Oracle BI platform on the comeback trail
The Oracle BI platform remains a relevant, vibrant suite of analytics products after all these years.
Oracle is one of the legacy business intelligence vendors — one of the companies that began producing tools for data analysis long before terms like augmented intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing were born. But while many of its long-ago competitors have disappeared and some that remain struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation, the Oracle BI platform is going strong.
“They’ve generally been followers, but they’re keeping up,” said Rick Sherman, founder and managing partner of Athena IT Solutions. “They’ve done an extremely good job.”
That’s not to say there weren’t hard times. In fact, just a few years ago Oracle BI software seemed out of date.
The company was in danger of becoming one of the legacy vendors that time passed by.
The vendor reacted. It met with customers and heard their complaints. It invested in innovation to include more AI and machine learning. It simplified its product suite. And it changed its management team to help take the Oracle BI platform forward.
“They had a leading traditional semantic-based platform, but when the industry transitioned to user-based visualizations, Oracle didn’t respond quickly,” said Rita Sallam, data and analytics analyst at Gartner. “Over the last three to four years, they’ve invested heavily in new capabilities … and their new products are well-positioned to compete with the rest of the market.”
From 18 BI products to three The Oracle BI platform, operating in the umbrella name Oracle Analytics, currently consists of Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) and Oracle Analytics for Applications. OAC is a platform delivered as a cloud service; OAS is an option that can be deployed on premises or through a third-party cloud vendor and allows users the option of migrating to Oracle’s cloud at their own pace; and Oracle Analytics for Applications is aimed at SaaS users. “They’ve done a nice job of weaving augmented analytics capabilities into OAC, with its natural language generation and natural language query and interaction options being particularly strong,” said Doug Henschen, principal analyst at Constellation Research. He added, however, that it remains to be seen just how actively Oracle will facilitate multi-cloud deployment and the extent to which AI capabilities will be featured in OAS. Before being pared down to three products, the Oracle BI platform consisted of a mind-boggling 18.
