OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) is a business intelligence tool from Oracle Corporation used to gather, store and visualize enterprise data. OBIEE is part of a broad suite of products from Oracle called Oracle Fusion Middleware. Fusion Middleware serves multiple business needs, including integration services, collaboration, content management and business intelligence.
While OBIEE is commonly used with Oracle business applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), it can ingest and analyze data from multiple sources. External data sources include relational databases, online analytical processing (OLAP), flat files and spreadsheets.
Organizations use OBIEE to:
OBIEE competitors include Microsoft BI tools, SAP AG Business Objects, IBM Cognos and the SAS Institute Inc.
OBIEE is based on business intelligence (BI) solutions developed initially by Siebel Systems and Hyperion Systems, both acquired by Oracle in 2005 and 2007. Siebel Analytics was later rebranded by Oracle as OBIEE. The components of the original Siebel Analytics product are still visible in OBIEE. For example, Siebel Answers, used for ad hoc queries, and Siebel Delivers, used for sending alerts based on changes in data, are available as optional OBIEE add-ons.
Oracle continued to enhance OBIEE through the early 2000s combining Hyperion and Siebel Analytics functionality. Oracle announced the general availability (GA) of OBIEE 11g in August 2010 and continued to enhance OBIEE delivering OBIEE 11.1.1.7 in April 2013. Oracle announced OBIEE 12c in 2015 and an upgrade procedure from OBIEE 11g.
OBIEE 12c introduced a new architecture for several back-end components. It offered significant new functionality, including a new Web UI and a new visual analyzer to create visualizations via a drag-and-drop interface. Several new advanced analytics capabilities were also provided in OBIEE 12c. These included new prebuilt functions available from OBIEE’s expression editor, including features such as forecasting, clustering, regressional analysis and outlier detection.
OBIEE is comprised of several components. These include:
Data in OBIEE can be thought of as being stored in three logical layers. These include a physical layer, a business layer and a presentation layer. The OBIEE business layer assumes that data will always be organized in a star schema format to support efficient analytic queries.
There are several other components in the OBIEE architecture, including the OBIEE Admin Tool, a BI Scheduler and the Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server (OPMN). OBIEE is often implemented alongside other Oracle Fusion Middleware applications.
OBIEE provides a common reporting framework that can be used to produce and deliver standard reports, scorecards and dashboards across the business. Capabilities also include ad hoc and OLAP-based analysis.
It is important to note that many components in OBIEE require additional licenses from Oracle. Customers can choose to license an Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Extended Edition that includes OBIEE along with additional functionality such as interactive dashboards. When we describe OBIEE features and benefits, we include functionality in some of these separately licensed add-ons:
OBIEE provides the following features:
Organizations realize the following benefits from OBIEE. Users can:
OBIEE can be used with other tools in the Oracle portfolio to present and visualize data in various ways. Among these separately licensed tools are:
While OBIEE has a relatively small share of the overall BI market, it has a strong presence in the enterprise business application market. Oracle business solutions include Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), Oracle Siebel CRM, JD Edwards and Oracle NetSuite. OBIEE has an installed base that comes from OBIEE’s Siebel Systems heritage, and it is also widely used with Oracle EBS.
Introduced in 2001, Oracle E-Business Suite was Oracle’s first complete bundle of ERP and CRM applications. EBS remains the most widely used line of business applications in Oracle’s product portfolio. Other enterprise applications, such as JD Edwards/PeopleSoft (2003) and NetSuite (2016), came from acquisitions.
Given the strong position of EBS in Oracle’s application portfolio, Oracle has made it easy to integrate OBIEE with Oracle EBS modules. Most users integrating OBIEE with EBS use Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics (OBIA), although this is not a requirement. OBIA is a prebuilt, prepackaged BI solution that provides a prebuilt set of OBIEE dashboards and reports for EBS. Given OBIEE’s heritage as a Siebel product, it continues to be widely used with Oracle Siebel CRM.
OBIEE is top of mind for EBS and other Oracle application users because of its pending end-of-support status. Fusion Middleware versions 12.2.1.3 have been out of Oracle’s Error Correction Support (ECS) since December 2021. For OBIEE users, bug fixes and security patches are no longer available. For OBIEE 11g users, ECS deadlines passed a long time ago, and most OBIEE 12c users are out of Oracle’s support, depending on their Fusion Middleware software versions.
OBIEE customers are facing a migration, and unfortunately, migrations of this sort tend to be disruptive. Customers have three broad choices:
Some common challenges with OBIEE stem from its overall design, which dates back to the early 2000s. Data extracted from clients pass through a BI Presentation Service, which queries underlying data through the BI Server. An OBIEE limitation is that business data needs to be converted into a dimensional model such as a star schema before it can be analyzed. As a result, organizations typically need to spend time converting data from its source format, requiring ETL pipeline operations. The result is added cost, delays in obtaining needed business data, and loss of data granularity as data is aggregated to support analytic queries.
A second challenge with OBIEE is related to its dashboarding capabilities. While OBIEE provides prebuilt dashboards for Oracle EBS via Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics (OBIA) data engineers and analysts need to develop their own dashboards for other applications. Developing business-friendly data views for enterprise business applications is a complex process. It can take organizations months of effort to build data models and business views useful to business and analytic users.
For OBIEE users, Incorta offers several potential benefits. Incorta is an all-in-one solution that combines data acquisition, data processing, data curation, a semantic layer and data analysis, all accessible from a single web interface. Using Incorta’s data connectors, organizations can easily extract data from Oracle business applications and third-party sources.
Incorta enables organizations to sidestep the traditional challenges associated with data warehousing and analytic environments. Data is mapped directly to the source on ingest, avoiding the need for traditional data aggregation, reshaping and flattening.
Incorta also makes it exceptionally easy to get productive by quickly extracting business insights from Oracle applications. Incorta data applications (formerly Blueprints) include prebuilt reports, dashboards and business-friendly data views pre-tailored to popular Oracle and third-party business applications such as Oracle EBS, NetSuite and Oracle ERP.
With Incorta, OBIEE users can: