Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) is a fully managed cloud-based BI and analytics platform from Oracle. It is designed as a single and complete platform that empowers business users and analysts to ask questions about their data — across any environment and from any device. Oracle Analytics Cloud provides various options for intelligent analysis while being easy to deploy and manage. OAC users do not need to worry about provisioning and managing infrastructure, making it attractive to many organizations.
Some of the core capabilities of Oracle Applications Cloud are:
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is a BI solution developed initially by Siebel Systems and Hyperion Systems, both acquired by Oracle. Oracle has offered OBIEE since the early 2000s, and as a result, there is a significant installed base of OBIEE users. Most installations of OBIEE are on customer premises.
Unfortunately, OBIEE users are facing a migration because Oracle has announced end-of-support for OBIEE. Depending on a customer’s Fusion Middleware versions, most OBIEE users have been out of Oracle’s Error Correction Support (ECS) since December 2021. This means that bug fixes and security patches are no longer available.
As a result of OBIEE’s end-of-support, Oracle BI users are looking for alternatives. For many, OAC represents a logical migration path. OBIEE users needing to migrate to a different analytics platform have three broad choices. They can migrate to:
Some key features and benefits of Oracle Analytics Cloud are as follows:
Some components of OAC are hosted in the download, while others may be downloaded and run locally — either on a desktop, laptop or mobile device. The major components of OAC are as follows:
OAC users can also use an optional BI connector to enable third-party BI tools such as Power BI and Tableau to access data residing in OAC.
OAC is a step forward in terms of functionality for users that previously ran OBIEE. The fact that it is a hosted service makes it easier to deploy and manage than OBIEE. Despite these benefits, there are challenges with the platform, however:
One of the significant limitations of OAC is that it requires that data be represented in a dimensional model, such as a star schema, before it can be queried and analyzed. It shares this limitation with OBIEE. This limitation stems from the original designs of OBIEE and Essbase, which date back to the early 2000s.
As a result, organizations typically need to spend time converting data from its source format, requiring ETL pipeline operations performed outside OAC or using OAC’s data flow capabilities. 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 OAC is related to its dashboarding capabilities. While OAC offers powerful tools to create and share data visualizations, it lacks application-ready dashboards for enterprise applications such as SAP, Salesforce, and even enterprise applications offered by Oracle.
Prebuilt dashboards for Oracle EBS are available using a separate Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics (OBIA) offering. However, data engineers and analysts will find themselves developing their own dashboards for other applications should they proceed with an OAC deployment.
Developing business-friendly data views for enterprise business applications, given their complex internal table structures, is a complex process. It can take organizations months of effort to build data models and business views applicable to business and analytic users.
For OAC users, or OBIEE users considering a migration to OAC or OAS, 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 provides all of the benefits of a cloud-hosted OAC environment but sidesteps two of the significant shortcomings of OAC. With Incorta, 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 and third-party business applications. Incorta data applications (formerly Blueprints) include prebuilt reports, dashboards and business-friendly data views prebuilt for Oracle and third-party business applications such as Oracle EBS, NetSuite, Oracle Cloud ERP, SAP, Salesforce and others.
With Incorta, Oracle BI users can: