Thursday, January 28, 2010

More Evidence That Oracle Loves Essbase

Since the Oracle merger, it seems the developments concerning OBIEE and Essbase have been really exciting for traditional OBIEE people and less exciting for Essbase practitioners. The focus seems to have been on providing Essbase as another data source at the physical storage layer of OBIEE. There are advantages to that approach in that OBIEE made federated queries possible. Federated queries combine data from both Essbase and relational data sources into a single semantic layer and basically made the source of the data invisible to the end user. As implemented, the concept is fantastic for dashboards but for those of us raised on the interactivity of the classic Excel add-in, it was not really that exciting.

Flash forward to last week when I was on a demo of an upcoming product with a couple of old Hyperion friends who have recently returned to Oracle. The product, the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (“OBIA”) Essbase Integrator, turns the OBIEE/Essbase development effort to date on its head. The purpose of the product is open the data in the pre-packaged OBIA products, such as Oracle Financial Analytics and Oracle Spend and Procurement Analytics, to Essbase. At its heart, the Essbase Integrator will take data from those applications, which is currently available in OBIEE, and spin off Essbase cubes from them. The new product will maintain bi-directional metadata on both the OBIA side and the Essbase side to minimize maintenance efforts.

Obviously, the benefit for Essbase focused people is that this product has the potential to greatly expand the footprint of Essbase throughout the Oracle customer base. The benefit for OBI customers is that they can extend the capabilities of their applications to add some of the things that Essbase does very well. Some of those capabilities include:
  • What-if and scenario modeling
  • Allocations
  • Multiple hierarchy rollups
Let me emphasize again, this product is not yet available and Oracle is traditionally tight-lipped about shipment dates. I do know, however, that Oracle is planning a beta test cycle for the spring. If you are an OBIA customer and are interested in providing feedback during the beta cycle, send me email at timtow at appliedolap dot com with the subject line ‘Essbase Integrator’ and I will pass your information to the right people at Oracle.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's very exciting to hear from time to time about upcoming new for the more or less future.
However, on the other hand it's copiously frustrating that we are completely lost in insecurity about any time line.
We are on the (and yes I thing so) terrible version 9.2.1.
And we all know that the next worthwhile release will be the 11.1.2.
We and our customers are less delighted about the fact that no-one can or is will to state something about a release date. So much more than talking about planing games for the distantly stuff we are interested in the near future. We need planning security at least so much as we need visionary ideas.
Well, that must have been said.

Anonymous said...

It's very exciting to hear from time to time about upcoming new for the more or less future.
However, on the other hand it's copiously frustrating that we are completely lost in insecurity about any time line.
We are on the (and yes I thing so) terrible version 9.2.1.
And we all know that the next worthwhile release will be the 11.1.2.
We and our customers are less delighted about the fact that no-one can or is will to state something about a release date. So much more than talking about planing games for the distantly stuff we are interested in the near future. We need planning security at least so much as we need visionary ideas.
Well, that must have been said.

Tim Tow said...

I am not sure of the reason why Oracle doesn't disclose their ship dates.

Back in the Hyperion days, word usually got out about perspective timeframes but since the Oracle acquisition, *nobody*, including my old Hyperion friends, talk ship dates. My guess is that it is a 'immediate termination' thing for Oracle employees.

Tim

Anonymous said...

Not disclosing release dates has to do with revenue recognition compliance. For example, a customer decides to purchase some software with the understanding the next release will be out in XYZ date. What happens if the release date slips? The customer can potentially sue the software vendor for breach of contract.

-tm

Tim Tow said...

Ah.. That brings back memories from my accounting days (which I have tried very hard to bury in a sea of technology.. (BigGrin)). A number of vendors seem to be very quiet about ship dates, but I wonder how many software companies are filled with sales reps that over-promise features/performance/etc with impunity?

Tim