Oracle Revamps Endeca and Business Intelligence Foundation
Oracle has updated its analytics software slate in an effort to ease and simplify IT management tasks while making business insights easier to discover and visualize.
Version 3.0 of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery sports a sleeker user interface with drag-and-drop visualizations. Users can also now upload their own personal files — like Excel spreadsheets — to Endeca Server, without IT intervention. Oracle acquired Endeca, an unstructured data management specialist, in 2011.
Endeca Information Discovery 3.0 integrates with Oracle Business Intelligence Server and can be deployed on Weblogic Server, capabilities that allow organizations to substantially streamline their data discovery operations, says Oracle. It has also gained some social savvy with a JSON reader, new text enrichment features and improved sentiment accuracy, which enables the platform to better mine and decipher unstructured social media data.
Finally, Endeca is getting a touch worldlier. Endeca Information Discovery 3.0 supports 10 localizations, while Endeca Information Server can accommodate text data in 22 languages.
Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation 11.1.1.7 analytics suite also gets user interface tweaks in the form of new visualizations, namely Performance Tiles and Waterfall Graphs. Another visualization feature, called the View Suggestions Engine, provides an aid to help users visually analyze data and arrive at data-driven decisions.
For organizations that have been bitten by the BYOD bug, the Oracle BI Mobile Security Toolkit helps keep users' tablets and smartphones from leaking sensitive business insights. Additionally, the product offers more gesture controls, mobile visualizations and content viewing options.
Microsoft shops can now leverage Oracle Smart View for Office as a single add-on for Oracle BI, Essbase, and Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management applications. Excel users can now export business intelligence dashboards in native Excel or create new analyses from within the app using Oracle BI Foundation Suite data and visualizations.
On the Big Data front, Oracle Business Intelligence now employs the Hive Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface to access Hadoop data sources. Oracle Endeca Server integration means that users can explore Oracle BI objects to discover insights with navigation and full text support.
In total, the new capabilities further Oracle's goal of making business analytics easier to implement, says the company's vice president of product management, Paul Rodwick.
“In today’s uncertain and extremely competitive business environment, our customers are looking for ways to distil data meaningfully to detect problems, identify opportunities and better plan for the future,” he said in a statement. “The new enhancements reinforce our commitment to continually adding value to our customers by delivering innovation around business discovery, self-service analytics and user experience, and providing greater effectiveness to drive optimization and tighter alignment across their business.”
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the Quinstreet Enterprise Network, the network for technology professionals. 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.
