Oracle OBIEE Reviews

We primarily use this solution for making tables and working with data.

It is not a good product for data visualization. And, its functionality is lacking.

One to three years.

The scalability of the product is good.

We have an in-house tech support, so we do not use the tech support from the solution.

The other options we considered are: Tableau, Qlik Sense, and Splunk.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor are:

• Visibility
• Data Visualization
• Price

The reporting capabilities are good. The other valuable features are the dashboard capability and the ease of report creation.

The main feature is the dashboard functionality. As I work for HR, we have several dashboards for the VPs and HR business users, so they are able to see all the integration and higher data; it's like a one-click option.

Data integration itself needs to be improved. We use ODI along with OBIEE for data integration. We find it very hard to go through this whole process. Once the data is there, it's very easy to report it on the OBIEE front end. However, just getting the data into data warehousing is difficult.

The other thing we have experienced is if the data load takes a long time, Oracle doesn't give any out-of-the-box solution to have the reports run out of a snapshot. Thus, if any data is being run/aggregated, then the report goes down. If it takes a very long time then your report goes down for even longer.

It is not fully scalable and there are performance issues that we see. It's not that bad. I would give it a 3/5 rating.

The support is not great. It keeps going back and forth. It would definitely help to improve the support provided.

We didn't look at other data warehousing solutions as such, but we were looking at various other reporting solutions. As a data warehouse, we use a lot of Oracle products and are on Oracle VBScript. We also possess high level of Oracle expertise in our organization. Thus, we decided it was best to go with this product.

It's a long implementation process; it took us a while to implement it. However, once you do implement this product and get the hang of it, it's easy. It has its issues just like a lot of other software products have issues.

Oracle Business EE has a futuristic vision for BI Server capabilities with support for answers, flexible dynamic dashboard, intelligent untime query engine, web and mobile analytics and support for structured and unstructured data. OBIEE provides out of the box supports for Oracle ATG commerce catalogs and also have sample applications which enable users to come up with nice dashboards in relatively lesser time frames.

However, OBIEE lacks support for deploying multiple RPD on one BI server, direct access to RPD schema or model layers. Also the overall solution is heavier relative to other products.

• Ease of use
• Strong calculation engine
• User-friendly look and feel

I am from a consulting background which normally works on projects. Many customers using this product have streamlined their planning process with analysts spending more time on analysis than data massaging.

Particularly on the Cloud, a lot of functionality has yet to be ported.

More than 10 years.

On-premise, when data grows exponentially, stability issues have been experienced.

Not applicable.

An eight out of 10.

Straightforward and easy to setup.

For financial planning with WorkForce and CapEx, it's definitely the product to go for.

It's easy to create fully-functional Dashboards.

We have been able to integrate different sources into one dashboard.

Essbase integration needs to be worked on.

I've used it for around five years.

No issues with the current version.

When using Essbase, queries accumulated in the BI server and degraded its performance.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

It's satisfactory.

Technical Support:

It's satisfactory.

We previously used Hyperion WebAnalysis, and we needed better RMDB and browser support.

It was straightforward.

We used a mixed team, and when the vendor team implemented it, they had satisfactory skills to do it.

It's ok.

It´s expensive.

• QlikView
• Tableau

Requires some database tuning and an expertise in OBIEE to perform as expected.

• Dashboards
• KPIs
• Scorecards
• Analysis
• Reporting

Working as a BI Consultant, I have to develop different analyses, reports and dashboard documents to analyze the status of different business measures. We are using OBIEE and MicroStrategy for the purpose of enterprise performance management by defining and describing different business perspectives and objectives, Initiatives and results are analyzed on the basis of these defined attributes.

I've been using it for six months to a year.

Sometimes there is an issue of font size, spacing and other related formatting document issues.

We've experienced no issues with performance. However, the larger amount of number of selectors, filters etc. you have, the longer it will take to display an analysis.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Customer Service:

7/10

Technical Support:

8/10

I started with OBIEE, and I am still using it for References.

It was straightforward.

We implemented it in-house.

We're also using MicroStrategy.

If you are looking for Purely Performance Management of a whole Enterprise, then you should choose OBIEEE, otherwise choose MicroStrategy.

Oracle OBIEE came out very early, compared to the other BI products, the other competitors’ products. It was pretty much the first in the market. It grabbed a good portion of the market. That's one important feature: They have been there forever.

We do have ad-hoc reporting. A few thousand users run ad-hoc reports. They run SQLs for data, extract the data and use the data. Some users use the dashboards.

Stability-wise, they still have a lot to improve, especially when you have a lot of data coming out of SQL. For example, if I have to see a million requests, most of the time it crashes.

Scalability is fine. I don't see any issues. Scalability-wise, most of the time, they depend on the underlying WebLogic server. The WebLogic server scales fine.

We always have problems with Oracle support. When they cannot solve an issue, they always go around and around with it. Time passes and users get frustrated - the customer gets frustrated – getting the ticket closed.

If there is an easy solution or they have come across the issue already, that’s when they are responsive. However, if they don’t know the answer right away, or if you don’t quickly hear back from Oracle, or if you don’t like the answer you get from Oracle, that’s when you can go through this; you might never get the solution. It’s better to just close the ticket and not waste that time.

I did not previously use a different solution. We kind of started this project from scratch. We use all Oracle products and Oracle support. We thought, OK, why use a different product if we can get a good product from Oracle?

Setup is good; easy and simple.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

If someone asked me for advice, I would throw out a few options and let them pick which one is better. I’d provide whatever I know about this product and also other products, not just those from Oracle.

I don't know if Oracle wants to hear this, but there are other products in the analytical field that are pretty good. For example, Tableau.

For example, dashboard-wise, other products are way better than OBIEE. Oracle still has to improve some of these issues, especially when there is a huge amount of data.

When I’m choosing a vendor such as Oracle, the most important criteria are that they are big; everything is integrated. For example, if I have to use Oracle Identity Management, it is integrated with OBIEE, including single sign-on. Everything is integrated.

I believe the most valuable feature is the ETL, the component to extract the data from the source system.

It allows us to bring data from key systems together and provide useful information in metric form to our leaders.

I’d like to see an easier way to go ahead and allow users to access other data, maybe to query it and so forth; maybe from a user, UI perspective. I've noticed, as I’ve mentioned, other tools that are out there. It's very much about the user experience, and I don't know if the current look and feel is lending towards that.

It works well. I think it was more of the implementation that we faced. Once we got the kinks worked out of it, it seems to work pretty well. The load seems to be completely maintainable.

I think it's scalable. It just might not seem that it's as easy. We do have other products now that are coming into the market that are a lot easier for us to go ahead and use a mixed set of data.

We haven't been using the support as much. We have contractors and consultants that we're working with already that provide us that help as an alternative service.

We did have BusinessObjects. We had it for many years, and it's very old. I don't think that it was scalable. It didn't have the performance that we were looking at and the capability of pulling in outside mixed data.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I did hear about it from the other team members. As I’ve mentioned, we had an implementation partner involved with this, and it didn't work out as well. I think that they tried to give us a tool out-of-the-box, and then we definitely needed customizations to work with our data.

At the time that we made the decision to go with this product, there weren’t that many other players in this area. Over the past three years or so, there's been a surge of new players in the market. We've probably had OBIEE for about five years now. At the time, it was pretty new. There weren't a whole lot of options and OBIEE was probably the best tool around.

When I’m looking for a vendor such as Oracle, the most important criteria I consider are the partnership and the support. We've been an Oracle shop for a long time and I know that there are certain relationships that I've had with the account team. That's important. I think that, again, really working together and providing us information that will help us make the decisions towards new solutions, whether with Oracle or with Dell. Then, definitely, if we need help with escalations and so forth we can turn to them.

I think that you really need to understand your data analytics strategy to understand which functions and features that you're looking for. The business itself needs to be ready to take this on because it's definitely not an IT solution. The premise around a lot of the analytics solutions is really to empower the business now to take the ball and run with it, create their own reports, create their own dashboards. You need to make sure that the business is able to go ahead and have the skill sets to start taking up that responsibility, or at least to come up with a roadmap of how they're going to get there.

It does what it's supposed to and it will work, but it definitely can be better.