Oracle OBIEE Reviews

I believe the most valuable feature is the ETL, the component to extract the data from the source system.

It allows us to bring data from key systems together and provide useful information in metric form to our leaders.

I’d like to see an easier way to go ahead and allow users to access other data, maybe to query it and so forth; maybe from a user, UI perspective. I've noticed, as I’ve mentioned, other tools that are out there. It's very much about the user experience, and I don't know if the current look and feel is lending towards that.

It works well. I think it was more of the implementation that we faced. Once we got the kinks worked out of it, it seems to work pretty well. The load seems to be completely maintainable.

I think it's scalable. It just might not seem that it's as easy. We do have other products now that are coming into the market that are a lot easier for us to go ahead and use a mixed set of data.

We haven't been using the support as much. We have contractors and consultants that we're working with already that provide us that help as an alternative service.

We did have BusinessObjects. We had it for many years, and it's very old. I don't think that it was scalable. It didn't have the performance that we were looking at and the capability of pulling in outside mixed data.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I did hear about it from the other team members. As I’ve mentioned, we had an implementation partner involved with this, and it didn't work out as well. I think that they tried to give us a tool out-of-the-box, and then we definitely needed customizations to work with our data.

At the time that we made the decision to go with this product, there weren’t that many other players in this area. Over the past three years or so, there's been a surge of new players in the market. We've probably had OBIEE for about five years now. At the time, it was pretty new. There weren't a whole lot of options and OBIEE was probably the best tool around.

When I’m looking for a vendor such as Oracle, the most important criteria I consider are the partnership and the support. We've been an Oracle shop for a long time and I know that there are certain relationships that I've had with the account team. That's important. I think that, again, really working together and providing us information that will help us make the decisions towards new solutions, whether with Oracle or with Dell. Then, definitely, if we need help with escalations and so forth we can turn to them.

I think that you really need to understand your data analytics strategy to understand which functions and features that you're looking for. The business itself needs to be ready to take this on because it's definitely not an IT solution. The premise around a lot of the analytics solutions is really to empower the business now to take the ball and run with it, create their own reports, create their own dashboards. You need to make sure that the business is able to go ahead and have the skill sets to start taking up that responsibility, or at least to come up with a roadmap of how they're going to get there.

It does what it's supposed to and it will work, but it definitely can be better.

The most valuable feature is that we don't have to do anything. They give the code by themselves. We just have to do minor customizations. Its usability is really good. When we implement the tool, we can implement it in a short span of time and start doing enhancements on the basis. It's really good; a good tool.

They offer multiple database support. We can import data from Excel files, CSV files, along with our ERP systems. I just think that’s a cool thing.

The only thing is: Upgrades are critical. They are migrating their business intelligence systems. They have introduced cloud-based analytical solutions. I like where it is going, but with what we have been using, we are facing difficulties in upgrading and so on.

In my company, they have been using it for seven or eight years.

I've been working on OBIEE since the beginning of my career, around eight or nine years.

This is definitely a stable solution.

One feedback would be that their upgrade is not as easy as other cloud solutions. You have to install the software again and migrate the repositories. That's kind of bad; that's a negative.

Nonetheless, it could serve as a business solution for the whole organization, multiple business teams, and so on.

The solution is definitely scalable. I have seen it grow with my company. Once the tool is implemented, multiple teams want to exploit the tool, derive different business cases out of it and build different dashboards out of it. They give a base system, on which we can do ad-hoc reporting. Dashboard development is also extensive with OBIEE.

Technical support is quick actually. I've been communicating with those guys regarding multiple issues. The support is good. They look into our issue and give the best possible solution to us. So far, it has worked out good. They're definitely knowledgeable. They are knowledgeable about the issues. They figure it out and give out multiple possible ways to approach the problem and find a solution.

This is definitely a good tool. I recommend it. Moreover, if someone was thinking about implementing this solution and they came to me, I would have a quick chat telling them the pros and cons we faced during the implementation. I would give them ideas about how useful it was for our business.

It's a generic BI tool and all of the BI features are good.

We use it as an enterprise BI tool. All of the reports are in one place; that's the main benefit.

In the next release, I would like to them to add or include data visualization and mobile, which right now is a separate product. If it were up to me, I would merge them together.

It has some shortcomings, but overall it's a good, stable product.

We've been using it for 6-7 years.

It is quite stable. We've never had any issues with it; overall, it is very good.

It is scalable. We have lots of users using it and we can easily expand it.

The quality of Oracle tech support depends: if you get a good person, it's very good; otherwise, it's very bad. It's one extreme or the other.

We've been using it for a long time, so it's not like we recently went to it; it's been a long time.

I did not set it up my myself; my guys did it. It was somewhere in between straightforward and complex; it was not that complex, but it was not straightforward either. We had to get an expert Oracle consultant to help us with it, but that went well.

We selected this because we got a good deal on OBI, Hyperion and other products as a package; that was one of the reasons we picked this. Of course, features-wise it checked out equally with other tools that we evaluated. Eventually, cost plays into it.

The features that we were looking for were data visualization; slice and dicing of data; analytics, if you will; mobility; ease of use; scalability, of course; and also, response time.

You can go with OBI if you are an Oracle shop. It's better than SQL Server products. There are other products that are better than OBI, also, but it's one of the top five products.

The reporting is the most valuable feature. Also, the look and feel of the reports is really good. You can visualize the data in a user-friendly way. That's the main value.

How it benefits the organization is that we use it for a wide variety of things; we use it for billing and we use it for finance. We use it for so many of the regular basic daily use cases. We send data to our customers based on that. They review what we send and make decisions based on that. We do our billing with it, so that's the main aspect.

The web services are pretty weak. There are so many bugs in it and it doesn’t support that many features. That's weird. I think other kinds of solutions are meeting the market. If they improve it, then it would be really good. They could move into new companies in new markets.

Other than that, lots of open-source tools are coming up, which are competing. The licensing part is an issue. Open-source products are free. This tools is mostly used for non-revenue-generating functions, so its reports do not generate any revenue. People are always asking why they should pay a license fee. Why use a licensed tool when it does not make any money.

It's a very stable product.

I think you can have 16 nodes. It's pretty scalable. I have not seen any scalability issues, so far.

I have used technical support in the past. They are okay. They're not that helpful at times, but the documentation is really good. They have documents to which we can refer. That's where they're pretty useful.

We used to use another solution. In this company, I think they were using Cognos. It was pretty expensive and performance was not that great. We moved to this solution. Performance is okay here. It's not really that great but it's stable; it’s a stable product.

I was involved in the setup and I was involved with migration for various versions. I worked with an earlier version of this product, which was called Siebel Analytics. Then Oracle acquired Siebel and they named it as Oracle BI. I've done various large upgrades for three or four companies.

With Oracle, with the BI specifically, there are so many outside tools. There’s MicroStrategy and Tableau. The basic difference between Tableau and Oracle BI is the volume of the data BI can hold; Tableau can't hold as much data. That's the major difference. Also, the stability of the product is really good.

Determine the use cases. First write down the use cases and then look for the product that satisfies all these use cases. That would be my advice.

The most valuable features are what you can do with it. It's the insight of the data that really gives the management the capability of looking beyond what they probably currently have within the transaction system.

Now with 12c, there’s also data mash-up, which gives them the capability to look at different data, join them on the fly and look at the key indicators, which can probably give them insight into the business.

Performance is a key point, but it's always a give and take with performance: What do you really want to achieve versus what you can really get, and what does that cost? That's the key, I think, from a performance perspective.

I have been using it for 10 years.

It is a stable solution. We have been using it since it was Siebel; since before Oracle acquired Siebel. It has been almost 15-16 years. It's pretty old. Now, with the new release, they're adding on more and more capabilities.

It's pretty scalable. You can scale it differently; you can scale it horizontally or vertically. With the new upgrades, it's pretty amazing the things that you can do with it.

Technical support are very knowledgeable because this product has matured a lot from where it was initially.

With every release, the setup is getting easier and easier. When we started out, it was more complex; now it's getting more and more easy.

Based on what I have seen, based on different implementations, it's one of the tools that is pretty reliable in the market, that is pretty stable. As long as it meets your requirements, you should be fine. I don't see any issues with it.

When I’m deciding to work with a vendor like Oracle, I think about how much they are willing to collaborate and make their product succeed. It's more about partnership; it's more about reliability, but it's also about dependency. You often get stuck with products you're implementing and the solution might not be available onboard, so you have to go and reach out and get the solution.

• Ad hoc analysis
• Dashboarding
• Dimensional modeling (Administration tool)
• Security and permissions

For me as a consultant, these are the most valuable features of the product. By using the Analytics feature, users (and consultants) are able to build both simple and complex reports / graphs. The user is able to add complex calculations and to create almost any column he desires.

The Administration tool is the workbench for the implementation consultant; this is where the data warehouse is called, and facts and dimensions are defined and joined. Here we transform data into a business model and make it accessible to the end user. It is possible to join multiple physical sources and combine their data into a single business model. So, if sales are recorded in a sales application and inventory is recorded in a different system, it can be combined right here.

Security and permissions are important when, within a company, specific roles are defined that are (not) allowed to certain areas of data. OBIEEprovides roles and groups and data shielding by role or even user-level to cope with almost any business requirement at this point.

Users find it difficult to understand which combinations of facts and dimensions are ‘allowed’ in a single report. The application does not provide feedback up front, but gives an error afterwards.

The user interface provides subject areas where the user can choose columns for a report. A column can be either a fact (measure) or a dimension (like company, or date).

It is not uncommon to have two measures that cannot be compared by the same dimension. The report will show a blank column, or give an error message saying something like ‘incomparable measures at this level’.

Most of the times, this is a design flaw in the underlying dimensional model, but this does not have to be the case. If a user could see the unavailable columns based on their selection - by greying out options that are not available - this would greatly help the user understand the underlying data model and prevent frustration.

I have used it for five years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent; there are many companies specialized in delivering technical support for OBIEE.

For the end user, the product runs inside the web browser; technical setup requires a specialist.

Contact a reseller (such as Ordina) to negotiate the best price. Oracle list prices are always negotiable.

Seriously consider a cloud implementation. Cut back on implementation and maintenance / upgrade costs and very little time-to-market.

Caching is a valuable feature. We can simply schedule the report to run before the users get to work. This reduces the time it takes for the users to load data-heavy dashboards.

I only realized this after using Tableau, but I really appreciate the re-usability of reports in OBIEE. I liked this because I don’t need to re-do reports that have to be in different dashboards and it makes my folder structure organized.

Another feature I love are the functions readily available in the RPD. This makes life so much easier when computing for example, year ago, month ago, rolling months, percent growth, etc.

Variables also give us a little flexibility with the formulas, titles and column names.

The company I was assigned to is a utilities company, so they heavily rely on daily reports to monitor the situation. Customer feedback is very crucial to them. Working both as their business analyst and developer, I get to communicate with the people responsible for reporting to top management. Based on their feedback, some are able to see if pending items have been delivered and if not, they can easily identify which group to go to. This assures that their customers are satisfied with the service.

Some have also said that with the reports readily available via OBIEE, they can immediately download and present them to their bosses. No more use of spreadsheets to compute for the KPIs.

We had a lot of users before that wanted customized user interfaces. This was one of the hardest things to customize in OBIEE. You had to have knowledge in other areas to provide user requirements.

With the popularity of self-service systems, our power users wanted more ad-hoc reports. We couldn’t provide this because that meant giving them administrator access, which was against the security guidelines of the company.

One requirement we also had was the ability for users to change passwords. Again, this meant that we had to give the users administrator access, which was against company protocol.

I have used it since 2010, almost six years.

I am not sure if this is relevant, but there was one time when we configured the SSL for OBIEE 11.1.1.7 and we were unable to create new users. We did this to two servers, but the issue only happened to one server. The Oracle Support consultant we talked to wasn’t able to resolve this. I’ve since left the organization and am not sure if it has been resolved.

There were no scalability initiatives that I was a part of, just upgrades to new machines, which are simple new installations.

I rate technical support 5/10. I am not sure about others, but the technical support I had from Oracle Support was often delayed or they couldn’t solve the problem.

I did not previously use a different solution, but I did dabble with Tableau after I started using OBIEE.

Initial setup was straightforward. By the way, I’ve only worked with Windows installations.

The organization was already using this product when I got there, so we just maintained it.

Google is your best friend! Some documentations do not contain everything, so it is good to be patient when looking for solutions, even outside Oracle Support.

The client required the ability to produce the same reports that they currently produce in Excel (replicating as close as possible to the format as the users were used to this), but distributed via a dashboard/mobile front-end rather than relying on emailing Excel files.

For them, the most important features were the ability to build complex and highly formatted analytic reports, to publish them on dashboards, to build mobile apps to allow access whilst out and about, but still be able to email reports out for those users who still wanted them that way. Including the report in the body of the email to avoid having to open attachments was also desired.

The ability to directly access data in their warehouse rather than downloading into an Excel file was also an important consideration. This is a small company, but growing fast and the amount of data was becoming unwieldy in Excel and would just get worse.

These reports are used all day by the company’s sales representatives as they travel between regional outlets, customers and suppliers. Having access to this data quickly via a tablet/mobile phone meant spending less time at a desk and could ensure that they have up-to-date information during their meetings. It has therefore greatly increased the time the sales reps can spend out on the road and positively impacted on the deals they are making. Their managers can also monitor during the day what the sales reps are up to and provide better guidance.

The IT developers for this client have struggled in two areas, setting up the repository and fine tuning the report formatting.

The repository in OBIEE provides a huge capability for bringing in table structures from a database, linking them together, mapping hierarchies, adding custom calculations and so on. However, to do much of the complex mapping they needed is very difficult without considerable experience. There is very little within the repository administration tool to guide you on how to achieve complex tasks and the documentation is quite brief. Improvements in this area would certainly help.

For the reports, the requirement was to replicate highly formatted reports in Excel and despite the cell-level formatting in Excel that obviously cannot be replicated within a reporting tool, we’ve gotten extremely close. However, as with the repository, experience has been key – the analytic report-building screen provides a wide range of functionality, but without someone with experience on hand to provide ‘tricks of the trade’, they would have struggled. Simplifying the interface to provide easier access to all of the functions would help greatly here.

For this client, it was their first foray into professional business intelligence reporting products. Until now, they’ve merely been using Excel for all of their reporting needs.

There were some issues in the first few weeks with the services crashing with little or no meaningful messages in the log files, but these seemed to clear up and no issues have been encountered since. They have been put down to the developers being a little over enthusiastic with what they were trying as they were learning the product. Now they know what they are doing, all is ok.

This has not been an issue so far for this client, they are still in the early days of building their BI estate.

No technical support has been requested so far from the vendor.

Excel was the original solution. As the company was young and the quantity of data still relatively small, Excel was the obvious, easy and cheap choice. The growth of the company has now reached the point where the use of Excel is becoming problematic – the quantity of data needed to be downloaded, the size of the Excel file, maintenance of the VBA/Macro code in the sheets and access to the files by users out on the road were all issues that needed to be addressed.

The initial installation and configuration was relatively straightforward. Installing the software is a little complex for someone doing it for the first time; there are quite a few steps, but it was just a case of slowly working through them.

The big boon for this client was that they already had a data warehouse containing the data required for reporting; it was currently being assembled by an overnight process and then manually downloaded into Excel. OBIEE was able to directly connect to this warehouse and access the table/view objects within. The client was quickly able to start producing some of the simpler reports.

For this client, the licensing requirements where initially quite simple; they knew how many users they intended to provide the reports to, so they only purchased the licenses for them. The long-term intention is to incorporate more reports and, hence, service more users within the company, but they know they can extend the licenses as and when required. In this scenario the advice is quite simple – start small and grow as you need to; there is no point buying enterprise-wide licenses until you need to.

The client was already an Oracle database user, so Oracle’s Business Intelligence product was the obvious first port of call when looking for a better reporting solution. I do not know how seriously they looked at other products.

For a company just starting out in the world of BI reporting, this product, along with most other BI reporting products, is an expensive tool to buy, if you just want to play around and see what BI can do. It contains so many features, you can easily get caught up trying them all out and never actually deliver anything meaningful.

To get the most out of the product, you need to know what it is you are trying to achieve – what reports you want to produce, where the data comes from, how you want to provide those reports to the users. You can then quickly start to deliver benefit from the product just using the features you actually need. Later on, you can start looking at additional features to see what else it can do for you.

The product has a huge range of features as well as script/API interfaces to plug in others. However, many of the features are a little too complex to simply use ‘out of the box’. It is a product that Oracle are constantly developing and each release is better than the last, but each release also adds more features that make it even more complex. It is a comprehensive reporting solution, not a simple reporting solution!