Before going with OBIEE, I didn't evaluate other options. While using OBIEE over the last 10 years, I've evaluated several but not beforehand. The clients that engaged me already had made the choice and did the installation, or I did the installation for them.

I tried learning Tableau and Power BI.

Many people are using Microsoft Power BI because they are competitive, and Oracle OBIEE is more expensive.

I'm aware of the other options in this market category. OBIEE is an enterprise solution whereas other products in this category are not robust enough at that level. There are other good products out there but they are not enterprise solutions. 

We evaluate solutions on a case by case basis based on the specific implementation as we implement BI solutions for different clients.

I was able to evaluate many other options before choosing Oracle OBIEE. When I was working for one of my clients in Africa, they wanted us to implement Microsoft BI in their environment for data visualizations. I felt bad about the Oracle OBIEE because Oracle never tried to market that product as a visualization tool, they always try to market it as an analytical tool, and people do not understand what Oracle OBIEE can do. In visualization, it can give the other contenders in the market a good fight, but Oracle never tried to market it in that way.

This is one of the biggest problems with Oracle. If Oracle would have marketed better then they would have had more customers. There are a lot of other clients people prefer, such as Tableau, ClickView, Qlik Sense, or Microsoft BI, because they want to see things in a graph, in a colorful way. The same can be achieved in Oracle OBIEE, but it was never marketed properly.

I'm a consultant and my only evaluation was on the database. I decided on Oracle because of the database and, during my career, their other tools are starting to come naturally.

We looked at IBM Cognos, QlikView, and Tableau. From an IT standpoint, we look at self-service BI, integration, and scalability. When it comes down to the senior, C-level executives, price is also another factor.

Tableau is a product which can be used for data discovery, but not for organizational analytical needs. That is the missing part.

Cognos is missing a lot of important features like self-service BI and many other dashboard capabilities.

I've seen other data analytics platforms like IBM's suite of products, SAP Business Objects, and Microsoft BI stack. All of them are good, but when it comes down to the collaboration of functionalities, on the business or IT side, OBIEE is the best for the organization. That's the reason we deployed Oracle Business Intelligence for our organization.

Since we use Oracle, we have implemented ERP and then Oracle ERP Procurement Cloud, which is a cloud software. We also have a cloud database, including OCI infrastructure.

We didn't evaluate other products. It is something standard.

We also considered Hyperion and there was also Teradata.

We had Oracle E-Business Suite, so we just stayed with the same product suite. It ended up becoming a good bet because right now everything is BI, and mobile and data analytics. Back then, I didn't expect it to be that, but I picked a good horse.

When I’m looking at a vendor such as Oracle, it is important that they're providing new tools all the time, and that they also are very stable; you know they're going to be around. You also feel like they have an integrated solution, so that OBIEE works with the Oracle database, and then you also have Oracle front ends that are also calling Oracle BI reports. It's an integrated solution.

We selected this because we got a good deal on OBI, Hyperion and other products as a package; that was one of the reasons we picked this. Of course, features-wise it checked out equally with other tools that we evaluated. Eventually, cost plays into it.

The features that we were looking for were data visualization; slice and dicing of data; analytics, if you will; mobility; ease of use; scalability, of course; and also, response time.

I don't recall evaluating other options.

We are always looking for the best features that are available. Already, Oracle has advanced technology, which is the reason that we have chosen OBIEE compared to other products.

I am sure the team has evaluated other products; and as a matter of fact, I am re-evaluating BI products as we speak, and OBIEE is one of the options on the table.

I have past experience with QlikView, Tableau and Sisense.

We are planning to move away from Oracle OBIEE, and to move to another tool that has in-memory data processing capabilities. Oracle doesn't provide that capability very easily, so we have performance challenges, etc. We are exploring Tableau and QlikView. They provide in-memory calculations and in-memory processing, which results in very fast throughput so that the data updates into the dashboard.

In terms of choosing a vendor, the most important criteria for me is the ability to create near real-time analysis, which OBIEE is lacking at the moment. Another is very good performance, which means it should have its own engine to process the data or even to do some small ETL operations on the data. In addition, it's the simplicity to develop and architect the solution.

The client was already an Oracle database user, so Oracle’s Business Intelligence product was the obvious first port of call when looking for a better reporting solution. I do not know how seriously they looked at other products.

Business Objects and SAS.

I did a demo with Domo, but those guys were right behind me for more than a year. We didn't have any plans with Tableau, but it may be a solution that we could eventually migrate to.

There's a lot of competition right now between a few giants, including Microsoft, Oracle,  Amazon Web Services, and SAP as well as Tableau.

We also looked at IBM and SAP. 

We didn't evaluate other options because we did a pilot program ten years ago and we already had the licenses and infrastructure in place for it.

Tableau is visualization, and OBIEE is not as visual. It's a visualization tool, but Tableau's got more bells and whistles, a more "wow" factor. OBIEE is more data driven. Also depending on the user's capability, it presents data in a way in which you can make your own reports.

When I first encountered OBIEE, I had no choice to use other options, because this platform was preferred at that company. That was five years ago and since that time, I have been using OBIEE and I can recommend using it to everyone.

On the other hand, if our customers would like to use an open-source BI platform, I can recommend using SpagoBI, for example.

We looked at third-party software, but we prefer to stick with Oracle. With Oracle, it’s easy to integrate with each of the suites and modules that we already had. We didn’t want the cost of integrating with third-party apps. This was an easy decision for us.

I also looked at Power BI and Cognos.

if your project involves a lot of cross-dimensional reporting, you will encounter some pain points along the way setting up the RPD but solutions are available online.

If you are looking for a quick visualization solution, then look for Tableau, but if you want a deep, proven reporting tool (with relatively weak visualization features), OBIEE is actually pretty good.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos, and MSBI.

I evaluated other solutions like Tableau, Cognos, MicroStrategy. They are more attractive visually, but in my opinion OBIEE has a stronger platform.

With Oracle, with the BI specifically, there are so many outside tools. There’s MicroStrategy and Tableau. The basic difference between Tableau and Oracle BI is the volume of the data BI can hold; Tableau can't hold as much data. That's the major difference. Also, the stability of the product is really good.

Compared to Tableau, I think it's mostly useful for more tabular reports where we are just exporting transactions and things like that. Typically, we will take that information and pull it into Excel to create a chart or graph, and then throw it into a presentation. It's good for that. It's good for getting the data dumps that you need, I mean, at least for us because it replaced our discovery tool.

No other options were evaluated.

SAP Business Object, IBM Cognos

We evaluated a couple of other products, such as SAP BusinessObjects, but they had limitations. We decided on this solution because it fits our business needs.

The customer wanted Valtix, an internet BI system, but couldn't afford it. We advised him to go with OBIEE and the X5-4. I'm also fully certified in BGIF, and part of my job in that deployment was to deploy BGIF was challenging because it's an arm of the government. Still, we finally got some of the data into BGIF that wasn't mission-critical for the government. The rest of the data sat inside OBIEE.

I have evaluated Tableau and Microsoft Power BI and they have better charts and graphical visualizations than Oracle OBIEE.

I can make a comparison with Business Objects and MicroStrategy. Even though these are excellent tools for business analysis, Oracle OBIEE has allowed the company to approach data analysis in a structured and shared way favoring the growth of analytical expertise across the entire company.

When I started with the company, we already had it.

The organization was already using this product when I got there, so we just maintained it.

We did evaluate other options such as Cognos, SAP BO. As all our database architecture is based on Oracle Based technologies such as Essbase, Hyperion etc, we went on to implement Oracle BI.

• Crystal Reports
• SQR Reports

I have worked on Microstrategy a lot and the Microsoft platform. I find that Microstrategy is advanced in the Mobile and Visual display and is easy to use, but Microsoft is also easy to use but still has a lot of things they need to improve on.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

No other options evaluated.

No other options were evaluated.

At the time that we made the decision to go with this product, there weren’t that many other players in this area. Over the past three years or so, there's been a surge of new players in the market. We've probably had OBIEE for about five years now. At the time, it was pretty new. There weren't a whole lot of options and OBIEE was probably the best tool around.

When I’m looking for a vendor such as Oracle, the most important criteria I consider are the partnership and the support. We've been an Oracle shop for a long time and I know that there are certain relationships that I've had with the account team. That's important. I think that, again, really working together and providing us information that will help us make the decisions towards new solutions, whether with Oracle or with Dell. Then, definitely, if we need help with escalations and so forth we can turn to them.

The other options we considered are: Tableau, Qlik Sense, and Splunk.

We had more than one quotation, then we chose the product based on a type of questionnaire with scoring. I think Oracle made the high score at that time (2010). It was between Oracle and Cognos at that time.

There are now tools like Tableau or Power BI that enable you to do BI analysis without any model in the background. You can just connect to the database, or any other unstructured data source and do whatever you like, probably with more fancy visualizations. Although I'm a technical person, these things are more important to our business people. 

Oracle is an Enterprise BI tool. You have to do the modeling based on that model, then you can do whatever you like. However, it's not easy. It's not so flexible to do BI reporting directly from the data source without models. It is not that agile.

• QlikView
• Tableau

We only evaluated Oracle at that time.

We're also using MicroStrategy.

No.

Actually, we have all sorts of Oracle applications in our stack. We use SQL.