Oracle OBIEE Reviews

• Integrated search options
• Oracle scorecards
• Pivot tables
• Map views

When reports are developed in a way that show the work done in time, work done but not in time, and work not done at all, they drive the customers to pay attention to the lagging areas. This encourages everyone to work positively towards achieving the fixed goal in hand.

Some of the legacy BI publisher features have been discarded in the newer versions. Having them would help the product. The ability to provide column description upon hovering on the header would be of real help.

I've used it for five years.

No major issues.

No major issues.

Some of the issues were in regards to the LDAP authentication setup, but it was resolved.

Customer Service:

7/10.

Technical Support:

7/10.

No previous solution was in place.

It was pretty straightforward and simple. All we had to do was follow the installation manual, which provides a UI to setup the tool.

It was done in-house.

All the ventures that were started based off of this product were successful. The users were actively using the dashboards and reports, while the executive level management were able to view the functioning of their respective organizations on high-level view.

Ensure you purchase a complete enterprise package from Oracle so you can get the full benefit of OBIEE.

• Crystal Reports
• SQR Reports

Ensure the application server and the web server are installed and configured as recommended.

• Delta extracts
• Scheduler
• Multiple delivery options
• Word and Excel integration to create report templates

A lot of manual processes, e-forms and paper forms were replaced by automated interfaces and reports.

Customer support and documentation.

I've used it for 15 months.

No, we're using the cloud service.

No issues encountered.

There are slow processing times sometimes, and with it being a cloud solution, the infrastructure is out of our control.

Customer Service:

4/10.

Technical Support:

3/10.

No, we were switching from manual business processes.

It was quite complex, due to many business-specific requirements. OTB extracts and reports couldn't be used, so customized ones were created.

Two external vendors, one from the US with a high level of expertise and one from Australia with a medium level of expertise.

It's a good product with a lot of functionality, customization, a relative easy-of-use.

- Web-based features and the possibilities it offers to analysts and developers to design reports and access the dashboard from a web browser. No need to install an application onto your laptop.

- Self-serve interactive reporting

- Map-based visualizations (MapViewer)

- Mobile app designer

- Mobile security toolkit (you can download the sources and customize it and generate your enterprise iOS application)

It helps us in quick-wins development to get the trust of users.

- Make the interactive dashboards more responsive

- Give the possibility to deploy multiple RPD productions

- Allow hot deployment of repository file (RPD) without restarting services

5 years

- All the time. The upgrade process is not clear and I encountered issues in processing it.

- Charts require flash to be rendered, but by 11.1.1.9, we can turn off flash and use html chart.

8

-Yes, SAP BW (Business Explorer).

- We were looking for more user-friendly reports/charts and tools to speed up our development. OBIEE does that.

Initial setup was complex because we needed many components:

1) A database to store the OBIEE master data (MDS and BIPLATFORM schema)

2) A web logic server to host the Java component.

3) After that, you need to know how to start all components in sequential order:

Admin Server->Node Manager->Managed Server->opmnctl

In-house

SAP Business Object, IBM Cognos

1) The integration with SAP BW is not so easy, but it's possible through XMLA.

So if your data warehouse is under SAP BW, you have to be careful in your choice of OBIEE because you will face integration and performance issues.

2) Also, the OBIEE Administration Tool is not for non-IT people. So you will need IT to design your repository properly before the analyst will be able to design reports and dashboard.

3) I found Tableau more user friendly and productive than OBIEE. So, I advise to also look there.

• Governance
• Centralized metadata model
• Integration (security, external visualizations, etc.)

Better and more interactive visualizations.

8 years

Clustering and security (SSL, SSO, etc) can be tough at times.

Support team is timely with responses, but working out through issues can take some time.

Yes, used Cognos (IBM) previously. Switch was due to management decision.

Initial (simple) set up is straight forward, but complex environments (multiple nodes, complex security requirements) can be complicated. That said, once set up the tool is very flexible and addresses enterprise-wide requirements

This is a good solution, but its strengths (centralized, secure, enterprise-wide reporting) can also be seen as weaknesses if you are looking for a more flexible, lighter-footprint reporting package with better visuals. That said, newer versions of the tool have gone a long way to catch up on the visuals side (new views, external viz options, etc) and flexibility as well (BI Cloud Service).

Dashboards, Alerts, BI Publisher. Together these 3 features make this product a great tool to present data. Users can also create ad hoc analyses easily. Integrates very well with a wide variety of data sources making it easy to present data from multiple sources in a single place.

One stop shop for all reporting, data integrity, and compliance with company standards.

Performance for large data sets.

12 years

Setting up SSL can be complex. Documentation is confusing. But other sources of information such as blogs really help.

Sometimes when lots of users get in and try to run the same report at the same time with different parameters.

Customer Service:

Prompt but not always helpful.

Technical Support:

Poor

Depends on the requirements and infrastructure, but proper planning makes it pretty straightforward.

In-house

Being rollover customers from a previously owned company there was confusion about licensing. Talking to an Oracle rep helped.

Excellent BI tool that is flexible and user-friendly, and getting better with each new release.

Powerful, interactive and high performance reports and dashboards.

More reports views and enhance user interactivity.

Around 6 years, previously 10g but now 11g.

If you use Arabic reports names in the default reports path on windows you will face "Path too long" problem because all names are encrypted in hexadecimal format.

Immediate shutdown for services may crash the system.

No issues encountered.

No

Straightforward set-up.

No.

Go ahead it is a very good, stable and reliable product.

The features of OBIEE most important to me and my organization are Interactive Dashboards, Ad-hoc Analysis & Enterprise Reporting. We also extensively use the Repository services to create Data layers.

We have created various standard reports which are used extensively in my organization and help us to save upon duplication and data errors. OBIEE has also helped my organization to consolidate all the sources of data and create conformity between the data and hierarchy of all the sources.

One of the major areas for improvement on this product is that it should be made friendlier to the end user. Also, there should be a functionality added where we can provide a comprehensive user guide on the report itself rather than outside the dashboard.

Being a Business Intelligence Suite it provides some best in class features on paper, but after working upon its implementation in my organization for past year, I have understood that it has various technical limitations.

I've used OBIEE 11g for one year and was trained for six months by Oracle and Internal Trainings.

As my organization works in the BFSI sector, the size of data that our systems produce every day is immense. I feel OBIEE is still not able to fully handle that amount of data and that creates deployment issues.

The overall OBIEE architecture is quiet stable. Although, we have faced issues infrequently where the application has crashed.

OBIEE is very scalable and can handle a large number of users simultaneously. Although, it gets slower on heavy usage on a lot of machines.

Customer Service:

I would rate the Customer Service for OBIEE from Oracle support team at 8/10. They are quiet good at responding to the queries.

Technical Support:

I would rate the Technical Support for OBIEE from Oracle support team at 6/10. A lot of times they would just ask to update to the latest version when asked for a specific functionality.

Previously we were using Peoplesoft based Nvision reports. The major reason for switching to OBIEE was that it was not a complete BI solution. Also, Oracle had stopped the support for Peoplesoft which made it more vulnerable.

We had a mix of vendor team and in-house resources and both teams were working simultaneously. The vendor team worked well at the time of initial setup but recently we decided to roll off the majority of the vendor resources because of cost concerns.

We did evaluate other options such as Cognos, SAP BO. As all our database architecture is based on Oracle Based technologies such as Essbase, Hyperion etc, we went on to implement Oracle BI.

Exalytics combined with Exadata server makes it possible to query ~ 50TB of datamart data (uncompressed size), that's really great and ~ 1000 of simultaneous requests.

In the past it was not possible to join data from so many different sources due to the performance limitations imposed by the size of the data

Self service BI. It's clear that Endeca tends to be integrated into BIFS and probably self-service functionality will be covered by Endeca.

3 years

Sometime copy-paste of report metadata is quite complicated.

No

No, scalability is a big positive for the product.

We didn't get into contact with support. From previous projects I have very various experience with Oracle support. It happened to me to get very helpful solutions almost immediately, in other cases, we were just ping-ponging emails, but no breakthrough.

No

The initial setup was pretty complex due to the fact that very complicated aggregation rules were defined, but I think this would have even more complicated to be implemented with other BI tools.

I was part of a vendor team.

N/A

We are not involved in this phase.

Oracle BI combined with Exadata/Exalytics is a perfect tool for ROLAP/HOLAP type reports especially for extreme data sizes. I don't know any other tool suitable for that.