Oracle OBIEE Reviews

The solution is robust and it's so easy to understand, use, and visualize the data. Even a newbie can understand reporting. However, when it comes to coding in the back-end, you need some knowledge.

I like its capability of utilizing big data volume.

It definitely improves all organizations that use it for reporting their analytics. However, it’s not just about reporting. It provides analytics based upon different fields, such as sales, booking, or leads.

The knowledge it provides helps us make decisions about how our business is growing, where to stop, where to start, and where to accelerate. It has a huge impact.

The big data visualization can be improved.

It's a pretty stable product.

It scales well. It has a robust way in which it manages the humongous amount of data and reporting while recording. It’s phenomenal.

Technical support is good, but you don’t get immediate response from them. If you follow up with them, then they will help you out.

I was involved in the installation multiple times. It was straightforward, at least with the earlier versions. With the new versions, there are some issues you might face. If you have the proper documentation, then you won't have any issues.

We evaluated a couple of other products, such as SAP BusinessObjects, but they had limitations. We decided on this solution because it fits our business needs.

I like this solution. It is a robust product and it was suitable for the needs of the industry that I work in.

My advice to others depends on the data volume and what kind of data you want to represent. If the volume is very high and you want an enterprise solution where there are a number of concurrent users, I would suggest this solution.

If you have a different data set and the number of concurrent users is less, then I would suggest a different solution, such as SAP BusinessObjects.

When looking for a vendor, support is the most important thing. The second thing is reliability with a promise that it will be a stable product and you will get 24/7 service.

I like the solution's ability to query all of the data and pull it into a very user-friendly interface. We are using this as part of the Oracle Primavera suite.

I like the ability of the portfolio managers and schedulers to pull data in very easily and report out. This is the critical feature that we needed. This was the reason why we purchased it. You can configure what you need and make it look the way you want it to. The screens are set up in an excellent way. This solution has had a huge impact agency wide.

To reference the initial project setup structure for Oracle Projects and Oracle Portfolios- We need the ability to create layers and structure for projects. For example, Program Number, Project Number and Sub Project Number in a hierarchical structure that rolls up summary budgets for Programs and Projects for financial reporting. Also, each Program, Project and Sub Project may have a different name associated with it for tracking employee time entry. Portfolios are tracked by Sponsor’s name.

I would like to see a little more flexibility in the configuration.

We have been using this solution since June, 2016.

Oracle support was helpful when we needed them for installation and configuration. They provided excellent support.

We have been using Oracle for many years. We just needed to expand what we already had in Oracle. We have a solid database with Oracle.

The instructions and information that Oracle provided were very detailed. The challenge was that we didn’t have any prior experience with the installation and configuration. Oracle support has been great and helped us with the process.

We looked at third-party software, but we prefer to stick with Oracle. With Oracle, it’s easy to integrate with each of the suites and modules that we already had. We didn’t want the cost of integrating with third-party apps. This was an easy decision for us.

I would advise others to document what your current environment is and plan your installation and configuration ahead of time. It will then go smoother and faster. Plan your existing environment in detail and document it. This is critical.

When I look for a product, I focus on security, reliability, and ease of use.

It's one of the common integrated recording tools. I have been in the OBIEE world for quite some time. It's another powerful tool with certain aspects that are like no other tool. Three categorization layers gives us a lot of flexibility, which I didn't realize was possible on other reporting tools.

Prior to this, I was on the ETL side and slowly transferred to the reporting layer side and OBIEE was another good planning factor for me on that.

I would say the biggest need for us is non-structured data. Most of the time, our users come up with an Excel file they want to integrate. It's pretty much impossible in OBIEE. I'll put it that way. When it comes to the BI world, maybe you can do that in SAP Business Objects, and as a company, we have OBIEE and Business Objects as parallel tools people use.

That is always one of the things that we always lag behind and maybe people think Excel, but that is not one of the most powerful things businesses use. If you cannot satisfy the Excel needs, it doesn't matter how cool or how technically focused, consistent, compliant data you have; you can't use that if you can’t integrate it.

There are a few things, like variables and other stuff. Maybe they could allow the editing of reports. Those are the basic features. You cannot copy and paste a report, a particular section, which a lot of people said to us that they have to go through.

A focus on the user experience is what OBIEE needs. As a technical guy, I understand why it works and why, but if it doesn’t sell the business? Make it more user friendly. I'll put it that way.

I rate a product based on how it allows me to help the organization and my role is to provide reports. Success comes only when my customer accepts it. Right now, it's unidirectional and the other piece; there are some things, which are a pushback. It could be a lot of factors, not specifically OBIEE, but OBIEE plays a major role.

Most of the time, we have issues we are facing.

I have used Oracle OBIEE for the last 3 years.

It is a stable product. It has it's own life cycle and as the near future comes, it takes its own time, but once it gets stabilized, we're pretty much good.

We are using it to a good amount of extent, but I believe it's scalable. There is some kind of heaviness to the application. If it can be compartmentalized, then they will have it really good. Right now, they are trying to scale it to an extent we could do, but it comes with some kind of administrative work from our side.

Technical support is okay. I will put it that way. We had our own ups and downs. As a company, from our side, we are platinum customers to Oracle. I don't want to go through the regular route of technical support. We know what we are asking. I'm not that new at this. I don't want to go through a 10-step process to reach somebody, because we work with them to correct some of their product issues.

Apart from that, we get assistance. I won't say we don't get it, but we also had a structured model to interact with Oracle and that they are getting better at that. I came to know that in 12c. They are making it easy for us to give our issues to them. They have the ability that we can click on a case and give them whatever they need. Hopefully, that should solve our problem with Oracle.

When I came in, there was a framework already existing. I was more stabilizing the issues, and this is what my knowledge is about. Setup was not straightforward. There are a lot of things that my friend was initially doing and was going through. I came and then helped them and stabilized it more; not specific to the OBIEE, but from the OBIEE stack. Those are some things that need to be improved.

The best feature of this product is the reporting capability and customization. It lets the users do their own reporting, slicing and dicing, and getting the visual outputs rather than depending on a partner or developer to get reports or produce management reports.

It's much easier to get different outputs rather than relying on a partner or another developer who has some experience in development, but with this product you don't need that as such.

The product can definitely improve. It is a good product compared to Microsoft Power BI or other Microsoft products, the SAP BIs and other small BIs in the market. In comparison with the others, the Oracle BI product is much more advanced; it's a heavy product. However, the issue is the cost factor. If Oracle decides to improve the cost factor and provide facilities to the user where the user can benefit, then it will be good.

Apart from the cost factor, it is a good product. Now, they are moving to the Cloud with the BICS model and adding visualization features. They are heading the right way. For us, the mobile and visualization features are more beneficial; plus with the Big Data coming in, it will really benefit us on that scale.

I've been using it for around four years.

It is a stable product. It depends for downtime. For the repository and repository refresh, you don't need that. It has both online and offline options but you can do the online repository upload as well.

It is a scalable product. It should meet our future needs.

It is a product where you have to initially set it up and position it for the future requirements so that the analysis part takes place properly. Based on that, you can get proper outputs. You can build it upon your stack, scheme, marks and dimensions.

I would give the technical support a 60/100 rating.

At times, it is difficult for us to get support, especially at the skill levels and due to the regions to which we have been allocated to in terms of support; that is also an issue. The expertise is in that particular domain like for the BI, ETLs, etc. For the modeling-related technical skills, they are lacking a little bit, as opposed to the ERP and the other domains.

The setup is straightforward but it needs expertise. The normal IT guys cannot do this. In other words, for the setup, BOMs, scaling ups and other supporting requirements, you need to have proper domain expertise and product knowledge individuals for carrying out the setup properly. Otherwise, you will not get the proper output. It is very resource intensive. If you get the wrong output, then all your assumptions and forecasts goes wrong; so it's very sensitive.

I have used both the on-premises and the cloud module.

The cloud module is still in a premature state, so it has to get mature.

This is an enterprise analytics platform that allows you to do both analytical and real-time reporting. It has a large fleet of products within itself, such as Oracle BI Publisher.

You don't need a lot of time to build and deploy these tools. For the analytical needs, you have OBIEE as a platform where you can build the requirements. You model it, build dashboard reports, and then use it.

Oracle covers all of your reporting needs from an organization standpoint. This application also has a self-service BI, which is an ad-hoc service. It allows businesses to generate their own reports. They don't have to wait for IT to come and do it for them.

It saves a lot of time from a scheduling capability standpoint. If C-level executives want to create more billable reports, they can go down to the granular level of details.

This solution is a self-service BI. It makes it much faster for the business. The tool helps the organization by not having to maintain the infrastructure, nor worry about infrastructure and performance issues.

It also has the enhancements such as new data visualization capabilities and other robust features. The tool can be deployed quickly, is easy to use, and is scalable.

The tool has everything I need right now, including mobile, geo-spatial, and data visualization. I would like to see better licensing in terms of data visualization.

Maybe they could include it as a part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, which would allow product users to take advantage of it. Otherwise, it's going to be an expensive product.

The solution is very stable. I've been involved in this product for close to 14 years now, even before Oracle acquired Siebel. The initial Siebel Analytics did some good generation of BI.

There wasn’t a lot of advancement made initially, but later the architecture changed and it was taken to the next generation with a lot of new, rich, and cool features like mobile, geo-spatial integration, and integration with new data sources. It's been great.

Scalability-wise, it's pretty good. When you use it with an ERP system or with CRM applications, it integrates with SAP, Oracle-based e-business applications, and even the Microsoft stack.

Scalability-wise, you can leverage this product, and not only with an Oracle database. It can work with any database and with any heterogeneous source. It's very scalable and easy to maintain.

I do use technical support with this subscription on any issues that we encounter, except for cloud-based systems. We already gave them product bugs. They are addressing them in patches. I think they are pretty good. Oracle always has someone who will respond to you, depending upon the severity levels involved.

When I started at this organization, we had a Microsoft BI stack and a SAP BI stack in place. Both of them used the dashboard capabilities and kept all of the reports together in one place. Microsoft BI has a subscription facility where you can subscribe users to set up reports and get them by email.

Neither of these solutions was robust nor scalable. The ad-hoc reporting capability is one more area which was missing in these previous solutions. One of them has it, but it's very complex to configure it.

Another reason why we chose this tool is the ease of use. You don't have to know a lot of programming to deal with this product.

I did the setup by myself in my organization. I did the delivery destination production from scratch, with the help of the documentation logs from various forums. You just have to follow the instructions which are straightforward. As long as you follow the instructions, it was easy to use.

We looked at IBM Cognos, QlikView, and Tableau. From an IT standpoint, we look at self-service BI, integration, and scalability. When it comes down to the senior, C-level executives, price is also another factor.

Tableau is a product which can be used for data discovery, but not for organizational analytical needs. That is the missing part.

Cognos is missing a lot of important features like self-service BI and many other dashboard capabilities.

I've seen other data analytics platforms like IBM's suite of products, SAP Business Objects, and Microsoft BI stack. All of them are good, but when it comes down to the collaboration of functionalities, on the business or IT side, OBIEE is the best for the organization. That's the reason we deployed Oracle Business Intelligence for our organization.

If your requirements are for an enterprise reporting platform, Oracle would be able to satisfy your needs. From an analytical standpoint as well, this product will address your real-time data operational report needs.

If you are only looking for data discovery, or just looking at flat files and the patterns of the data, then Tableau or QlikView will do the job.

Whenever I select a vendor, I look at multiple things:

• Scalability
• The integration of the products with other important applications within an organization
• Data integration
• A database application with Excel-based files

The cost factor is the most valuable feature. It's very cheap to deploy it enterprise-wide without having to worry about breaking the bank.

The biggest advantage that I find is the centralized data governance, i.e., one version of truth is critical for any business. For me, OBIEE provides that one version of truth.

The visualizations and usability aspects in this product can be improved a lot. Even now, I constantly hear people comparing Tableau to OBIEE and how Tableau has a better UI and is easier to use compared to OBIEE, which is a bit difficult.

It does need some level of tuning but more or less, it is stable.

We have deployed it enterprise-wide and it works well for us.

Opening a ticket with the support team can be frustrating. It takes a long time to resolve the issue.

We did not look at any other products.

The setup process was straightforward.

It's self-explanatory and not much guidance is needed.

However, you should not skimp on the hardware. It's a hardware-intensive product, so you must make sure you have good hardware.

It has good dashboarding. Also, being an Oracle product, it's good for ETLing in and out. It has a very good ETL process to get the data in and out of the data warehouse system. Also, it does have very good integration points to different products, such as Big Data, Hyperion, or Financials. You can pull everything up, project it and dashboard it. It's a good business intelligence platform.

For advanced users, they can build their own custom reports. You can actually create a custom dashboard for your upper management, and for your middle management. You can provide required reports at all levels of management for decision making. You can get data from different systems into it. It works well with other products, where you can bring in data, and then project it. It's got a very good ETL process, which makes it easy for you to bring in data.

They should focus more on performance. Basically, no one has the time. They also have to compete with big data analytics. They ought to keep that in mind and see how this product could eventually, down the line, be replaced. They should take some measures to actually make it stay.

For stability, in the back end, you have the Oracle database. You can use In-Memory.

You can fund it well, scale it well and size it well; all of these things. It's a good product.

It's not distributed. You can’t do distributed scaling, per se. Whenever you use the algorithm, if that's the case, you can always use a RAC system or something like that. On the application side, you can use however many servers you want. You could redirect your traffic accordingly, based on different servers. You can cater to different customers or to different business end users, depending on their priority. It's pretty scalable, but not distributed in nature. For example, it’s not good for big data analytics and that kind of stuff.

I don’t know about technical support these days. Overall, Oracle support is not that impressive, which it used to be. We are living with it. If you have a stable product like Oracle, if it’s going good, most of the time, it's fine. The only challenges come whenever you try to upgrade, and then it'll be a little rocky for a while. You'll be okay, but during that rocky period, you don't get enough support. There isn’t enough documentation. It's a huge product. Those are some of the challenges.

We previously used a custom reporting solution, like Crystal Reports and so on, then we actually moved into this OBIEE a few years back, when OBIEE first came out. It's been a long journey with OBIEE.

Setting up is pretty easy in terms of infrastructure and so on. When customization comes along, that's when it's never easy. Any customization is never easy. It's always complex.

Look at big data and other open-stack solutions. See if that actually fits; otherwise, you might want this kind of solution, ready to install. Don't customize. If you have a lot of customizations, see if this product will work; do a PoC. I strongly recommend to check big data, and go from there.

When I’m choosing a vendor to work with, the most important criteria are scalability and how well it works with other products.

Another thing is that we shouldn't be locked in to a vendor. We should be able to move vendors in and out if we really want. I don't like vendor lock-in. That's another thing. It should be scalable in a distributed way.

My rating is because of the performance and scalability. We did scale it well and we did size it well, but there are still some limitations in achieving the kind of performance that we want. It's not always consistent in its performance.

I think Answers, the ability to create ad hoc reports for the business, is the most valuable feature. They really like that.

It definitely provides benefits for analyzing data.

I think there should be a few more features like the other BI tools in the market, kind of like the self-service approach of gathering data and then integrating the information.

Stability is 9 out of 10. It's pretty stable, but once in a while, we get some issues.

I'd say there are some limitations. One of my projects is looking for graphics. There's some limitation on graph and the charting capabilities; it couldn't do a Gantt chart, for example.

Oracle support is sometimes pretty vague, and the way they analyze the issue or try to troubleshoot, it's very timely. It takes a long time.

When I started with the company, we already had it.

It's a very good tool. It will satisfy a lot of the needs, but I think there's room for improvement.