Oracle OBIEE Reviews and Pricing

Director of Statistics and Analysis at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 1, 2013

Powerful platform for summarizing data within a DW environment

Company Background:
• Verisign, Inc. operates the domain name registry for .COM, .NET and other Top Level Domain extensions
• There are more than 125 Million registered .COM and .NET domain names
• These domains are in various states, such as:
newly registered, expiring, renewed, or deleted

Department Background:
• The Business Intelligence group is responsible for reporting, modeling, forecasting, and creating a coherent narrative about the 'health' of the domain registry.
• Our group acts as an information 'hub-and-spoke' for many internal customers such as, Marketing, Finance, Product Management, Account Management, and the Executive suite

Data Background:
• The primary source of data comes from Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE)
• Oracle 11g running on Linux
• Oracle has always been a principle database in the infrastructure
• Engineering builds some automated reports for external customers with BI Publisher
• Our Business Intelligence Group used to work with Oracle Discover, then OBIEE (v10), and currently migrating to OBIEE (v11)

Process Challenges:
• Company has never provided an opportunity to choose a different BI tool
OBIEE is the legacy company standard
• Currently migrating from OBIEE (v10) to latest version (v11)
• Along with a new data architecture:
Writing user quick guides
Arranging training for business users
Building dashboards from scratch
Recreating Automated Reports (Agents)

Process Advantages:
• After using OBIEE (v10) for three years, there were hundreds of reports in the folder structure
Some were useful, some weren't
• The migration forced us to start from a clean slate because over the past few years we have better idea about what is important to our customers

OBIEE Pro's:
• Interface is improved from earlier (v10) version
Better organization of windows showing the compound layout, views, and subject areas
Easier to configure pivot tables
There is a split screen where you can arrange the columns and rows and view the pivot table results
• Improved ‘Agent’ capabilities
"Agents" is the new term that replaces "iBot”
With v11, possible to subscribe other people to an automated agent
This is better than having to work with Executives and walk them through the process
• Latest version of OBIEE contains functions to obtain values from prior time periods
Makes comparative reports much easier to create

OBIEE Con's:
• OBIEE interface times out for long queries that involve extensive drill-down
The analysis we perform is not limited to rote, summarization of transactional data
Easier to identify the event in the OBIEE reports then submit a SQL query to the database to pull the transactional detail
• OBIEE Excel 2007 download
Selecting the ‘Excel’ download option still only returns 65K rows
• Formatting is time consuming task
Dozens and dozens of ‘clicks’ required to polish a dashboard
When formatting a pivot table, there isn't an obvious way to change the 'fill' color in the upper left box that sits adjacent
to the row labels and the first column

Other Challenges:
• Working with Unstructured Data
Creating segmentations on-the-fly not practically possible
Temporary tables cannot be inserted into the production environment
Exploring Oracle APEX as a solution
Have to download to Excel and then summarize against a lookup
Analysis often merges non-Oracle data with results from OIBEE reports

• Analytics
Our forecasting code doesn’t run in production
Isn’t available within the OBIEE interface
Resulting datasets downloaded into Access for aggregation
OBIEE has some time series functions but very difficult to perform rigorous validations and monitor accuracy without having to customize the XML and PL/SQL options on the ‘advanced tab’ of the query design window

• Dates
We’ve encountered some issues with dates that we did not have with OBIEE v10
The “Month-Year” date format in OBIEE downloads into Excel as a ‘text’ value instead of an Excel Date value with a “MON-YEAR” format

Conclusion: Oracle Business Intelligence is a powerful platform for summarizing data within a DW environment. Despite OBIEE’s interface and feature improvements, its usability remains clumsy with complex queries requiring skilled coders.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user73641BI Expert at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

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Dec 11, 2013

I agree on some of your points, I have been around BOBJ and OBIEE and both have their strong points. My wish list for OBIEE is to make it easier to have multiple deployments on the same server, this just seems like a no brainer to me or allow for more cohesive code management system. I know they are working to improve points, but I would like to see them make it easier for muti-user development and such, because at the enterprise level change control and management become very, very large issues and adding significant headcount is not the answer today.

it_user7017

Consultant with 51-200 employees

Jun 21, 2013

Essbase and EPM Integration Improvements in OBIEE 11.1.1.7

One of the major new feature areas in OBIEE 11.1.1.7, but which has so far got very little attention, is the significant improvement in integration between Essbase, the Hyperion EPM Suite, and OBIEE 11g. The integration between EPM Workspace and OBIEE’s Presentation Services which disappeared when 11g came along is now back, along with installation and security integration, a new version of SmartView that (properly) supports OBIEE as a data source, and the ability to spin-off aggregates from the RPD into Essbase ASO cubes.

Now some of these features of course made an appearance in the earlier, 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 release, and integration between OBIEE 11g and EPM Suite has been happening on-and-off right back from the OBIEE 10g days, but where we’re at now with OBIEE 11.1.1.7 is the delivery of a number of things that customers have long been asking for, including:

The ability to run OBIEE from within EPM Workspace, with single sign-on between the two
Shared security provisioning and organisation between Essbase and OBIEE, through application roles and policies
The ability to install Essbase and the other EPM tools into the same WebLogic domain as OBIEE, using a single installer
A proper Excel (and Word, Powerpoint, Outlook) add-in for OBIEE, with the ability to author reports as well as run existing Answers-authored ones

This is actually one of a number of new feature areas that came with 11.1.1.7 that have had little publicity; as well as better Essbase integration, there’s actually now support for multi-tenancy in the RPD and catalog, Hadoop integration (which we covered in a blog post last week), the View Suggestion Engine, the inevitable changes to MUD, and quite a few others, some of which I’ll try and cover in the next few days and weeks, but for now let’s look at these new Essbase/EPM integration improvements, starting with installation of Essbase and its related tools into the OBIEE WebLogic domain.

As I mentioned back in my OBIEE 11.1.1.7 New Features posting a few weeks ago, the OBIEE product installer now offers Essbase as an installation option alongside OBIEE, Real-Time Decisions (RTD) and BI Publisher. As with RTD, Essbase isn’t included in the base OBIEE+ license, but it is included in Oracle BI Foundation Suite, the product package that Oracle encourage new customers to take out an includes OBIEE, Scorecard & Strategy Management, Essbase and BI Mobile. Selecting Essbase during the install process installs it, and the other EPM Suite tools, in the same WebLogic domain as OBIEE, and you can see Essbase within Fusion Middleware Control as a product – separate from OBIEE – that you can manage and monitor.

Essbase Server, and Essbase Studio (the client/server tool used to design and build Essbase cubes) are also now controlled and monitored through OPMN, something that’s been a feature of EPM Suite for several releases now but which is, of course, new for OBIEE.

So something that’s been an issue for EPM customers upgrading from OBIEE 10g to 11g was the removal, at the time, of the ability to integrate OBIEE’s Presentation Services within EPM Workspace, and the SSO link between the two products. Back with OBIEE 10.1.3.4 there was an admittedly complicated but supported and working process to integrate the two products together, allowing EPM Workspace customers to “skin” OBIEE to look like Workspace and run the two products together, albeit with separate report catalogs, security models and so forth.

This, coupled with the removal of OBIEE’s Hyperion custom authenticator for the RPD left many EPM Suite customers upgrading to OBIEE 11g in the lurch, leading to workarounds such as this one that we put together recently for one of our customers. Well this integration (mostly…) is back with OBIEE 11.1.1.7, so let’s see what it does, and what functionality is still missing compared to OBIEE 10g.

First off, Essbase and EPM Suite as installed as part of an OBIEE installation isn’t quite the same as EPM Suite installed standalone; most importantly, Essbase in this OBIEE incarnation has a different security model than “standalone” EPM Suite, in that it uses the same system of application roles and policies that the Fusion Middleware 11g-centric OBIEE 11g does, rather than the Shared Services and groups that standalone EPM Suite does. Also, the OBIEE 11.1.1.7 install installs just the following EPM Suite products:

Essbase Server, including Essbase Agent, Essbase Studio, Essbase Administration Services, Provider Services
Financial Reporting
Calculation Manager

Therefore you don’t get Planning, Web Analysis and so forth, and you can’t subsequently install them into the domain and Fusion Middleware Control afterwards – so think of Essbase and the EPM Suite tools in this context as an add-on and complement to OBIEE, not a full installation of EPM Suite in their own right. Moreover, the majority of Essbase administration tasks which for standalone EPM Suite installs are performed through MaxL, Shared Services and EAS are performed through Fusion Middleware Control, and Essbase high-availability and clustering works different within this context, for example. The standard product architecture diagram for OBIEE and Essbase combined within the 11.1.1.7 release therefore gets updated, with a number of products added to the Java components, and System components part of the diagram, like this:

Now, when installed as part of OBIEE 11.1.1.7′s WebLogic domain, EPM Workspace is available at http://[machine_name:port]/workspace, and when you launch it you’re presented with a view into the BI Catalog, and menu options to administer the various EPM and BI tools from one place.

Within this catalog are both OBIEE objects such as analyses, dashboards and agents, and EPM objects such as Financial Reporting and SmartView reports.

There are limits to this EPM/BI Catalog integration though – FR reports, for example, can only be opened using the File > Open dialog in EPM Workspace, with an error message showing if you just click on the report itself in the BI Catalog view within EPM Workspace. But SSO between Workspace and OBIEE seems to work (as in, you don’t need to re-enter your BI password when clicking on an analysis in the Workspace Catalog view) as both OBIEE and EPM are working off of the same Fusion Middleware security model, which (the lack of) explains why the feature disappeared for so long after OBIEE 11g was introduced.

Now that OBIEE and Essbase share the same security, the need for the old HSS Custom Authenticator has now gone away, though of course this will only be of use if a customer has moved their Essbase installation into the OBIEE domain, with standalone EPM Suite installations still needing the security workaround mentioned earlier in this article. There’s no upgrade path from standalone EPM Suite installations to this integrated arrangement, so most probably any users of Essbase within this new 11.1.1.7 context will be installing it “net-new”, with the main objective being to enhance their existing BI setup rather than merging their separate BI and EPM platforms into one.

As you’ve probably picked-up by now, much of this new integration ability is down to security harmonised across both Essbase and OBIEE, or more accurately Essbase now having an option to use Fusion Middleware 11g security rather than Hyperion Shared Services. So what does Essbase and FMW11g security look like in practice? Let’s head over to Fusion Middleware Control, in particular the Application Policies administration screen, to take a look.

The big difference when Essbase runs as part of an Oracle BI domain is that authentication, and authorization for Essbase use Fusion MIddleware security rather than Shared Services or Native Essbase security. Although Essbase Administration Services ships with OBIEE 11.1.1.7, you should use Fusion Middleware Control to enable access to particular Essbase databases, and give permission to access tools such as Financial Reporting or Administration Services; the only security role for EAS and MaxL in this setup is to create the Essbase data and metadata filters; these filters are then assigned to users through FMW security resource permissions and application policies, which then are then granted to application roles and thereby to users.

Whilst this probably seems like an over-complicated nightmare to traditional Essbase users, it does have the major advantage that one set of application roles granted to users within a Fusion Middleware system can cover both OBIEE and Essbase permissions, and there’s no need to link to Shared Services or support Native Essbase security. We’ll cover the implications of this more in some future blog posts, but this is the enabling technology that makes the rest of this integration make sense.

With Essbase integrated into the OBIEE BI Domain, you can also now use Essbase as an aggregate persistence target, though this feature comes with the same (slightly strange) approach and limitations that we first encountered when it was first introduced with OBIEE 11.1.1.6.2 BP1; although there’s not the same requirement for the Essbase server only to be used for aggregate persistence, you still have to name the Essbase database in a particular way, it’s ASO-only, and the Aggregate Persistence Wizard still creates a separate ASO database for each aggregation (similar to Oracle Database materialised views) rather than one single cube covering all aggregations. In practical terms – I’m not sure how much you’d use this vs. creating your own Essbase cube in Studio against the whole RPD business area – but it might be useful for OBIEE developers who otherwise don’t know Essbase.

So finally, the other major Essbase-related new feature in OBIEE 11.1.1.7 is SmartView, the successor to Oracle BI Office. But that’s a topic in itself, so I’ll cover that this in the next posting.

Disclosure: My company is an Oracle Gold Partner

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user6903Head of Engineering at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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Jun 21, 2013

Thanks Mark for a nice coverage. It 's great as usual to see posts from you on OBIEE and I have also followed those couple of times. OBIEE 7 has some of good things which I will from previous release (s):-

For last release the rich catalog of samples were missing which they has ensured with new release and help users to adapt and migrate quickly.

Essbase and some of the optimizations is yet to be tried but looks like lot of improvisations over last release.

We were waiting for endeca integration and support which is also included officially with new release and now Oracle ATG people have all support on endeca side for pulling commerce statistics to OBIEE reporting views.

Thanks again for highlighting some of key areas and a nice summary on new release.

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Ariel Lindenfeld

VP Product at PeerSpot

Jun 11, 2013

Gartner's Magic Quadrant report says that OBIEE lacks good customer support. Have you found this to be the case?

Based on Gartner's Magic Quadrant, Oracle's customer support, product quality and sales experience are chronic weaknesses of OBIEE. However, customers choose OBIEE due to its integration with other Oracle products.

Are you a Real User of OBIEE? Have you found this to be the case in your organization?

If you are a user or are evaluating OBIEE, add your comment below or write your own review. Share your opinion with our community!

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user111810Developer at a university

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May 9, 2014

We are recent implementers of both OBIEE and the OBIA SIA (Student Information Analytics) offering. TO answer your questions regarding product quality and customer support I reply with a resounding YES. The already 4 month past deadline project has hit bugs (both existing and confirmed) at every step of the way; the integration and ease of use even when utilizing only Oracle's own BI platform is abysmal (click on a link in BIACM to FSM, time to reenter your password, want to set up a new developer in ODI or switch target environments, time to start generating wallets and manually configuring XML files). Even with direct access to the SIA development team (all of which is located in a timezone that prevents us from having enough overlap to actually communicate effectively during normal hours) the bugs and issues we've encountered do not see timely resolution and the 'fixes' eventually offered are nothing more that incredibly hack workarounds.

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it_user6903

Head of Engineering at CloudBearings

Jun 5, 2013

We used OBI EE for generating OOTB reports...

We used OBI EE for generating OOTB reports and then for preparing few custom dashbaords for our clients as part of project.
The product in terms of installation is simple but heavy and takes some time to generate your first report but when one ic comfortable can play easily with platform and this saves time. We have more than 250+ samples available on reporting, drill downs and graphical interactions which help you to prepare concise reports in one report. The ESSBASE query engine makes it possible to pass complex BI queries to engine in real time and responsive also. Overall nice platform which focuses on web and mobile analytics as well.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user79650Architect at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

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Aug 19, 2014

You can write whatever you want. You can create an ad-hoc report as a result of a logical SQl, or even from a SQL directly sent to the underlying database.

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it_user6903

Head of Engineering at CloudBearings

Jun 5, 2013

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Comprehensive BI tools, but lacks support for deploying multiple RPD on one BI server, direct access to RPD schema or model layers.

Pros and Cons

"Oracle Business EE has a futuristic vision for BI Server capabilities with support for answers, flexible dynamic dashboard, intelligent untime query engine, web and mobile analytics and support for structured and unstructured data."

"However, OBIEE lacks support for deploying multiple RPD on one BI server, direct access to RPD schema or model layers. Also the overall solution is heavier relative to other products."

Valuable Features:

Oracle Business EE has a futuristic vision for BI Server capabilities with support for answers, flexible dynamic dashboard, intelligent untime query engine, web and mobile analytics and support for structured and unstructured data. OBIEE provides out of the box supports for Oracle ATG commerce catalogs and also have sample applications which enable users to come up with nice dashboards in relatively lesser time frames.

Room for Improvement:

However, OBIEE lacks support for deploying multiple RPD on one BI server, direct access to RPD schema or model layers. Also the overall solution is heavier relative to other products.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user5046

BI Expert at a hospitality company with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 13, 2013

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Dashboards, semantic modeling are great. But needs improvement with visualizations and mobile.

Pros and Cons

"Dashboards, semantic modeling"

"Ad-hoc analysis is tedious and lacks advanced capabilities."

Valuable Features:

Dashboards, semantic modeling

Room for Improvement:

Slow to market with visualizations, mobile functionality Ad-hoc analysis is tedious and lacks advanced capabilities

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user3876Database Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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May 17, 2013

A major disadvantage of this tool is that it requires more technical support and maintenance, which is a very time consuming activity.

it_user3891

Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 22, 2013

Solid enterprise BI platform but lacks coherence

The unwieldy acronym OBIEE stands for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition.

The offering is a loosely coupled assembly of a dozen plus components (eight – by some other counts) both acquired and homegrown. Its beginnings go back 12 years ago to nQuire product which first became Siebel Analytics only to be reborn as OBIEE after Oracle's acquisition of Siebel in 2005 and then Hyperion in 2007. The story does not end here as Oracle continues its acquisition spree with the recent (2012) purchase of Endeca for its e-Commerce search and analytics capabilities.

The current intermediate result is a solid contender for the Enterprise BI Platform, firmly placed at the top-right of Gartner's Magic Quadrant along with Microstrategy, Microsoft, IBM, SAP and SAS.

Oracle's page for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g summarizes the suite's functionality in following terms (direct quote, with claims about “cost reduction” and “ease of implementation” left TBD)

• Provides a common infrastructure for producing and delivering enterprise reports, scorecards, dashboards, ad-hoc analysis, and OLAP analysis
• Includes rich visualization, interactive dashboards, a vast range of animated charting options, OLAP-style interactions and innovative search, and actionable collaboration capabilities to increase user adoption

And – by and large - it does deliver on the promises.

One of the important features for the enterprise is integration with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint). What Oracle has dubbed as “Spacial Intelligence via Map Based Visualization” represents a decent integration of mapping capabilities (not quite ESRI ArcGIS but a nice bundled option nevertheless – and no third party components!)

Among other things to consider is tighter integration with Oracle's ERP/CRM ecosystems (no surprises here as every vendor sooner or later tries to be everything for everybody), and for the organizations with significant Oracle presence this would be an important selling point.

Being redesigned with SOA principles in mind, OBIEE yields itself nicely to integration into SOA- compliant infrastructure. Most organizations choose Oracle Fusion Middleware for the task due to more coherence with OBIEE and the rest of Oracle's stack; but it is by no means a requirement– it can be run with any SOA infrastructures, including open source ones.

For mobile BI capabilities, OBIEE offers Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile (for OBIEE 11g), currently only for Apple's devices – iPad and iPhone – downloadable from Apple iTunes App store. Most features of the OBIEE available in the corporate environment are supported on mobile devices, including geo spacial data integration.

NB: Predictive modeling and data mining are not part of OBIEE per se (it cannot even access data mining functions built into Oracle dialect of SQL!) but they could be surfaced through it. Oracle Advanced Analytics platform represents Oracle's offering in this market.

OBIEE ranks second from the bottom in difficulty of implementation (SAS holding the current record); coupled with a relative dearth of expertise on the market and below-average customer support, this should be considered in evaluation of the OBIEE for adoption in the enterprise.

One interesting twist in OBIEE story is Oracle's introduction of Exalytics In-Memory Machine in 2011 – an appliance that integrates OBIEE with some other components such as Oracle Essbase and Oracle TimesTen in-memory database. The appliance trend resurrects the idea of a self-contained system in a new context of interconnected world, and Oracle fully embraces it with the array of products such as Exadata, Exalogic and now – Exalytics. By virtue of coming fully integrated and preconfigured it supposedly addresses the difficulties of installation and integration – at a price; this is designed to be a turn-key solution for an enterprise but its full impact (and validity of the claim) remains to be seen.

So, to sum it up:

Pro:

It is a solid enterprise class BI platform with all standard features of a robust BI – reports, scorecards, dashboards (interactive and otherwise), OLAP capabilities, mobile apps,
integration with Microsoft Office, SOA compliant architecture. It also includes pre-defined analytics applications for horizontal business processes (e.g. finance, procurement, sales) as well as additional vertical analytical models for the industries (to help to establish common data model)

Contra:

It is evolving through acquisitions and integration thereof which affects coherence and completeness of vision; no integrated predictive modeling and data mining capabilities,
ranks rather low on ease of deployment and use as well as on quality of support; rather shallow (and therefore expensive) talent pool; with all being factored in, the TCO could
potentially be higher than comparable offerings from other vendors.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user248220Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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Jun 2, 2015

I am supposed to help a customer in deciding which tool to choose and this review is very helpful from that perspective.

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reviewer2092269

Oracle Application Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

May 3, 2023

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Though it is easy to use, its dashboard and support need to improve

Pros and Cons

"It is easy to use...I rate the scalability of the solution a nine out of ten."

"If the data is large, the dashboard takes a really long time. So, based on the database, if you have around a million cost contacts, the load time is very low, and the dashboard fails."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution for its functionalities related to reports, analytics, dashboards, and other things.

What is most valuable?

It is easy to use. We have all the fields available to try and drop to create analytics.

What needs improvement?

I think the schedule option where we schedule the dashboards has to be improved. When we have to send the dashboard to the ADS personnel based on some conditions, then it is not feasible to add those conditions and send it to different email addresses. Suppose a person does not have access to Sales Cloud, but the business wants emails to be triggered. Then we have to put in static emails while scheduling the reports or documents. We do not have any conditions where we can, from the existing fields, add some conditions, like the ones based on certain conditions regarding a person and then based on some other conditions regarding another person. So that's where I think I have faced backlogs personally.

Though Oracle did support us, the resolution wasn't quick. Oracle can improve its support.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for three years. Also, I don't remember the version of the solution I am using. I am a partner of Oracle OBIEE.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate the stability of the solution a seven out of ten. We have faced one issue with the solution. If the data is large, the dashboard takes a really long time. So, based on the database, if you have around a million cost contacts, the load time is very low, and the dashboard fails. Oracle can improve it. Even if the data set is more, the load time should be less so that the business can use it in hand and not wait for them to load.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate the scalability of the solution a nine out of ten. In my organization, around a hundred people use the solution.

How are customer service and support?

Recently, my company connected with Oracle's technical team when we faced loading issues related to the dashboard. We did not receive a quick resolution since we were more involved in sharing logs every time.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is easy.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't look into the solution's pricing because the upper management looks into it.

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely suggest those planning to use the solution to use it, considering the easy-to-use features and since there is less complex coding involved. Moreover, it is understandable and can be used.

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.