Oracle BI Achieves Suite Status

Oracle is now offering its Business Intelligence (BI) 10g
as a standalone suite to give managers better insight into their businesses, as well as to take its share of the multi-billion-dollar market for
BI software.

BI 10g gives users the ability to query, and perform reporting and analysis,
data integration and management tasks, all functions designed to help users
obtain fast, accurate information about accounts, customers and work
performance.

The suite contains Discoverer for query, reporting and
analysis; Spreadsheet Add-in for direct access to Oracle OLAP
from within Microsoft Excel spreadsheets; Warehouse Builder for ETL
; and BI Beans for custom BI application development.

While these products have been retooled, the most significant nugget about
the today’s announcement is the repackaging of the BI tools in one bundle.

Steve Illingworth, senior director of BI products at
Oracle, said the Redwood Shores, Calif., company has produced Discoverer,
Warehouse Builder and BI Beans for years, but never offered them in a suite
with one dashboard view to help customers corral their data.

Oracle’s development team has worked for the last six or seven years on putting OLAP capabilities, data mining capabilities and ETL capabilities within the
database, he said.

It might seem as though vendors like Cognos and Business Objects have the
advantage of arguing greater devotion to BI because they specialize in it,
but Illingworth disagreed. Oracle will be catering mostly to customers who
already use the company’s database software, making BI 10g a logical fit.

“If you are using the Oracle database, why are you not using Oracle business
intelligence products,” Illingworth said.

Oracle BI 10g, which comes with Oracle Application Server 10g Enterprise
Edition, is available now at $20,000 per processor or $400 per named user.

Separately, Oracle issued on Friday its Application Server Enterprise JavaBeans
(EJB) 3.0 Preview, a set of software tools that lets Java application
developers dive into EJB. A core technology in J2EE 5.0, EJB 3.0 provides
application protocol interfaces that ease development.

It is available as a download for free.