Oracle OBIEE Review

• BI Dashboards
• BI Publisher

We previously used a stand-alone desktop-based business reporting tool which did not enable us to maintain a single source of truth, or provide users with pervasive intelligence. However, with this enterprise solution, we have less reliance on the MIS teams to produce reports. Management and operational teams have access to information as and when they need it, insights pop up on a daily basis, and the business has transformed into a knowledge-empowered operation, with decisions at all levels being made on facts rather than guess work.

• Tighter integration of BI Publisher with RPD/BI answers is essential
• Enhanced big data tools will be valuable for industries like ours
• Simplified analysis drill-down setups
• Running BIP report once in the interactive view should not require a rerun when the view is switched, for example, to HTML or Excel

I've been using OBIEE for eight years in total. It's been three years on v11g, and prior to that I had been using v10 since 2007.

No issues with deployment.

We have experienced bottlenecks due to an increased load causing users to fail to login, or too many stuck threads. Perhaps the linkage between BI and Weblogic needs to be optimized to improve stability.

No issues with or scalability.

Customer service in general, is responsive enough to keep you aware of the fact that someone is looking into your issue.

Technical Support is only good when issues are escalated to the development or third line support teams.

Other solutions have been explored before. My reasoning for recommending OBIEE for my organization was that apart from having previous experience working in older versions, and being aware of its scalability, was that most of the banks systems are Oracle based which meant seamless integration. We also wanted to explore deployment of the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Analytics Server which comes inbuilt with OBIEE.

It was straightforward because we had external assistance. However, due to the expertise we developed, we were able to build and test our backup server from scratch internally. We also restored the Exalytics system with ease after power issues caused the disks to crash.

Both sides need to be part of the team at each stage of deployment so that knowledge transfer is effective. The tendency for most vendors, however, is to avoid too much knowledge transfer for obvious reasons.

There is a need for a per CPU rather than per user license for OBIEE as this impacts the number of users that can be deployed, and therefore the level of security of data throughout the system.