Oracle Outlines Business Analytics Battle Plan
Oracle is on a mission to claim the Big Data business analytics crown and counter increasing competition from the likes of SAP and IBM. Oracle President Mark Hurd took to the stage today at Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2012 during a keynote presentation to demonstrate how his company's business analytics strategy is crystallizing into an integrated hardware and software portfolio.
It's an ecosystem that includes the company's Exadata Database Machine and Big Data Appliance. Much of Oracle's analytics strategy also rests on Exalytics, a system that pools a massive amount of RAM for in-memory analytics. On the software side, it includes 80 business intelligence and performance management applications — and of course, the company's business database offerings.
The goal is to help organizations wrangle Big Data and extract actionable insights from their ever-growing stores of business information. Essentially, according to Hurd, it all comes down to getting “the right information to the right person at the right time to make the right decision.”
Hurd said Oracle will continue to invest big in analytics, roughly $5 billion next year and a “little less” this year, to develop “best of breed” technology. Additionally, Oracle will push for deeper integration between its Big Data and analytics offerings as well as cloud-enable its technology and embrace mobility.
It also means baking predictive analysis features into Oracle Database instead of a standalone product, said Balaji Yelamanchili, senior vice president, Analytics and Performance Management for Oracle. Oracle's aim, he said, is to “democratize access to advanced analytics” and hand the power of predictive analytics to DBAs of all stripes, not just specialists.
Naturally, that means new and upgraded products, including Oracle Endeca Information Discovery.
Endeca Reports for Duty
In October, Oracle acquired unstructured data management specialist Endeca. Today, the company's technology powers the “first enterprise platform for data discovery.” Running on Exalytics, Endeca Information Discovery combines search and analytics to derive business insights from structured and unstructured data without modeling.
Endeca Information Discovery is based on Endeca's Latitude and MDEX products and can glean business intelligence from several sources — both within and beyond the firewall — ranging from data warehouses to social media, sensors and transaction systems. According to Oracle, customers are already employing Endeca's software for far-ranging data discovery applications like social media sentiment analysis, insurance claims analysis and criminal intelligence.
Such capabilities, according to Yelamanchili, help businesses in “connecting the dots and finding the patterns.” Ultimately, he said, it “takes you from traditional reporting and analysis to interactive discovery and exploration.”
Two new business intelligence applications were also announced today, Manufacturing Analytics and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics. Oracle describes them as the “industry's first and only in-memory analytic applications for manufacturing and asset management analysis.”In addition, Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management gets an upgrade to version 11.1.1.2. New features include project planning and account reconciliation modules and Exalytics.
Lastly, Oracle introduced two new analytics applications for the platform of its archrival, SAP. Both Oracle Spend and Procurement Analytics for SAP and Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics are also compatible with Exalytics.
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Previously, he served as a managing editor for the Internet.com network of IT-related websites and as the Green IT curator for GigaOM Pro. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
Pedro Hernandez contributes to Enterprise Apps Today, and 11Press, the technology network. He was previously the managing editor of Internet.com, an IT-related website network. He has expertise in Smart Tech, CRM, and Mobile Tech, Helping Banks and Fintechs, Telcos and Automotive OEMs, and Healthcare and Identity Service Providers to Protect Mobile Apps.
