Crossing the Oracle BI chasm – why it’s still not too late to rethink your analytics environment
Organizations using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) have been aware of its pending end-of-support status for years. Depending on their Fusion Middleware versions, most OBIEE 11g and 12c users are beyond Oracle’s Error Correction Support (ECS) deadline. This means that essential bug fixes and security patches will no longer be available.
While most organizations have a migration strategy, it is the 11th hour for others. Potential targets for Oracle BI users include Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) or third-party BI solutions. While some of these solutions are good options, none are ideal. Most rely on traditional data modeling and analytics approaches that have hardly changed in decades. The risk for Oracle BI users is that even after going to all the effort and expense of migration, they can carry forward the deficiencies in legacy environments. These include difficulties achieving timely insights, challenges modeling data and various performance-related issues.
The fallacy of sunk investments says that organizations can become so focused on past investments that they lose sight of the present and future costs and the potential benefits of taking a different path. Organizations that have settled on an OAC migration strategy understandably feel pressure to “stay the course.” Given the critical importance of analytics to the business, however, it is never too late to consider new options. Below are four reasons why a migration may be the perfect time to reevaluate your strategy.
1. Technology is evolving at a rapid pace
Advances such as cloud delivery models, open columnar file formats and in-memory analytic engines are transforming analytics. Long-held approaches like reshaping data from third normal form (3NF) into separate fact and dimensional tables for analysis are no longer necessary. Modern business analytics platforms enable organizations to analyze source data directly without costly transformation, ETL pipelines and traditional data warehouses. These advances are potential game changers. These modern BI platforms make it easier to model data, achieve timely insights and drill seamlessly from summary metrics to line item detail across multiple data sources.
2. Business needs are changing as well
Just as technology is evolving, so too are business requirements. Driven by competition, timely, self-serve access to the latest data is becoming table stakes. Today, many organizations have difficulties accessing data in raw form, and IT teams stand between users and their data. Traditional data engineering practices and ETL pipelines mean it can take weeks to incorporate new data sources or obtain needed reports and data extracts. These restrictions are no longer acceptable for companies that need to be data-driven. Analysts need the freedom to explore all of their data, and in real time.
3. Migration costs don’t need to break the bank
One of the most time-consuming aspects of implementing a BI solution is connecting to upstream systems and building business-friendly reports and dashboards. Organizations can spend months understanding complex schemas and wrangling data into analytics-friendly forms. Modern solutions like Incorta can reduce implementation time with prebuilt analytic templates for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), NetSuite, ERP Cloud, SAP and Salesforce. After installation, only light customization is typically required, speeding time to value and reducing the work needed to generate baseline reports and KPIs. The result is dramatic — significantly reducing the time and cost for an OBIEE migration.
4. Advanced analytics demands a solid data foundation
AI and machine learning (ML) are rapidly transforming businesses. Organizations increasingly rely on ML-based algorithms to enhance customer service, improve decision support, provide customer recommendation engines and combat fraud. Training these data-hungry algorithms depends on having access to raw transactional data and being able to put it in the hands of data scientists quickly. The need to build a modern data foundation for these next-generation services is yet another reason to rethink your migration plans. When moving from OBIEE, organizations should look for data-science-friendly platforms that support embedded ML for time-series prediction, outlier detection, classification and other models. They also need an open platform that integrates easily with existing data science tools and frameworks.
Incorta for Oracle BI users
For customers migrating from OBIEE, Incorta is worth a look. Incorta can help expedite an organization’s migration from OBIEE and drastically speed time to value for Oracle analytics projects. Like OAC, Incorta is a fully managed cloud service with embedded BI tools. Incorta directly maps to Oracle and third-party data sources using its Direct Data Mapping™ technology. This eliminates traditional transformation and aggregation steps and delivers data to the business in record time. Using Incorta, organizations can boost analyst productivity and enable self-serve access to the latest data across multiple applications. They can also position themselves for the future with a modern, efficient unified data and analytics platform that supports the latest data science tools.
For real-world examples of how Incorta helps companies overcome key obstacles and challenges with migrating from OBIEE, check out our recent webinar, 5 Key Considerations for Upgrading OBIEE to a Modern BI Solution – now available on demand.
For a more in-depth conversation about Oracle BI migration options, schedule a no-obligation Incorta proof of concept (POC) at https://go.incorta.com/proof-of-concept.
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