Five reasons to start fresh with your Oracle BI modernization project
As WWII wound to a close, Winston Churchill famously observed that one should “never let a good crisis go to waste.” While the risks faced by today’s business leaders are more modest than what Churchill faced, there are still lessons to be learned. Below we explain why a pending OBIEE migration may be just the opportunity your organization needs to modernize its analytics environment.
Challenges for Oracle BI users
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) users face a dilemma. Depending on their OBIEE version, most customers are now outside of Oracle’s Error Correction Support window. Bug fixes and security patches are no longer available, an untenable situation for most corporate users. OBIEE users can migrate to Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), deploy Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) on premises, or consider other solutions. In business and IT circles, migration is a scary word. Even modest migration efforts carry risks of disruption, cost overruns and long periods of operating systems in parallel.
A financial perspective
While migration carries risks, ironically, the bigger risk may actually be in “going too small.” There can be a temptation to simply “replace what we have” to minimize scope and complete migrations quickly. So what’s the problem? If organizations spend time and money only to end up with the same functionality, their return on investment (ROI) will be precisely zero. Worse, if functionality regresses, returns can quickly turn negative — not a great financial story to sell to the business. Ideally, most organizations want to see a positive return on investments made in a migration.
Traditional approaches are no longer enough
Despite advances in some areas, the basic ideas behind analytics have hardly changed in decades. Most solutions, including OBIEE and successors, still rely on the same dimensional modeling techniques and star schemas pioneered by Kimball and Inmon. Data in transactional systems such as Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is extracted, reshaped and aggregated via ETL pipelines and landed in a data warehouse. This process is slow, expensive and requires significant data modeling effort and ongoing maintenance. Adding new data sources and building and validating pipelines can take weeks or even months, depending on an IT organization’s workload and backlog.
New technology to the rescue
Fortunately, new technologies are changing how analytic systems are deployed and managed. Using Incorta, a cloud-based unified data analytics platform, business users can directly run complex analytic queries against source data. They can do this without ETL processing, OLAP, aggregations or expensive data warehouse infrastructure. With Incorta, data is ingested via data connectors and stored in efficient open columnar Parquet file formats. Dimensions and measures are recognized automatically, and joins are pre-computed via Incorta Direct Data Mapping®, enabling lightning-fast queries and derived data views.
Incorta comes with prebuilt Data Apps for popular enterprise applications, including Oracle EBS, Cloud ERP, JD Edwards, NetSuite, SAP and others. Data Apps provide prebuilt dashboards and business-friendly data views. This means that users can be up and running, extracting valuable insights from complex business systems, often in a single day. These technologies are game-changers for Oracle BI users, enabling them to unlock more value from their Oracle business applications.
Five reasons to start fresh with a data modernization strategy
An OBIEE migration may be the perfect opportunity for business and IT leaders to start fresh and modernize their analytics environment. Below are five reasons why:
1. Improve the speed and fidelity of analytics. With Incorta, data is ingested quickly and updated regularly using fast parallel data connectors. Because data doesn’t need to be transformed or aggregated, analysts have instant access to the latest full-resolution data.
2. Incorporate new data for better quality decisions. Incorta bypasses the need for complex data modeling when adding new data sources. Subject to security controls in upstream systems, users can be productive analyzing new data in hours rather than the days or weeks required in typical environments.
3. Deliver a positive ROI and lay a foundation for future competitiveness. Rather than simply replacing OBIEE with similar functionality, Incorta brings new capabilities. This translates into quantifiable business value and ensures a positive return on the investment required to migrate from OBIEE.
4. Reduce future costs. In addition to delivering new functionality, a move to Incorta can potentially avoid the need for ongoing spending on data integration technologies, expensive data warehouse infrastructure and data engineering activities — further boosting projected ROI.
5. The investment and opportunity costs are small. Unlike traditional migrations that can take months to plan and execute, a proof of concept with Incorta can be conducted with minimal investment. Incorta can be deployed in just a week or two and start showing value immediately. Oracle BI users can evaluate Incorta quickly and make a decision without disrupting their existing environment.
Learn more
To get started with your Oracle BI modernization project, sign up for a free Incorta Cloud trial and jump-start your analytics, visit https://cloud.incorta.com/signup.
To view a replay of our latest webinar, visit 4 Reasons You Should Rethink Your Oracle Analytics Cloud Migration.