BI Blogs

Oracle Preps Major BI Revamp This Summer : "Charles Phillips, president
of Oracle Corp, said the company is planning to roll out significant upgrades to
its business intelligence (BI) and online analytic processing (OLAP) tools later
this summer. In an SG Securities Webcast recently, Phillips told analysts to
expect "a major revamp of our product line coming out over the summer both for
BI tools and our OLAP engine."

This must be Oracle 10g Business Intelligence Phase 2 - due out around the
time of Open World (September 15th). Phase 2 comes with Reports and OWB "Paris",
though there’s been no particular news on any revamp to Discoverer, BI Beans or
the Excel Add-in.

"Improvements to the OLAP engine will focus on smoother enterprise-scale
deployments managed from a central administration point. "Customers seem to love
our OLAP engine but deploying it to multiple sites from a single administrator
wasn’t easy," Phillips said.

"We’re fixing that in this next release of the OLAP engine due later this
summer."

I suspect this is a reference to the support in OLAP 10g Release 2 for
transportable tablespaces. What this means is that you can create your AW in a
tablespace, then us the IMP utility to export the tablespace metadata, copy the
datafile and the metadata export to another server, then import the metadata
using IMP to register that tablespace with the new database. It could also be
referring to the ability to save XML templates for the AW model definition, and
the use these templates to reproduce the AW design in another database. The
thing about transportable tablespaces was why this wasn’t possible with
10.1.0.3A onwards - surely at this point all the AW metadata was contained
directly within the AW, not in the OLAPSYS schema, so why wasn’t this possible
with 10.1.0.3A onwards?

On the BI tools side, Oracle is completely revamping the user interface by
introducing more wizards and support for more multiple report types. Phillips
said that a product developed from its Applications division called XML
Publisher, which he expects to be available across all Oracle’s applications
soon, will deliver a flexible infrastructure for a range of enterprise reporting
needs.

"What [XML Publisher] does, it takes all of your reporting capabilities and puts
it in a single repository. You then hit a button and decide how you want to
substantiate that report — go to print, fax or website."

"Users can design the front-end report using Word and Excel and put it into the
repository which converts it to XML and makes it available to everyone," he
said.

"[Because] it’s all in a single XML repository it gives you a single
infrastructure for all reporting. In most companies those are all separate
products — whether production reporting and ad hoc query."

I wonder if this means that XML Publisher will become a standalone product,
with it’s own report designer IDE, and eventually become part of the Oracle BI
bundle? Where does this leave Oracle Reports?

Phillips added: "We do a lot more BI than people know because we don’t break it
out that way. [BI is] just another market for us related to the database."

Funny he should mention this. ""We do a lot more BI than people know
because we don’t break it out that way." - but they do. At least in terms of
tools and applications, BI 10g is a separate price list item, and their
treatment of OLAP and data warehousing technology is no different than
Microsoft’s. "[BI is] just another market for us related to the database."
- is this meant to be encouraging? I thought all Oracle’s moves recently
were aimed at trying to separate out the BI business, make it less like it’s
just another part of the RDBMS or application server technology stack. A strange
message.

"Technically there’s a lot happening over the summer. We have a lot of BI
products and we’ll be doing a better job of packaging it," Phillips said.
"You’ll be hearing us talking about that a lot more OpenWorld."

Certainly should be. OWB "Paris" coming out should be a pretty big event, and
if 10g OLAP Release 2 sorts out the performance issues around OLAP API queries
(so that Discoverer Plus OLAP runs at the sort of speed you’d expect it to) it
should create some clear product differentiation between Discoverer OLAP and
Discoverer Relational. I’ll be over at Open World next month, so I’ll report
back at the time on the various BI product launches.

Oracle Preps Major BI Revamp This Summer : "Charles Phillips, president
of Oracle Corp, said the company is planning to roll out significant upgrades to
its business intelligence (BI) and online analytic processing (OLAP) tools later
this summer. In an SG Securities Webcast recently, Phillips told analysts to
expect "a major revamp of our product line coming out over the summer both for
BI tools and our OLAP engine."

"Technically there’s a lot happening over the summer. We have a lot of BI
products and we’ll be doing a better job of packaging it," Phillips said.
"You’ll be hearing us talking about that a lot more OpenWorld."

IBM and Hyperion Part Ways Maybe : "On July 21, I got a surprising email
from Stephanie Clark - IBM’s Analyst Relations person. In it, she states that
IBM and Hyperion are ending their OEM agreement and each company will go its
merry way. Read on — it gets even stranger.

Bottom line from the email? IBM will no longer offer new sales of DB2 OLAP
Server (IBM’s version of Hyperion’s Essbase) to its customers. Current DB2 OLAP
Server customers have the opportunity to migrate to Hyperion’s version of
Essbase as of July 21st."

Interesting blog article from Claudia Imhoff, and it looks like
IBM’s recent aquisition of
Alphablox means that their OEM relationship with Hyperion is on the way out.
IBM had a reseller agreement with Hyperion to distribute Essbase, and part of
the arrangement was that IBM got to sell a version of Essbase that stored it’s
data in a DB2 star schema rather than an Essbase multdimensional database. I
guess that just like Oracle OLAP, and Microsoft Analysis Services, although the
ROLAP option is there nobody actually uses it in reality, so I can’t imagine too
many customers will be disadvantaged, and most that did use it will probably
have migrated to multidimensional Essbase or products such as Analysis Services
some time ago.

UPDATE : Nigel Pendse dropped me a line to point out that IBM
abandoned the old ROLAP version of Essbase some years ago. What they’ve been
reselling recently is just a rebadged version of the multidimensional version of
Essbase, which in fact worked just as well running against an Oracle or SQL
Server database. Nigel’s opinion is actually that the Essbase move isn’t much to
do with IBM’s aquisition of Alphablox; in fact it’s more to do with their
current focus on their Cube Views product, which in his opinion is more likely
to be IBM’s future OLAP direction.

AMIS is participating in the Oracle Warehouse Builder Paris Release Beta program. Unfortunately I have not had too much time for in depth involvement myself. However, from what I have done and seen, from the work my colleagues were doing as well, I am pretty - t0 use an Americanism …

In these last busy two months I’ve seen many things that deserves to blog, but until now I hadn’t time to do it. But today I have 5 minutes to talk about the current BizTalk 2004 integration with Analysis Services 2000: this time I have some critics to do.

There is a database with two cubes (MessageMetrics and ServiceMetrics) and I don’t know if it really give to a user what he really needs, but for sure this cube doesn’t follow the actual best practices, but instead it follows what I would call “worst practices”. Let’s see:

• All dimension are private
• Possible “shared” dimension are private, so there is no easy way to have a virtual cube to relate measures from different cubes
• It seems there are no designed aggregations
• The missing of shared dimensions causes the inability to optimize the cube process

should be considered only as a “demo of possible integration” or if it is sold as an example of products integration. In both cases it fails the target, because I sincerely can’t see the added value of a such poor designed olap cube. It doesn’t scale. It requires “another service” (Analysis Services) only to give you what is available with SQL aggregation (if you have a lot of data, cube design is really bad) but with an added latency (the cube needs to be processed).

 I just checked here: it has to be considered as a BizTalk feature. I’m curious to see BizTalk 2006 advances here.

Uhm… someone has some fact to convince me that I’m wrong?

IBM and Hyperion Part Ways Maybe : "On July 21, I got a surprising email
from Stephanie Clark - IBM’s Analyst Relations person. In it, she states that
IBM and Hyperion are ending their OEM agreement and each company will go its
merry way. Read on — it gets even stranger.

Bottom line from the email? IBM will no longer offer new sales of DB2 OLAP
Server (IBM’s version of Hyperion’s Essbase) to its customers. Current DB2 OLAP
Server customers have the opportunity to migrate to Hyperion’s version of
Essbase as of July 21st."

Interesting blog article from Claudia Imhoff, and it looks like
IBM’s recent aquisition of
Alphablox means that their OEM relationship with Hyperion is on the way out.
IBM had a reseller agreement with Hyperion to distribute Essbase, and part of
the arrangement was that IBM got to sell a version of Essbase that stored it’s
data in a DB2 star schema rather than an Essbase multdimensional database. I
guess that just like Oracle OLAP, and Microsoft Analysis Services, although the
ROLAP option is there nobody actually uses it in reality, so I can’t imagine too
many customers will be disadvantaged, and most that did use it will probably
have migrated to multidimensional Essbase or products such as Analysis Services
some time ago.

Cognos Version 8 and Cognos Office Connection highlighted at Cognos Forum 2005.

Initial vision combines adjacent products as starting point.

September BI suite release tightens integration and unifies UI.

Acquisition targets SAP’s 12,000 manufacturing customers.

Applix is a global provider of Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management solutions. Applix is a founder of the BPM Standards Group (www.bpmstandardsgroup.org), and has been recognized by numerous industry analyst groups for its technical leadership and vision in the marketplace.More than 1,900 customers worldwide use TM1 for tight integration with Excel, real-time response, adaptability, and low total cost of ownership. Delivered by Applix and by a global network of partners, TM1-based solutions help customers manage their business performance and respond to the marketplace in real time. Headquartered in Westborough, MA, Applix maintains offices in four countries in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim. For more information about Applix, please visit www.applix.com.

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A year ago I was hunting for some open source Content Management / Portal software. I looked at things like drupal, nuke and scoop, but found that there were nearly a hundred out there. I used CMS Matrix to narrow my list to something manageable. This sit

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Acquisition could be a winner for all involved