Oracle OBIEE Reviews

The solution is robust and it's so easy to understand, use, and visualize the data. Even a newbie can understand reporting. However, when it comes to coding in the back-end, you need some knowledge.

I like its capability of utilizing big data volume.

It definitely improves all organizations that use it for reporting their analytics. However, it’s not just about reporting. It provides analytics based upon different fields, such as sales, booking, or leads.

The knowledge it provides helps us make decisions about how our business is growing, where to stop, where to start, and where to accelerate. It has a huge impact.

The big data visualization can be improved.

It's a pretty stable product.

It scales well. It has a robust way in which it manages the humongous amount of data and reporting while recording. It’s phenomenal.

Technical support is good, but you don’t get immediate response from them. If you follow up with them, then they will help you out.

I was involved in the installation multiple times. It was straightforward, at least with the earlier versions. With the new versions, there are some issues you might face. If you have the proper documentation, then you won't have any issues.

We evaluated a couple of other products, such as SAP BusinessObjects, but they had limitations. We decided on this solution because it fits our business needs.

I like this solution. It is a robust product and it was suitable for the needs of the industry that I work in.

My advice to others depends on the data volume and what kind of data you want to represent. If the volume is very high and you want an enterprise solution where there are a number of concurrent users, I would suggest this solution.

If you have a different data set and the number of concurrent users is less, then I would suggest a different solution, such as SAP BusinessObjects.

When looking for a vendor, support is the most important thing. The second thing is reliability with a promise that it will be a stable product and you will get 24/7 service.

The cost factor is the most valuable feature. It's very cheap to deploy it enterprise-wide without having to worry about breaking the bank.

The biggest advantage that I find is the centralized data governance, i.e., one version of truth is critical for any business. For me, OBIEE provides that one version of truth.

The visualizations and usability aspects in this product can be improved a lot. Even now, I constantly hear people comparing Tableau to OBIEE and how Tableau has a better UI and is easier to use compared to OBIEE, which is a bit difficult.

It does need some level of tuning but more or less, it is stable.

We have deployed it enterprise-wide and it works well for us.

Opening a ticket with the support team can be frustrating. It takes a long time to resolve the issue.

We did not look at any other products.

The setup process was straightforward.

It's self-explanatory and not much guidance is needed.

However, you should not skimp on the hardware. It's a hardware-intensive product, so you must make sure you have good hardware.

I think Answers, the ability to create ad hoc reports for the business, is the most valuable feature. They really like that.

It definitely provides benefits for analyzing data.

I think there should be a few more features like the other BI tools in the market, kind of like the self-service approach of gathering data and then integrating the information.

Stability is 9 out of 10. It's pretty stable, but once in a while, we get some issues.

I'd say there are some limitations. One of my projects is looking for graphics. There's some limitation on graph and the charting capabilities; it couldn't do a Gantt chart, for example.

Oracle support is sometimes pretty vague, and the way they analyze the issue or try to troubleshoot, it's very timely. It takes a long time.

When I started with the company, we already had it.

It's a very good tool. It will satisfy a lot of the needs, but I think there's room for improvement.

What I like about OBIEE is the kind of interface we have at OBIEE gives us all the financial reporting, all the operational reporting, as well as the delivery reporting. All of these reporting modules are quite good at OBIEE, and they actually help us.

It's quite faster, the way it is integrated with the whole Oracle ecosystem. Speed is one of the key issues. You don't like clicking on something and just waiting for even a few minutes. It becomes a pain; so performance is the key when it comes to using OBIEE.

I just saw somewhere, OBIEE on cloud: that could be the good thing. Right now, what we have is OBIEE on premise. Certainly, I cannot currently check the reports on my mobile. But that could be one advantage OBIEE would have on cloud, once they move.

Certainly the look and feel of the user interface is something should be improved further.

I have been using it for three years.

I've been using it for the last three years, and we never faced any such issues.

It is certainly scalable. Obviously, I can't predict how it will respond to millions of users working, but certainly a few thousand. We have added, subtracted, and soon, and it works perfectly.

We get quite good support if we enter a service request, and so forth. It's good.

Obviously, I can't answer that because, as an end user, setup is more a matter of configuring parameters, like, if I need to generate certain reports on basis of certain dimensions, for different quarters, and so forth. Apart from that, as an end user, I don't customize or configure the application.

Obviously, I would prefer a product which was integrated with the whole Oracle ecosystem. If you are already using an Oracle ecosystem without some database, an ERP solution ,or integrations and so forth, OBIEE is a natural choice in that case. Obviously, there some advantages with the ecosystem, and it works perfectly fine for us.

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.

• 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.

The capability to implement business and data manipulation logic in the RPD provides a very powerful interface for the developers to work on.

We've had a situation where we had data residing in different databases and we wanted to have a robust reporting solution for one of our verticals. OBIEE helped us in achieving that and we were able to build a solution around it which is now widely used throughout the organization.

The ease of building reports can be improved in the product. In an era where strong visualization tools like Tableau and QlikView are becoming popular, it is very important that Oracle looks into this aspect.

I've been using OBIEE for over four years now. During this time, I've seen the evolution of the product from 10g to 11g.

I would rate the level of customer service to be very high. The support was extensive and timely. I would rate it 8 out of 10.

We were able to get answers to our technical queries fairly quickly. I would rate the level of technical support at 8 out of 10.

The earlier scenario of data reporting was mainly based out of Excel, which was neither robust nor stable. There was no security setup and since everyone had his/her own copy of the Excel sheet, there was no single source of truth.

These issues prompted us to move towards OBIEE as a solution.

The initial setup and configuration of the product was complex as it involved a lot of steps. We also encountered a few errors during installation, but with the help of technical support, we were able to resolve those.

Some of the most outstanding features of OBIEE is both its scalability and dependability. OBIEE is worthy of its ‘Enterprise’ moniker as it can handle any amount of end-to-end data thrown at it. But these strengths can only be realized if the business and engineering teams work diligently to define not only the various levels of data aggregation, but also clearly define the meta-data in order to establish efficient drill-down hierarchies and relationships. 

With proper table design plus good data governance, OBIEE can serve as the central delivery mechanism that brings insight into the business layer of almost any size of company.

With a wide array of internal customers, OBIEE has helped us provide a many-to-one Business Intelligence relationship. By transforming the company’s performance data into various dashboard perspectives, each information consumer can select a customized dashboard view. The result is to empower the business user to ‘self-serve’ some of their regular and most important reporting needs. 

This reduces the amount of noisy communication between the business and OBIEE power users within the company. It increases the speed of analysis, and it provides an unwavering consistency across the dashboards and downloaded reports.

In today’s business intelligence environment, nimbleness and flexibility are valued on par with scalability and dependability. Historically, Excel was perfectly aligned with the former two while enterprise solutions held firmly to the latter two. It was the business analyst’s conundrum to work seamlessly between the micro- and macro-solutions. Now, BI entrants into the market are challenging that paradigm, providing tools that span all four characteristics and this is where OBIEE is looking somewhat dated. 

OBIEE requires a lot of metadata customization that can only be achieved by individuals with very specific skill sets. This includes Oracle developers, web developers (including XML), Siebel, and more. These skill sets may even reside in different departments yet the business user depends on each to ensure that their KPI dashboard is updated with the latest segmentations and that the drill-down reports open up quickly. These challenges may ease somewhat with the introduction of Oracle's Visual Analyzer, however it is too young a product to tell how fast it will move up the development curve.

As the BI space continues to evolve, many business analysts are focusing more on complementary solutions that, although they may not be as enterprise-worthy in scope, are extremely flexible, easy to customize, and can get the analyst the needed insight without having to overcome some of the development hurdles in OBIEE.

OBIEE is as powerful as the Oracle backbone upon which it runs, but it will not serve the business as effectively as it could if there is not a commitment to align engineering resources with the needs of the business. With the right skill sets and a defined corporate data governance strategy, OBIEE can be a powerful BI engine for almost any company.

Over the past few years, OBIEE has become less important for us in the analytics group. In order to lead a proactive data discovery group, OBIEE just doesn’t provide enough flexibility. We are constantly blending various data sources together, creating on-the-fly segmentations, and iterating through potential dashboards. With OBIEE in a production environment, the business users cannot wait for the slowly moving development pipeline, QA, and scheduled code releases. As a result, we develop our own datasets and analysis on a production copy of the DW. We do our own QA and will road test the production style report while the production version works its way into the next production release. 

I think OBIEE’s sweet spot is a 20,000+ person financial services firm with a BI group divided into experts in Oracle, Java, and XML. The dev group is represented by business analyst/liaisons with the business units. If a manager needs a new dashboard, they meet with the liaison, specify what they need. The analyst takes it back to the BI group and then the developers build it out over the next month. 

This is where a BI tool like Tableau has helped us fill this gap. Over the last two years, Tableau is now becoming the de facto analysis/visualization tool for us.