Oracle OBIEE Reviews

• Data accessibility
• Easy to create ad hoc reporting for different solutions
• Excellent tool for defining and creating Executive and Operative Dashboard

I’ve used this product especially in the retail field. It’s been a huge initial effort creating reporting for monitoring business trends and retail KPIs, but once we did it we had a great return in terms of data reliability, time response and information sharing between internals and externals.

Retail, Finance, Wholesale

I've used if for about four years in the fashion industry.

Yes, especially when we’ve moved from one version to another. Most of the problems encountered have been solved quickly.

No broad impact

No

8/10

8/10

Designing and building the entire set up of Data Warehousing and Dashboard Reporting implementation has been challenging in terms of resources and time. It took at least six months to a year to see the first results of our hard work.

I can make a comparison with Business Objects and MicroStrategy. Even though these are excellent tools for business analysis, Oracle OBIEE has allowed the company to approach data analysis in a structured and shared way favoring the growth of analytical expertise across the entire company.

From my experience as Retail Planner and Business Analyst in fast paced companies, I would suggest this solution to anyone who wants to improve data analysis in terms of data read, performance, analytical culture throughout the company.

I think it's a great tool for the retail, finance, and commercial industries.

ABC Sell Out Analysis

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.

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.

The most valuable feature is its stability to connect with other data sources, other than Oracle.

We basically are able to do better analytics, be able to make better decisions.

I would probably just like to see more integration with big data sources.

Stability is very good. We've had good success using the product.

Scalability has been good for us, because we have a large enterprise; it's state-wide. We scale it up to our state-wide enterprise system.

Technical support is excellent, very good.

We just needed to upgrade our current environment.

I guess we decided to go with this solution because we already had experience with the product. We felt pretty comfortable using it.

When choosing a vendor such as Oracle, support and good service are my most important criteria.

It worked out very well for our environment.

Initial setup was pretty complex, but we had help from the vendor, so that helped.

Really work with the vendor.

Caching is a valuable feature. We can simply schedule the report to run before the users get to work. This reduces the time it takes for the users to load data-heavy dashboards.

I only realized this after using Tableau, but I really appreciate the re-usability of reports in OBIEE. I liked this because I don’t need to re-do reports that have to be in different dashboards and it makes my folder structure organized.

Another feature I love are the functions readily available in the RPD. This makes life so much easier when computing for example, year ago, month ago, rolling months, percent growth, etc.

Variables also give us a little flexibility with the formulas, titles and column names.

The company I was assigned to is a utilities company, so they heavily rely on daily reports to monitor the situation. Customer feedback is very crucial to them. Working both as their business analyst and developer, I get to communicate with the people responsible for reporting to top management. Based on their feedback, some are able to see if pending items have been delivered and if not, they can easily identify which group to go to. This assures that their customers are satisfied with the service.

Some have also said that with the reports readily available via OBIEE, they can immediately download and present them to their bosses. No more use of spreadsheets to compute for the KPIs.

We had a lot of users before that wanted customized user interfaces. This was one of the hardest things to customize in OBIEE. You had to have knowledge in other areas to provide user requirements.

With the popularity of self-service systems, our power users wanted more ad-hoc reports. We couldn’t provide this because that meant giving them administrator access, which was against the security guidelines of the company.

One requirement we also had was the ability for users to change passwords. Again, this meant that we had to give the users administrator access, which was against company protocol.

I have used it since 2010, almost six years.

I am not sure if this is relevant, but there was one time when we configured the SSL for OBIEE 11.1.1.7 and we were unable to create new users. We did this to two servers, but the issue only happened to one server. The Oracle Support consultant we talked to wasn’t able to resolve this. I’ve since left the organization and am not sure if it has been resolved.

There were no scalability initiatives that I was a part of, just upgrades to new machines, which are simple new installations.

I rate technical support 5/10. I am not sure about others, but the technical support I had from Oracle Support was often delayed or they couldn’t solve the problem.

I did not previously use a different solution, but I did dabble with Tableau after I started using OBIEE.

Initial setup was straightforward. By the way, I’ve only worked with Windows installations.

The organization was already using this product when I got there, so we just maintained it.

Google is your best friend! Some documentations do not contain everything, so it is good to be patient when looking for solutions, even outside Oracle Support.

Visual Analyzer is a nice feature that gives us options on how to view our data.

Once fully used, the Visual Analyzer has great promise. However, you're allowing end users to upload spreadsheets that can mash with your existing data. This is a great idea (Tableau attack on Oracle's part), but it can be dangerous if the end-user data is wrong. In that case, the great report will be wrong. It still needs a data manager's blessing to check it, IMO.

Installing it is quite different now with the steps. Once the product becomes more mainstream with lots of blogs, the installation process will be easier to follow, but even with existing documentation it was quite a chore. Then, there's the issue of using it within a virtual server and the loop back challenge you have to hunt for on the internet to get it working correctly.

I've been using it about a week or so.

Mainly just the change in install process and virtual server 'challenge'.

It's Oracle - you get what you pay for service-wise, and even then it's the person you work with that dictates whether it's a good or not so good service.

8/10 in general, but don't be afraid to raise severity if you're being essentially ignored.

We previously used v11.x.

It's pretty good, but as with all things Oracle you have to read the install notes first.

We did it ourselves.

OBIEE 11c is pretty slick these days, and it has a new look so that's nice. Everything's pretty darn good now with the following 2 caveats.

1. Allow more than one RPD. I don't know how or when, but one RPD for an entire production environment is brutal.
2. What's with BI Publisher? It seems everyone states that it's just for pixel perfect reports but the IMO shows that's just not true. There are a large number of standard reports that can, and should, be created in BIP. Daily Orders report bursts to various departments? That's not pixel perfect and it's one of a huge number that should be BIP. Sure there should be lots of analysis reports but BIP is still very important. So why has it not changed in this release? I'd swear Oracle's setting it up for removal like they did Discoverer, Hyperion, etc.

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.