Oracle OBIEE Reviews

• Ease of use
• Strong calculation engine
• User-friendly look and feel

I am from a consulting background which normally works on projects. Many customers using this product have streamlined their planning process with analysts spending more time on analysis than data massaging.

Particularly on the Cloud, a lot of functionality has yet to be ported.

More than 10 years.

On-premise, when data grows exponentially, stability issues have been experienced.

Not applicable.

An eight out of 10.

Straightforward and easy to setup.

For financial planning with WorkForce and CapEx, it's definitely the product to go for.

• Data accessibility
• Easy to create ad hoc reporting for different solutions
• Excellent tool for defining and creating Executive and Operative Dashboard

I’ve used this product especially in the retail field. It’s been a huge initial effort creating reporting for monitoring business trends and retail KPIs, but once we did it we had a great return in terms of data reliability, time response and information sharing between internals and externals.

Retail, Finance, Wholesale

I've used if for about four years in the fashion industry.

Yes, especially when we’ve moved from one version to another. Most of the problems encountered have been solved quickly.

No broad impact

No

8/10

8/10

Designing and building the entire set up of Data Warehousing and Dashboard Reporting implementation has been challenging in terms of resources and time. It took at least six months to a year to see the first results of our hard work.

I can make a comparison with Business Objects and MicroStrategy. Even though these are excellent tools for business analysis, Oracle OBIEE has allowed the company to approach data analysis in a structured and shared way favoring the growth of analytical expertise across the entire company.

From my experience as Retail Planner and Business Analyst in fast paced companies, I would suggest this solution to anyone who wants to improve data analysis in terms of data read, performance, analytical culture throughout the company.

I think it's a great tool for the retail, finance, and commercial industries.

ABC Sell Out Analysis

• Data Warehouse Application Console
• Analytics
• Inter Process Communication

Several KPI reports and different analytical reports can be generated for the operations team.

I have developed datamarts from scratch using OBIEE and ODI as well for a government department in charge of agriculture and food throughout Mexico.

Additionally, it was used to generate several KPIs for a nation-wide logistics company who were distributing all the medicines for government-provided social security insurance.

• DAC
• Siebel Analytics
• BI Server

I've used it for four years.

There is an issue with the handling of the cache in the BI server.

There was an issue upgrading from 10g to 11g.

9/10.

9/10.

I haven't used another solution.

It was complex because the installation of the product presented some problems, and there was not much information about it. The issues were with security for the BI server and the middleware.

We did it in-house.

It is high.

No other options were evaluated.

Be well prepared with the product details from installation to implementation. Be sure you have a support account.

It's easy to create fully-functional Dashboards.

We have been able to integrate different sources into one dashboard.

Essbase integration needs to be worked on.

I've used it for around five years.

No issues with the current version.

When using Essbase, queries accumulated in the BI server and degraded its performance.

No issues encountered.

It's satisfactory.

It's satisfactory.

We previously used Hyperion WebAnalysis, and we needed better RMDB and browser support.

It was straightforward.

We used a mixed team, and when the vendor team implemented it, they had satisfactory skills to do it.

It's ok.

It´s expensive.

• QlikView
• Tableau

Requires some database tuning and an expertise in OBIEE to perform as expected.

The advanced visualizations and the semantic layer. These allow for easy design of the warehouse.

We use the forecasting modules with financial data from the ERP system (EBS) and Hyperion.

This allows us to predict how the company will perform in the coming quarter and to take appropriate measures to mitigate the loss.

We also know the fast moving products. We know how to stock and market out products.

• OBIEE visualizations are still behind compared to Tableau and QlikView
• Visualizations, such as Gantt charts, are not available in OBIEE out-of-the-box: Needs a workaround to enable them

I’ve used OBIEE for six years.

The latest version of OBIEE is very stable, especially if it’s running on TimesTen for Exalytics.

OBIEE is designed to be scalable. It scales the best compared to all the other BI products.

I would give technical support a rating 3/5.

We did use previous solutions. The upgrade was a corporate decision. This was based on several factors, such as the new features, the approaching end of support, and the cost of maintaining an old system.

The initial setup is never simple. It was a long and difficult journey. It needed a lot of cooperation from the ERP consultants.

For enterprise BI, OBIEE is still one of the best products. Oracle does give a good discount and ensures a successful implementation.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos, and MSBI.

Understand your data and what information you want to gather from it before embarking on the BI journey. Ensure that you have a strong team to implement it. The best tools are useless when they are poorly implemented.

There are many valuable features. For example:

• Multiple data sources: I can easily combine multiple data sources and organize them into a common business model.
• Three-layer repository: With the three-layer repository, the development and interpretation are very simple. The three layers are divided from each other well both in logical and physical meaning. The physical layer is used for importing data, creating aliases, building physical joins, setting up connection pools, managing cache and hints for tables. The business model and mapping layer is used for creating logical columns, fact and dimension tables, hierarchies, measures, using fragmentations and filters, applying business logic. The presentation layer is used to prepare, group and organize the data for users to view.
• Security management: Security management is very detailed, complex and well defined in OBIEE. I can set up everything that I want; user security, object security, row-level security, etc. For example: I can easily connect users with application roles, different application roles with different privileges or set up data filters, other restrictions for users / application roles or manage subject areas/tables/columns access for users / application roles, etc.
• Smart cache management: I can easily manage cache and cache settings. I can use it for common tables only, I can purge it in a scheduled way, etc
• Interactive dashboards and analyses: Lots of rich visualization (dashboards, analyses, graphs, maps, etc); user interactions: drilling, pivoting, filtering, prompting, sorting, navigation and more.
• Spatial integration: Lots of rich map visualizations, many supported map suppliers and a wide range of possibilities to use map data.
• Individual customization using CSS and JavaScript.

I have worked for National Public Health and Medical Officer Service on the Child Birth Notification BI project. It was a very successful project both for us and the medical experts as well.

For example, with our analyses, the medical experts could improve healthcare and services at the regions where the child mortality was high.

Of course, there is some room for improvement, because a perfect BI platform does not exist in IT.

The following things would be welcomed:

• Detailed editing of dashboard prompts: By this, I mean the appearance and localization. If I create a dashboard prompt, I cannot edit freely the columns and texts on the user interface of dashboard prompts. For example, I cannot insert individual text fields that are independent from columns; I cannot use CSS to emphasize my texts of columns and the localization is quite limited as well.
• Smarter BI navigation using hierarchical columns: By this, I mean the navigation from a measure is quite difficult when I use hierarchical columns. When I use a hierarchical column in an analysis and expand the levels and click on a measure on the second level, for example, the BI does not know the appropriate level using navigation and it will result in wrong amounts. This is a known issue, according to the BI documentation, and there are other solutions, alternative ways to use navigation. Nonetheless, for hierarchical columns, it could be smarter.

I have used it for more than five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues with BI, but I did encounter stability issues with WebLogic.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. It has worked well.

I can't rate technical support, because I don't ask for help from OTN. Whenever I find any errors or have any issues, I read solutions or best practices from forums or BI channels.

I used only open-source solutions before OBIEE, but the functionality of these tools is not even close to OBIEE.

I think the install of OBIEE is not so complex; it's quite straightforward. Of course, the configuration can be complex, if we would like to use completely different settings from the default.

Unfortunately, this is the most difficult point with OBIEE. The license is very expensive.

When I first encountered OBIEE, I had no choice to use other options, because this platform was preferred at that company. That was five years ago and since that time, I have been using OBIEE and I can recommend using it to everyone.

On the other hand, if our customers would like to use an open-source BI platform, I can recommend using SpagoBI, for example.

I recommend using OBIEE because of its wide functionality (multiple data sources, interactive dashboards and analysis, spatial integration, delivers and alerts, mobiles, etc.).

In my opinion, it is one of the best BI platforms. It provides a full range of capabilities (from development to user experience).

I have worked on a lot of interesting and special projects, and I haven't been assigned any task that I could not do with it.

• Dashboards
• KPIs
• Scorecards
• Analysis
• Reporting

Working as a BI Consultant, I have to develop different analyses, reports and dashboard documents to analyze the status of different business measures. We are using OBIEE and MicroStrategy for the purpose of enterprise performance management by defining and describing different business perspectives and objectives, Initiatives and results are analyzed on the basis of these defined attributes.

I've been using it for six months to a year.

Sometimes there is an issue of font size, spacing and other related formatting document issues.

We've experienced no issues with performance. However, the larger amount of number of selectors, filters etc. you have, the longer it will take to display an analysis.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7/10

8/10

I started with OBIEE, and I am still using it for References.

It was straightforward.

We implemented it in-house.

We're also using MicroStrategy.

If you are looking for Purely Performance Management of a whole Enterprise, then you should choose OBIEEE, otherwise choose MicroStrategy.

We mainly use it for reporting purposes, i.e., generating reports especially for the business. We use it for the business data analysis and metrics purposes as well. For this, we have been using OBIEE for quite a long time.

It is beneficial for us because most of our reports are on OBIEE. It's not only for data analysis. We use it for corporate year-end financial purposes as well. We use it for the backlog management, for example, to check how much is the backlog or how much is the shipment amount and for similar kind of data. We are using OBIEE for such purposes.

We are into the Oracle Supply Chain which involves the process from auto-booking to shipment. They bring the data from Oracle apps to Oracle Arch Work. There is a middle layer which is called ODS. From ODS, they put the data in the OBIEE product. From there, the IT teams create all the attributes, we bag them there and in this way, we can generate our own reports. That is how we have been using this product.

It is useful for us especially for the quarter-end data analysis or to improve any metrics; in this way, we use OBIEE for data analysis purpose.

Some of the additional features required are that it should be more user-friendly. Sometimes, when we use the drag-and-drop feature it does not drag the object and needs to be user-friendly. It's not available today.

If it would be more flexible, that would be helpful.

It's stable. The data is 100% accurate. In regards to stability, it's good. Only sometimes, maintenance is an issue, otherwise the performance is OK.

The scalability is good because it depends on how you upgrade your OBIEE.

We have a lot of companies such as Windows and we chose the best IT teams. They have good architecture and we will do the screening and get the best to resolve the issues.

We were previously using some other software from a different company but we weren't able to find all the data. We were looking for PL/SQL data and this product was able to be get us a lot of data. We need a lot of data for hypnotics purpose, for this reason we chose the Oracle product.

The most important criteria while choosing a vendor would be that they should improve the performance and the product should be user-friendly. Most of the times, we want to use less data and the data should be improved.

The setup was OK and it was not that complex. It was quite straightforward.

We are always looking for the best features that are available. Already, Oracle has advanced technology, which is the reason that we have chosen OBIEE compared to other products.

You should shop around but for me this is the best solution. As per the cost factor as well, it is a cost-effective product.

The attributes should be more user-friendly, other than that the other features of this product such as performance, reporting structure and architecture are good.