Oracle OBIEE Reviews

• Data Warehouse Application Console
• Analytics
• Inter Process Communication

Several KPI reports and different analytical reports can be generated for the operations team.

I have developed datamarts from scratch using OBIEE and ODI as well for a government department in charge of agriculture and food throughout Mexico.

Additionally, it was used to generate several KPIs for a nation-wide logistics company who were distributing all the medicines for government-provided social security insurance.

• DAC
• Siebel Analytics
• BI Server

I've used it for four years.

There is an issue with the handling of the cache in the BI server.

There was an issue upgrading from 10g to 11g.

9/10.

9/10.

I haven't used another solution.

It was complex because the installation of the product presented some problems, and there was not much information about it. The issues were with security for the BI server and the middleware.

We did it in-house.

It is high.

No other options were evaluated.

Be well prepared with the product details from installation to implementation. Be sure you have a support account.

We mainly use it for reporting purposes, i.e., generating reports especially for the business. We use it for the business data analysis and metrics purposes as well. For this, we have been using OBIEE for quite a long time.

It is beneficial for us because most of our reports are on OBIEE. It's not only for data analysis. We use it for corporate year-end financial purposes as well. We use it for the backlog management, for example, to check how much is the backlog or how much is the shipment amount and for similar kind of data. We are using OBIEE for such purposes.

We are into the Oracle Supply Chain which involves the process from auto-booking to shipment. They bring the data from Oracle apps to Oracle Arch Work. There is a middle layer which is called ODS. From ODS, they put the data in the OBIEE product. From there, the IT teams create all the attributes, we bag them there and in this way, we can generate our own reports. That is how we have been using this product.

It is useful for us especially for the quarter-end data analysis or to improve any metrics; in this way, we use OBIEE for data analysis purpose.

Some of the additional features required are that it should be more user-friendly. Sometimes, when we use the drag-and-drop feature it does not drag the object and needs to be user-friendly. It's not available today.

If it would be more flexible, that would be helpful.

It's stable. The data is 100% accurate. In regards to stability, it's good. Only sometimes, maintenance is an issue, otherwise the performance is OK.

The scalability is good because it depends on how you upgrade your OBIEE.

We have a lot of companies such as Windows and we chose the best IT teams. They have good architecture and we will do the screening and get the best to resolve the issues.

We were previously using some other software from a different company but we weren't able to find all the data. We were looking for PL/SQL data and this product was able to be get us a lot of data. We need a lot of data for hypnotics purpose, for this reason we chose the Oracle product.

The most important criteria while choosing a vendor would be that they should improve the performance and the product should be user-friendly. Most of the times, we want to use less data and the data should be improved.

The setup was OK and it was not that complex. It was quite straightforward.

We are always looking for the best features that are available. Already, Oracle has advanced technology, which is the reason that we have chosen OBIEE compared to other products.

You should shop around but for me this is the best solution. As per the cost factor as well, it is a cost-effective product.

The attributes should be more user-friendly, other than that the other features of this product such as performance, reporting structure and architecture are good.

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 is flexible, which is important. It has a previewing script, so it's easy for us to convert from Oracle Financial to OBIEE.

I know the financial users are very happy with the analytical reporting results.

I think that the system catalog. The system catalog is metadata not only for the OBIEE; it can also be communicated with other incoming sources. It doesn't matter what the source is that it's coming from, maybe from EBS, maybe from PeopleSoft. Then you can interface with the other source’s system metadata to complete the integration.

I think that in the data warehouse, you need to have an ETL layer for imported data, ODS layer, warehouse layer, an information layer. I would prefer that you could extract it complete from the source into the database, and stage it there.

Since we only just implemented it about 1.5 years ago, we still haven't gone live yet. We still have a lot of security issues that need to be resolved, so we don't know.

Since we are a very small organization of only about 2,000 employees, scale is not a big issue for us.

We were using MicroStrategy. Before that we were using Oracle Discoverer. We moved from Oracle Discoverer to MicroStrategy, and we eventually came to OBIEE. I think that we probably switched because of the vendor, and that it is more scalable because Oracle supports this product. So the long-term investment is better than going with MicroStrategy.

We have been using Essbase. We run a lot of smart view reports, which have been valuable to our business.

There should be additional features like planning and budgeting. It is pretty complex without having to run any additional ad hoc reports, so having built in reports like that would be nice.

We have been using the product for more than a year.

We have some stability issues. We periodically refresh the data from the Oracle EBS to OBIEE. Sometimes you can’t see the data and we have to run ad hoc reports to push us through that confusion.

It is going to meet our needs for the future. We are planning to implement EPM as well.

They are good. We go to Oracle support when we have critical issues, otherwise we go to the community.

Initially, we were using all Oracle products and a program called GL1. GL1 is an external plug-in that we used with Excel to run reports with the database. It was not robust like the work we have with OBIEE, which led us to transition.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had an issue with the servers, but other than that it was smooth.

Go with OBIEE with smart view. If you are in planning and budgeting, also get EPM. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

• 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 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.

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

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.

We primarily use the solution to take reports and for its dashboards.

The visualization is very good.

From an end-user perspective, it's a very user-friendly environment.

There are pages about its limitations in Gartner documents. My understanding is they are working to improve themselves. There aren't any really big issues and they're already in the cloud, therefore, largely there isn't too much that's lacking.

The pricing model could be improved. Right now, it's quite confusing. Many customers have this feeling that it's a super-expensive option.

Currently, the solution is based on three pillars. The first is the BI publisher and it used to be a single product. The second is Oracle and Oracle Business Intelligence, the core component. It used to be a CBO product. Then, thirdly, you have this new Oracle visual analyzer. Now, all of these are wrapped into one Oracle analytics product. However, the integration between (or among) these three products is not 100% complete. This is the area where improvements can be made.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years at this point. It's been a while.

It's pretty stable. Now that it's the cloud era, the company is supporting it 24/7. If there is any issue, it's very well supported. It's very stable in our eyes. 

The support is quite good. You do pay for it, however, it's available when you need it. We're quite satisfied with the level of service provided.

I have some experience with Microsoft Power BI.

Power BI is more self-service BI oriented. It originated in the era of self-service BI. That's both a plus and minus, depending on what you are looking for. For example, if you prefer more self-service oriented solutions, you get more freedom with Power BI. You provide your business users with more freedom and that could be good or bad. It depends on the situation. 

Oracle Business Intelligence comes from the era of more IT-driven business intelligence solutions. It's more metadata-driven. You can establish stronger governance with Oracle BI in terms of implementing policies and data, data filtering, data governance, and user rights, etc. Ironically, Power BI wants to have more options to be tightly governed, and Oracle is trying to be more self-service oriented. 

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. Deployment typically takes three days or so.

The solution has a reputation for being expensive and has a confusing pricing model. There aren't extra fees on top of the main licensing costs, however.

We're an Oracle partner.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

The solution is better suited for medium or large organizations, mostly due to the high price tag. A smaller company would be hard-pressed to afford it.

That said, I would recommend it to others to use.