BI Scorecard Blog

Exalytics: Oracle’s Must-Have System for BI

Last week at Oracle Open World, much of the mainstage headlines were about cloud, but in the BI space, it was about Exalytics, Oracle’s in-memory engineered system for BI.

Released in February, Exalytics is Oracle’s latest engineered system that leverages the TimesTen in-memory database to provide fast BI. Both the meta data for Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) can be cached in-memory as well as data from the data warehouse and Essbase cubes. For example, customer Sodex cited 10 times faster performance on Essbase cubes running on Exalytics and scaling to 10,000 users. Exalytics integrates with Exadata via a superfast Infiniband connection to allow loads from the data warehouse into the in-memory BI system. The Exalytics Summary Advisor gathers usage statistics on queries to recommend which data should be loaded into memory versus left on disk.

Oracle touts Exadata as the ideal solution for high performance data warehouse, so why would anyone need Exalytics, unless data is in different places or a slow-performing data warehouse? Exalytics customer Thomson Reuters noted that Exalytics has allowed them to have an interactive dashboard on a 10 billion row data set, something not possible on such large data sets before. Exalytics provides performance at the application level by caching OBI EE metadata, while Exadata provides performance at the data level. The Swedish shoe retailer NilsonGroup meanwhile cited easier deployment of OBI EE on optimized hardware, without the need to patch software as they previously had to on commodity hardware.

But it begs the question: should customers have to buy an engineered system to ensure a smooth deployment? One integrator described the software quality in OBI EE 11g as impacting project timelines by months and the security integration with WebLogic as a “train wreck.” As OBI EE (acquired from Siebel in 2005 as Siebel Analytics) has been more integrated with the rest of the Oracle product stack, Oracle has become increasingly dependent on its own middleware, taking a less agnostic approach than other BI vendors. It is also a point of contrast with SAP’s Hana, that has both third-party BI support and multiple hardware vendors. An SAP and Oracle partner who has tested both SAP’s Hana and the Oracle Exadata plus Exalytics combination described Hana as “revolutionary and 1000 times better” but said Exalytics has been only “evolutionary and 10 times better.” With such conflicting views from public customer references verus in-the trenches comments, it is too early in the Exalytics’ product life to say how much customers are sacrificing openness for performance and ease.

The other piece to Exalytics is the 11.1.1.6 release of OBI EE, also released in February, that includes greater dashboard interactivity and improved visualizations. At first glance, the finished charts look as powerful as those in competitive products such as Tableau and TIBCO Spotfire. However, the design interface is less intuitive and there’s a whole lot more complexity to develop dashboards than in those pure-play products. Flexibility and simplicity to develop are challenges not-yet-solved in the Oracle product line.

In addition to OBI EE and Essbase, Endeca Information Discovery also runs on the Exalytics system. Oracle acquired Endeca at the end of 2011 both for its e-commerce technology but also for its navigation of unstructured content, such as warranty claims and twitter streams. The Endeca MDEX engine uses a combination of in-memory and columnar data storage. While Endeca Information Discovery can be deployed on commodity hardware, one system integrator again cited easier deployment on Exalytics. Endeca has a very nice faceted search (think combination Google and any web retailer) interface. While it was encouraging to see this once niche product main staged by Larry Ellison, (Tweets about the olympics) it was frustrating that the product was not available in the BI demo pods. I got a tweet after leaving Open World that it was being showcased in a different building, not near the rest of the BI capabilities.

The bottom line, if you are using OBI EE and hoping for high user or data scale, Oracle is planning on Exalytics as being part of that deployment. The Exalytics sytem is configured for 1 TB Ram, 40 cores, with $170,000 list price.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Oracle Showcases Data Discovery, Commits to Public Cloud

Last week, Oracle showcased recent and upcoming products at its annual analyst conference in San Francisco.

In the BI space, the biggest announcements were around Exalytics, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, analytic apps, and a commitment to public cloud. Exalytics, announced at World in October, became generally available in February. Exalytics is a combination appliance and in-memory solution. The in-memory engine relies on technology from TimesTen, an in-memory, columnar database that Oracle acquired in 2005 used more in transaction processing. Exalytics can store both Essbase cubes and models from OBI EE in memory, boosting performance for both planning applications and existing BI apps. Oracle claims an 18x performance boost to existing BI and planning apps. An in-memory summary advisor recommends which data should best be stored in-memory based on usage statistics. I am still waiting to test drive the new release and appliance, but the in-memory summary advisor seems to be a unique differentiator, particularly if it is self optimizing. The integration with Exadata via a fast InfiniBand connection for direct access to the larger data warehouse is another differentiator, but I’d like to see how seamlessly the data moves from Exadata to Exalytics.

Exalytics was initially touted as both an in-memory and visual discovery solution. To be sure, there are some new visual discovery capabilities in the latest release of OBI EE when deployed with Exalytics, but in addition, Oracle now has Endeca Information Discovery in its portfolio. Oracle acquired Endeca in October 2011, primarily for its MDEX engine. Endeca is most widely known for its e-commerce capabilities and the faceted search to such e-tailers as ebags. Endeca brings the simplicity of search to BI, a capability not widely adopted but possible with competitive solutions such as QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and Information Builders Magnify. Where the MDEX engine is most different is its combination in-memory and columnar storage to support analysis of both structured content as well as textual, semi-structured content stored in comments, documents, and social media. Oracle’s plans for integrating Endeca with OBI EE were shared under non disclosure.

The BI analytic applications has been one of Oracle’s Trojan horses for selling OBI EE into Oracle E-business Suite, J.D. Edwards, and the PeopleSoft customer base. The analytic applications are expansive, bringing ETL, data models, dashboards and reports, and best practices to a number of functional areas and industries. The biggest competition here is in the build-it-yourself approach or for EBS customers, Noetix Analytics (acquired from Jaros in 2009). Oracle has continued to improve its depth of coverage in the analytic applications, most recently adding Asset Management and Manufacturing Process, as well as support for SAP data sources.

Executive Vice President Thomas Kurian shared details of Oracle’s plans for public cloud. The only thing I can share at this point is that the public cloud solution will be available this summer, but what’s in and out is also under NDA.  So stay tuned!

The highpoint of the event was the customer panel, which unfortunately was also under non disclosure. This panel was one of the best I have heard in my ten years as an analyst, in part because they delivered their criticism of Oracle with humor … and that they were critical at all. However, it was their constructive criticism that made the kudos all the more believable. As one OBI EE customer who had also deployed Endeca said, “Oracle bought an amazing technology (Endeca). I’m not sure they yet realize how good it is.”

A key theme of the event and a rallying cry for Oracle’s strategy is to simplify the IT experience to power extreme innovation. I “get” the rallying cry:  IT can’t keep pace with business demand with difficult-to-integrate and -deploy technology, but rarely has the goal of “helping IT” been inspirational to the business.

I suspect part of this shift in emphasis is related to Oracle’s 2010 acquisition of Sun Systems, and that hardware now accounts for almost 20% of its $35 billion in annual revenues. Not surprising then, a fair bit of the keynotes were devoted to talking bits and bytes of its engineered systems. There was a time in my career when I was happy to assemble servers, but as a BI expert today, I felt somewhat like the car buyer who simply wants to drive that sleek car, not dissect the engine. While servers and hardware has not been a high-growth industry of late, the difference is that Oracle’s focus is on systems that power business analytics, for which most market watchers cite double-digit growth. To that point, Oracle show cased customer after customer success story for Exadata. As one customer said, “we read all the glossy brochures (on Exadata). The product has lived up to the hype.”

 Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

Oracle Buys Endeca: What Does It Mean for BI

Last week, Oracle announced its intent to buy privately held Endeca. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Financial details were not disclosed.

Endeca was founded in 1999 and is most known for its e-commerce business, providing faceted search to many storefronts.  Shopping for shirts? Enter “shirts” and get a list of possibilities that can be refined by brand, color, gender and so on. Faceted search provides the navigation and filtering; general search relies on simple key word matching, or in some cases, synonym translation.  Most of the company’s 600 customers and $100 million in revenues come from this side of the business.

However, we recently added Endeca to our “Noteworthy Vendors” in the BI Scorecard Strategic and Product Summary report for its extension into BI with the launch of the Latitude product in 2010. Latitude combines faceted search capabilities with dashboard delivery to bring both traditional data warehouse content together with textual or unstructured content. Indexes to multiple data sources are created in its own columnar database, the MDEX engine. Endeca Latitude is sometimes evaluated along with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and QlikView because of their search paradigms, but it is unique in its ability to handle textual data. As an example, in the accompanying screen shot, a warranty dashboard provides an overview of claims for various car types. Analysis of textual data allows a wordle graphic to show that the majority of claims involve a “warning light.” Via the left pane, a user could search for data with those key words, or could use the faceted search to filter data by odometer reading, part number, or supplier.

In talking about the acquisition, Oracle VP Thomas Kurian said, “We see Endeca MDEX as a fantastic engine helping us in every segment we are in.”   Oracle expects Endeca to be a key part of its big data strategy, integrated with Oracle’s e-commerce applicaations, and integrated with OBI EE. Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca said “We will bring Endeca DNA into the Oracle organization. How far we can take it is only limited by our imagination.”

When I asked Kurian to comment on the potential overlap with Endeca given Latitude has its own front end, he presented three approaches that Oracle will support.

1. OBI EE with Answers as the front-end will support the MDEX engine as a data source.
2. A line of business could implement Latitude as an agile BI solution. This clearly has become a widening hole in Oracle’s BI approach as OBI EE has only gotten harder to implement with dependences on Oracle Fusion middleware and all data needs to be well-modeled up front.
3. The user interface could be built in Latitude and embedded in an OBI EE Answers report or dashboard. It’s this last use case that I think could converge overtime. While Oracle added some search capabilities in 11g last year (based on Oracle Enterprise Search), it is only on indexed keywords and is a separate installation. There is no faceted navigation that would be a good enhancement to OBI EE.

Kurian says the integration and assimiliation of Endeca would be a matter of months. That sounds overly optimistic, in my opinion, at least for the first and third use cases. But I am hoping Oracle will prove me wrong.

Purely coincidentally, you can learn more about Endeca and see it in action at my TDWI Cool BI course, November 1^st in Orlando, FL.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, www.biscorecard.com

 

Oracle Announces Exalytics for In-Memory, Visual BI

At Oracle Open World this week, Oracle announced Exalytics, a new appliance that further boosts this vendor’s BI capabilities. The product is currently in beta and is expected to be generally available by the end of the year.

Exalytics is a combination hardware, software solution that brings in-memory and visual discovery into the OBI EE 11g product line. It is the latest addition to Oracle’s expanding engineered systems that includes Exadata for transaction processing and data warehouse and Exalogic for the middle tier application server. In previous blogs and product reviews, I’ve been critical of Oracle’s lack of innovation and lackluster commitment to in-memory. The Exalytics solution addresses both criticisms.

Oracle acquired TimesTen in 2005, an in-memory database used predominantly for transaction processing. Support for TimesTen as a data source was added to OBI EE 11g last August 2010, but Oracle gave the impression it was more check-mark to having in-memory for BI, not a deeper integration. Oracle argued that in-memory is not the only way to boost performance. There’s Exadata (for example)! It is true that for speed-of-thought analysis, there are multiple ways to achieve performance, and in-memory is just one approach. However, it’s an important one, both more flexible than say indexes and cheaper than SSD; with SAP releasing HANA (an in-memory appliance) and the rapid growth of vendors such as QlikTech and Tableau, Oracle has been lagging in this area.

With the Exalytics appliance, TimesTen has been enhanced for columnar compression, additional analytic functions such as WHEN, RANK, and tuned for analytic queries such as subqueries. There is a new adaptive in-memory cache and summary advisory to determine what should go in memory and what is better left on disk. An administrator can override the advisor’s selections. Both the business meta data layer from OBI EE as well as selected data sets are loaded into memory. Similar to HANA but in stark contrast to QlikTech, Exalytics can be queried with straight SQL. Another differentiator to Exalytics is that Essbase has also been optimized for in-memory, allowing for better performance in planning and forecasting applications. From a hardware point of view, the appliance has 1 TB of DRAM, running on four Intel Xeon E7-4800 processors.

In Oracle’s own testing, the vendor has cited 20 times faster performance than current OBI EE implementations. One beta customer cited 100 times better performance in some drill paths. One of the vendor’s smartest moves is ensuring that Exalytics complements rather than competes with Exadata. The Exalytics system plugs into Exadata via two InfiniBand ports. This approach also addresses customers concerns of what to do when all the data doesn’t fit into memory.

In addition to in-memory, the upcoming release includes visual discovery capabilities. Previously, Oracle OEM’d Tableau, an agreement established by Hyperion prior to that acquisition. The agreement was discontinued earlier this year.  Exalytics includes things like micro charts and trellis charts (also known as small multiples). There is a new “Presentation Suggestion Engine” that will also recommend a visualization based on the data, no doubt an idea taken from Tableau’s “Show Me” feature. All of this is a vast improvement for current customers and for the Oracle’s BI positioning.

However, based on an early demo of the controlled beta, I don’t think it’s a slam dunk to beat more nimble competitors. Slow them, perhaps. Beat them, I’m not convinced. The rise of visual discovery tools has as much to do with the visual appeal and rapid time to insight of the products as with their ease of deployment. While Exalytics may solve some issues with ease of deployment and performance tuning, the enterprise architecture of OBI EE and its dependence on Fusion middleware components makes it less attractive to lines of business and SMBs. As well, there are some things that competitive products do better, for example in Tableau and Tibco Spotfire, it’s the powerful auto filters and data brushing that Exalytics does not appear to address. In QlikTech, the set analysis and faceted search are better. (For more details and comparisons on how visual discovery vendors compare, refer to the recently updated BI Scorecard Product and Vendor Summary here.)

Further, it seems that the new visualization capabilities are tied to the Exalytics appliance. This can be a tough sell for customers who have already invested in OBI EE software and were not otherwise planning hardware expenses. While I understand that the interactive, visual experience would be less powerful if the environment were slow, I’d like to see Oracle offer some of the software improvements as part of the standard OBI EE upgrade. MicroStrategy, for example, recently released Visual Insight as part of its Report Service license, a module most customers have already invested in.

Beyond these criticisms, that Oracle is releasing a major new appliance, with powerful visual and in-memory capabilities only one year after OBI EE 11g was released, seems to show that Oracle is serious about in-memory and more capable of delivering BI innovation. I look forward to putting the new product to the test, and to hearing more about pricing and packaging.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard 

Oracle BI EE 11g – Worth the Wait

After three years of waiting with bated breath (well, nobody holds their breath that long!), Oracle is launching Oracle BI EE 11g this week. The product is due to ship in a few weeks.

In case you haven’t been tracking Oracle’s BI strategy over the past few years, their strategic BI product is now largely based on capabilities from the Siebel acquisition back in 2005. Oracle Discoverer, Reports, and Hyperion Interactive Reporting (Brio) are still supported but not strategic. Essbase is still considered the premier OLAP option, although OBI EE has robust ROLAP capabilities.

Where the previous release fell short was in usability, interface appeal, and integration with Essbase. OBI EE 11g is a big improvement with capabilities that go far beyond improving core BI. For example, the new scorecard module seems one of the most robust, intuitive, and certainly most integrated on the market to date. (See a screen shot of the new start page right).   

Another new capability I’d like to highlight is their Actionable Intelligence. Within the pre-built analytic applications, Oracle had the concept of guided analysis in version 10. For example, if a call center representative is looking at a list of orders and pending payments by customer and sees that payments are increasingly late, the main report could link to related content to show the volumes, amounts, correspondence and so on. What’s new in 11g is that a decision-maker can be guided not only to other content, but also, can invoke a process. In this case, issuing a credit hold or sending a late payment notice could be actions to invoke. The actual web service or script to invoke is defined outside of the BI Server and then registered as potential actions. Once registered as actions, they can be embedded within a dashboard, report, or alert notification. The process of defining the actions and accessing them seemed straight forward. This capability is certainly a competitive differentiator and makes the concept of “insight to action” a reality. That it can be consistently implemented and leveraged by all users in various use cases and interfaces makes “Actionable Intelligence” even more attractive.

The product is initially being launched in London today with a live event planned for New York, July 20^th.

While this release has shored up Oracle’s competitive positioning and brought new capabilities, there are still some short comings in the product. Most notable is lack of BlackBerry support (the iPhone is supported) and that the Microsoft Office Add-In (SmartView) remains a separate server as in 10g. BI Scorecard subscribers can access additional detailed findings in the detailed scorecards or in the recently published BI Scorecard® Strategic and Product Summary.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

What's Your Secret to BI Success?

Two years ago, you helped me identify those factors that most make or break your BI deployment as part of research for this book. I’d like to know if anything has changed since then. Is the economy helping or hurting your BI efforts? Maybe a down economy is forcing you to work smarter, or maybe layoffs and budget cuts are putting a dent in your BI strategy.  For example, two years ago, 42% of you had standardized on a BI platform (see graphic). Did industry consolidation or the economy change that? And if so, which vendors are you standardizing on?

Take the updated survey here. As before, it’s not vendor-sponsored.

As your time is valuable and we are all strapped for cash, the first 200 respondents will be entered in a random drawing for 10 $50 gift cards. All survey respondents will receive a summary of key findings. For more insights, be sure to catch my keynote at TDWI in Orlando in November!

I look forward to hearing from you!

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

The BI Side of Oracle Open World

This is my first time attending Oracle Open World. I met it with a degree of trepidation when a colleague told me 60,000 people attend. 60,000??! The official count was 43,000, but still, that’s more than twice the size of my home town and 10 to 20 times the size of the typical BI conferences I attend.

So I was a little worried about the BI sessions and customers getting lost beneath the weight of the larger lines of Oracle’s businesses (mainly the database and operational apps), let alone how do that many people move among venues.

Rumor had it that CEO Larry Ellison would be making a big announcement related to BI during his keynote. The line to attend the keynote circled around the block, and I couldn’t help but recall the only other time I’ve stood in line like this was to see Phil Collins. So the big news that everyone knows by now is Oracle’s launch of its Exadata server, a combination hardware (built by HP) and database (Oracle) solution. The server’s entrance onto the stage was nothing short of dramatic. Ellison cited compelling statistics in Exadata’s performance improvement versus traditional hardware and Oracle deployments – generally a 16 times to 30 times performance improvement. Noteworthy to me is that while routine transactions like data warehouse updates were significantly faster, query performance seems to get the biggest boost. One early customer adopter Giant Eagle grocery chain reported queries ran 50 times faster on Exadata..  This move clearly challenges vendors Teradata and Netezza, but in this strange world of co-opetition, I’m wondering what it means to NeoView. I’ll defer to those experts who focus on BI appliances and datawarehousing.

From the BI tools side of things, I hate that these products reside in the middleware group. BI should be front-and-center-ware! Afterall, BI is the payback for all that data warehouse and middleware plumbing so I don’t quite agree with how this division is branded or organized.  But maybe I’m biased on this point.

Beyond whatever buzz a conference generates, where I had been seeing Oracle have momentum in the BI tools space is through its analytic applications, which are built on the OBI EE platform. While each of the analytic apps are in varying degrees of maturity, as OBI EE expert Jeff McQuigg from MetricSphere told me, just getting the ETL and business meta data layer for the various operational apps (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Seibel) gives customers a big jump start on their BI deployment. Oracle officials said their BI revenues more than doubled in the last year, and about 50% of that was driven by sales of the analytic applications. That Oracle both owns the operational apps and has an extensive portfolio of analytic apps is a significant competitive differentiator.

 

Regards,

Cindi Howson

Author: Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

Founder, , a resource for in-depth BI product reviews

TDWI In Las Vegas - Bigger Than Ever

This week’s TDWI conference turned out to be one of the biggest, with over 1000 attendees and another 200 executives at the BI summit.

A highlight from the Executive Summit was hearing Michael Masciandaro, BI Director at Rohm and Haas, provide practical tips on where to start with BI. He presented all the lofty goals often discussed at this conference – great data quality, robust architecture – and advocated not to start there. Instead, start with something “embarrassingly small” with a subject area or application that has no competition.

The BI 2.0 discussion gave credibility to the importance of “eye candy” in making BI appealing and improving adoption among skeptical users.  The use of Flash in MicroStrategy Enterprise Dashboards and Crystal Reports 2008 seemed to dazzle IT and business executives alike.  Mark Madsen’s demonstration of mashups was nothing short of cool. He contrasted statically displayed crime data – the normal display for most police departments – with such data more effectively integrated with Google Maps. The town spent big bucks on the less usable display whereas the mashup was put together by a passionate programmer in his spare time.

At the “BI Bake Off” course, I was once again surprised at how many attendees are doing a first time BI suite selection, roughly 40% of the 100 who took this course. Companies trying to rationalize the number of tools also take this course. Despite the reality of companies having multiple tools from multiple vendors, I was still staggered when a banking person revealed his institution had 23 different products (not multiple modules from 1 vendor, but products!).

A final question from an attendee to the vendor panel (Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle) took me by surprise. “Given Cindi just told us where your products are weak and gave some red and yellow scores for each of you, what do you think your weak points really are?” There was a pregnant pause. I laughed, suggesting he would not get such an honest answer in a public forum. To my surprise, each vendor did respond, for the most part somewhat candidly (offline, I normally hear those red scores are ALL wrong J!). But of course, a recurring theme to the answers was “everything is fixed in the next release!”

So I leave Las Vegas , with my now smoke-scented clothes (hey, if Paris can ban smoking, why not Las Vegas ?!?!), thinking BI is not at all a mature market. Innovation continues to come from vendors big and small, and if conference attendance is any indication, the BI market remains strong.

Regards,

Cindi