Oracle announces new BI suite

Oracle again made headlines at its OpenWorld event in San Francisco, California when it announced the release of its Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3, which aims to assist organizations in processing intelligence from existing applications and data sources and distribute it across the enterprise.

According to Oracle, this version focuses on three areas:

• New components and enhancements;
• Integration with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database; and
• "Hot-pluggable" support for third-party data sources and systems.

Oracle revealed that the suite would leverage service-oriented architecture techniques and integration with Oracle BPEL Process Manager to support multiple modes of workflow. This includes invocation of a business process execution language (BPEL) process from the BI environment, either through automated BI alerts or directed by BI users; BI that directs a BPEL process with intelligent decision points and conditional process steps based on analytics; and BPEL processes invoking analytic workflows through Web services.

The new product also lets users access to information through interactive dashboards, reports, ad hoc analysis, real-time alerts, mobile disconnected analytics, and integration with Microsoft Office and Excel, among other things.

Business Intelligence Suite EE is planned to include full integration of Oracle BI Publisher, and will allow customers to schedule and deliver documents to printer, fax, email, WebDAV, or include them in interactive dashboards.

The following key product integrations are also planned:

• Oracle Database 10g OLAP;
• Oracle Identity Management; Integration with a variety of Oracle security, provisioning, and authentication products including Oracle Database Virtual Private Directory, Oracle Internet Directory, the Oracle E-Business Suite security model, and Oracle SSO Server;
• Oracle BI and Analytic Applications.

The third release plans to expand certification and native support for third-party data sources and infrastructure products including the latest releases of IBM DB2, NCR Teradata, and Microsoft SQL Server. Oracle also intends to deliver native, direct access to SAP Business Information Warehouse.

This latest version is turning it to be huge with all the integration of existing products that Oracle is putting in. We'll find out if the product is as good as advertised when it becomes available in the next 12 months.