displayed at full width and you can scroll vertically from dashboard element to element.

There is a per-user cost, through Oracle licensing, to use the mobile client, but the company didn’t disclose the fees. There’s also no word on when Oracle might deliver mobile apps for Android or BlackBerry devices.

New data sources certified for OBIEE include Oracle OLAP, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, and SAP BW — all OLAP sources — and the relational Oracle Times Ten in-memory database. It’s surprising that some of these weren’t covered in last year’s initial 11g release, but the expanded list takes even better advantage of OBIEE’s ability to tap into and explore data from both OLAP and relational sources.

Among the other upgrades announced Tuesday, the entire line of prebuilt Oracle BI Applications has been upgraded to take advantage of the 11g platform. Until this upgrade, most of these apps were built on OBIEE 10g. So ERP-oriented apps such as Oracle Financial Analytics, Human Resources Analytics and Procurement and Spend Analytics, or CRM-oriented apps such as Sales Analytics, Service Analytics, and Marketing Analytics, can now take advantage of the data modeling, access, and analysis advantages described above.

The upgraded BI apps also use the latest version of Informatica integration software for ETL, and they’re certified to run on the latest Teradata database as well as Oracle, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

The final upgrade Oracle announced Tuesday is release 3.1 of Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD), an application mostly used for inbound business-to-consumer marketing. The application delivers real-time decision support in up-selling and cross-selling scenarios. The key upgrade is a new Decision Manager business-user interface that helps marketing managers, Web-site managers and content developers upload different offers and creative materials into the app. RTD then automatically chooses the right offer based on predictive analytics focused on customer histories and real-time insight into things like site navigation and recent CRM interactions.

Oracle hasn’t done anything extraordinary with these latest releases of Oracle OBIEE, Oracle BI Applications, and RTD, but they may not need a hard sell. The BI, analytics, and performance management markets in general are coming off a good year in 2010; total software sales across these categories increased 13.4% to $10.5 billion, according to Gartner’s figures. Oracle was outpacing the pack, so a tweaks may be enough to keep the momentum going.

[Thanks: http://www.informationweek.com]

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