Companies that maintain multiple BI products from different vendors soon find costs in a multitude of areas.  Software maintenance spread though multiple providers equals separate charges annually that are typically 15% of the license cost before discounts.  User and IT training would come from a variety of sources increasing training costs not to mention scheduling and logistics hassles and employee time costs.   Besides financial ramifications, fragmentation decreases usage.  Managers would need to use varied systems with multiple interfaces and would create extra work and effort.  This extra time and training could discourage further analytics and the overall pursuit of answers, which is the very reason for BI’s existence in the first place.

The biggest challenge for a company is choosing the best solution that fits their current needs and more importantly their needs for the future.  Scalability is an important criteria in evaluating these solutions and in the coming months the front runners should become more apparent in the market.

An enterprise approach that combines the components such as OLAP, Data Warehousing, ETL, Dashboard, Reporting and Analytics is not only necessary but achievable.  Companies can now bring together the best in BI solutions to match their every data need.  TechStone recommends a brief but thorough evaluation of the players in the market and to take advantage of the current offerings.

Oracle is the worlds #1 leader in business analytics software.  Their unified platform approach decreases the need for point product tools and increases data quality and the speed in which data is delivered to the end users.  Oracle started in the BI market first delivering a data warehouse platform.  Since 2003, Oracle has introduced a new set of BI tools for query and reporting providing the complete and unified solution.  Below is a list of Oracle’s offerings:

Data Warehousing Platform: includes Oracle Database 10g with Oracle OLAP and Oracle Data Mining engines and Oracle BI Warehouse Builder

Business Intelligence Tools: includes Oracle BI Discoverer, Oracle Spreadsheet Add-in, Oracle BI Data Miner and Oracle Reports Services

Analytic Applications:  includes Oracle Daily Business Intelligence, Oracle Balanced Scorecard, Oracle Planning and Budgeting, Oracle Activity Based Management and Oracle Performance Analyzer


The acquisition of Siebel has produced the integration of Siebel’s Business Analytics solution with Oracle’s traditional BI platform.  This BI solution is currently used by employees at Microsoft as well as HP.  Oracle’s BI Enterprise Edition provides business intelligence access across all departments within an organization.  This ‘pre-built’ solution replaces the tools in the marketplace.  It blends business intelligence with operations using guided analytics reducing the headache of creating KPI’s. 

The Enterprise Edition is also platform agnostic with the ability to be run with SAP, SQL, etc..  It’s hot-pluggable and can run on any O.S., database, security platform, etc..  TechStone provides expertise in helping clients plan their BI initiatives as well as implement these best of breed solutions.