Oracle OBIEE Reviews

Just as any business intelligence tool, the top five core expectations of any BI tool is to be able to:

1. Build adhoc reports (drag & drop) - for data discovery/exploration as well as to drive insight
2. Schedule set cadence reports - to avoid manual running of the report as well as including a broader audience to share with to further avoid any manual bottleneck processes, if this feature were not available
3. Visualization and Dashboards - basic & advanced (OBIEE offers both) - adhoc reports/data is great when one has enough time at hand to build great charts. What if the effort can be done just once and used many times? OBIEE out-of-the-box has a great selection of visualization choices, and others can be greatly customized with the right technical expertise
4. Offline data availability - OBIEE Briefing Book offers the data to be available even offline, and when connection is available can easily update to get the latest information; as suppose to the alternative of downloading PDF before going offline, and re-downloading when data refreshes
5. Customization - I simply cannot think of anything in OBIEE that cannot be customized, not to mention that APIs can also be built on-top for easy data communication with other tools

Taking top five features in mind:

1. Build adhoc reports (drag & drop) - our team and stakeholders build analysis everyday to find different ways to slice and dice the data to better analyze the business and produce actionable insight
2. Schedule set cadence reports - very heavily used feature across organization
3. Visualization and Dashboards (basic & advanced OBIEE offers both) - even executive dashboards are built using OBIEE given the flexibility of the tool
4. Offline data availability - used while traveling with peace of mind without having to worry about internet connection to stay connected with the data
5. Customization - we customized the tool to standardize to the corporate color pallet and to stay consistent.

Overall OBIEE is a great tool; however, the architecture of implementation for IT folks, and ease of use for a not-too-technical audience has room for improvement.

I have used OBIEE for the past five years.

Stability of OBIEE is very dependent on, and varies on, the hardware and Operating Systems of every organization. From experience, I have noticed OBIEE running on Linux has very few stability issues when compared to Windows.

The issue comes down to the learning curve of the product, and knowing exactly what to do as suppose to trial and error. Overall, OBIEE can scale with no issues.

It's great.

Overall, it's good as it can be improved.

My organization has been using OBIEE for the duration I have been employed.

The overall architecture of getting OBIEE up and running is complex and the sequence must be followed very attentively.

It was implemented in house.

I am sure the team has evaluated other products; and as a matter of fact, I am re-evaluating BI products as we speak, and OBIEE is one of the options on the table.

Be sure to know exactly what to do before doing anything, to save cycle time. And/or seek expertise in the field who have done it before and know the ins and outs of the product.

• Charts
• Navigation
• Drill Downs
• Variables especially- session variables
• Maps

For building charts and graphical representations, we don't have to do much work, so in that area it's good.

Customers are expecting many out of box things, which, currently, OBIEE doesn't support. e.g. customers are expecting pop up boxes with messages, and navigation. There are lots of buttons for navigating, downloading and invoking etc. Just like in the current version of OBIEE, we are dragging sections, text boxes in building the dashboard, in the same way as we can get pop up boxes, and buttons, we don't need to write Javascripts. In the market, we are getting many additional tools.

I've been using this product for the past three years. As I'm working as an OBIEE Developer, I am using this tool most of the time.

There were no big issues.

There were no big issues.

There were no big issues.

Average. Their guys are taking much time in resolving issues. They might be experts, but still there is lot of lag in delivering good support.

It provides our customers the ability to build simple or complex reports effortlessly. The existence of the Business Model and Mapping (BMM) layer is critical in providing numerous ways to model our data to fit a given project/set of requirements.

It has allowed us to provide our external users the ability to create custom reports while adding a complex object security framework not found when dealing with internal users.

Cross-dimensional reporting was a must and although this tool does not easily implement this, it still allowed us to model our data as necessary in order to deliver this requirement.

The UI needs to be updated. We had some people reference it as “1995” in ways of looks. The application itself does not work well with cross-dimensional reporting out of the box (there are no official documentation on how this can be implemented but unofficial online user blogs have provided us with some work-around solutions).

I've used it for three and a half years.

There were no significant issues.

No issues encountered.

We had some issues with not being compatible with some “compatible” servers.

8/10.

8/10.

There are some cheaper options in the market. We are currently planning on using another platform outside our US market due to cost. However, some platform options are not as robust as OBIEE.

Careful consideration has to be given when evaluating cost over features/performance just like any other ROI project.

if your project involves a lot of cross-dimensional reporting, you will encounter some pain points along the way setting up the RPD but solutions are available online.

If you are looking for a quick visualization solution, then look for Tableau, but if you want a deep, proven reporting tool (with relatively weak visualization features), OBIEE is actually pretty good.

• BI Publisher
• Oracle Maps
• MS Office integration

It has helped provide ad hoc reports. These improve the business by doing forecasting, as well as analyzing the existing reports with old data.

• OBIEE maps
• BI Publisher

I've used it for the last five years.

There were issues encountered.

There were some issues encountered with stability.

There were some issues encountered with scalability.

It's good.

It's good.

No solution was in place previously.

It was straightforward.

My team did the implementation and integration.

• BI Dashboards
• BI Publisher

We previously used a stand-alone desktop-based business reporting tool which did not enable us to maintain a single source of truth, or provide users with pervasive intelligence. However, with this enterprise solution, we have less reliance on the MIS teams to produce reports. Management and operational teams have access to information as and when they need it, insights pop up on a daily basis, and the business has transformed into a knowledge-empowered operation, with decisions at all levels being made on facts rather than guess work.

• Tighter integration of BI Publisher with RPD/BI answers is essential
• Enhanced big data tools will be valuable for industries like ours
• Simplified analysis drill-down setups
• Running BIP report once in the interactive view should not require a rerun when the view is switched, for example, to HTML or Excel

I've been using OBIEE for eight years in total. It's been three years on v11g, and prior to that I had been using v10 since 2007.

No issues with deployment.

We have experienced bottlenecks due to an increased load causing users to fail to login, or too many stuck threads. Perhaps the linkage between BI and Weblogic needs to be optimized to improve stability.

No issues with or scalability.

Customer service in general, is responsive enough to keep you aware of the fact that someone is looking into your issue.

Technical Support is only good when issues are escalated to the development or third line support teams.

Other solutions have been explored before. My reasoning for recommending OBIEE for my organization was that apart from having previous experience working in older versions, and being aware of its scalability, was that most of the banks systems are Oracle based which meant seamless integration. We also wanted to explore deployment of the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Analytics Server which comes inbuilt with OBIEE.

It was straightforward because we had external assistance. However, due to the expertise we developed, we were able to build and test our backup server from scratch internally. We also restored the Exalytics system with ease after power issues caused the disks to crash.

Both sides need to be part of the team at each stage of deployment so that knowledge transfer is effective. The tendency for most vendors, however, is to avoid too much knowledge transfer for obvious reasons.

There is a need for a per CPU rather than per user license for OBIEE as this impacts the number of users that can be deployed, and therefore the level of security of data throughout the system.

The data modeling tier (called repository in Oracle BI technology) lets the user build and manage flexible, stable solutions for a large number of data sources, and business reporting areas.

I use the product to realize reporting and dashboard solutions on several telecommunication network test suites, thus not for any company organization aspect.

The catalog tool (to create report and dashboard)is not intuitive or easy to use. There are also some low severity bugs (up the 11.1.1.7 release).

I've used it for five years.

The product does not provide an automatic system maintenance service, thus log files continue to be collected on the disk up until it is full and it causes the whole platform stop. It requires continuous manual monitoring and deletion of log files.

The platform is powerful, scalable and flexible, but requires a huge commitment in term of people expertise in system and on the product.

6/10 - in some case they don’t help completely in finding smart solutions or workarounds for our issues.

We used Business Objects XI, and we switched to Oracle for a more impressive view, and a more interactive dashboard. OBIEE is also better equipped for the data modeling functionalities tier, and integrations.

It was complex, firstly for the platform setup, and secondly, it is required to have a large amount of knowledge and experience of the product before becoming an expert.

We implemented it in-house.

Our customer is an enterprise that has over 120 entities. It used to take a lot of time (around 15 days) to collect data and generate reports for their performance. After OBIEE was implemented and some processes improved, our customer is now able to review their monthly performance with a clearly analyzed pattern within 5 days.

I've been using it for three years. I started with OBIEE 11g (11.1.1.5), and upgraded it to 11.1.1.6 and 11.1.1.7 afterward.

We did not encounter any serious issues when we deployed the tool.

OBIEE is a little unstable in our environment. The server/service has to reboot/restart every couple days, otherwise, users will see errors when they access reports.

I am not going to rate Oracle's support high. It took too many times to collect logs and screen shots, and talk to a support guy. And they still have to go back to R&D once they confirm the issue was product related. It took another loop to communicate with R&D guys, and there almost 70% of thje issues were treated as a "Fix in the Roadmap," which means we won't get a hotfix. We suffer quite a lot when we have to tell our customers that some bugs will not be fixed until it's in the roadmap, and even then, a few years later.

Our customer choose OBIEE as their reporting tool before we assisted them with implementation. I used TIBCO Spotfire after this project, and it's quite a different product. It seems business users will use a so called "analytic tools" such as Spotfire more often than "BI tools" like OBIEE or BO. Since their requirements become much more dynamic, they may not even know what they are looking for, or what questions they suppose to answer. BI tools needs too much IT effort for ETL and modeling to enable users to read the report. However, some questions cannot wait that long, and users need to know the answer as quickly as possible. On the other hand, analytic tools just need raw data and users can those data to generate reports whatever they need for whatever questions/purposes (if they know what those data means well and have some basic knowledge with database).

The setup is quite straightforward, unless you need to deploy with a cluster. Components in a model/presentation layer can do it simply by dragging and dropping, if all the calculations are done in the database. Although, some settings,such as "Write Back", is not that easy. They need to be configured, but you have no idea where to configure it unless you go through the documentation, and even some blogs perhaps.

I helped implement it as part of the vendor-side team.

Just keep the model as simple as possible, it'll make works much easier afterward.

It has easy integration with Oracle DB for clients who run an Oracle Warehouse.

It has given clients visibility into their operations from a holistic viewpoint. In my current project, we are using the tool to track movement of cases, managements, and clients are able to trace where their cases are and how long they have been in the different stations in the organization. This has improved on the overall performance of the organization as there is accountability.

There is a need to improve on meta data definition, for instance we should have one Dat Dimension that allows heterogeneous definitions. At the moment, every subject area has a copy, this is repetitive effort. There is a need to easily report from different facts without having to circumvent the system's normal design.

Metadata management, more visualizations as there aren't many, i.e. heat maps. The Dashboard layout area could be enhanced to allow more intuitive designs, as the limitations of having Sections and Columns in the sort of order they can in can inhibit exciting designs. Exporting of related Physical Joins without having to go to each join to extract.

I've used it for eight years.

Yes, at one client we upgraded versions and lost functionality due to the fact that Oracle had stopped supporting Office 2007. In the newer versions, we had to go through a lot of trouble to get the functionality to work, it was a very simple thing. In the newer version, when we exported graphs it ignored the lines and the tables were merged into a single line, and you can imagine why the management were not happy with that.

5/10 - I really believe that they can improve in customer service.

6/10

We did use something previously, and we changed as we wanted better functionality and stability.

I have not dealt with implementations a lot.

We used a mixed team. The vendor had guys that knew what they were doing, even at some point, better than the Oracle team.

Pricing of the training should be lowered to allow more new entrants into the the field. If the price is too high, mainly existing partners can afford it, and the market does not grow. The licensing is fair, but they should try and bundle the licensing cost as licensing as almost every component tends to hike the overall price.

I have worked on Microstrategy a lot and the Microsoft platform. I find that Microstrategy is advanced in the Mobile and Visual display and is easy to use, but Microsoft is also easy to use but still has a lot of things they need to improve on.

It's a very good platform provided you have a good strategy and a strong team around.