Oracle OBIEE Reviews

Our customer is an enterprise that has over 120 entities. It used to take a lot of time (around 15 days) to collect data and generate reports for their performance. After OBIEE was implemented and some processes improved, our customer is now able to review their monthly performance with a clearly analyzed pattern within 5 days.

I've been using it for three years. I started with OBIEE 11g (11.1.1.5), and upgraded it to 11.1.1.6 and 11.1.1.7 afterward.

We did not encounter any serious issues when we deployed the tool.

OBIEE is a little unstable in our environment. The server/service has to reboot/restart every couple days, otherwise, users will see errors when they access reports.

I am not going to rate Oracle's support high. It took too many times to collect logs and screen shots, and talk to a support guy. And they still have to go back to R&D once they confirm the issue was product related. It took another loop to communicate with R&D guys, and there almost 70% of thje issues were treated as a "Fix in the Roadmap," which means we won't get a hotfix. We suffer quite a lot when we have to tell our customers that some bugs will not be fixed until it's in the roadmap, and even then, a few years later.

Our customer choose OBIEE as their reporting tool before we assisted them with implementation. I used TIBCO Spotfire after this project, and it's quite a different product. It seems business users will use a so called "analytic tools" such as Spotfire more often than "BI tools" like OBIEE or BO. Since their requirements become much more dynamic, they may not even know what they are looking for, or what questions they suppose to answer. BI tools needs too much IT effort for ETL and modeling to enable users to read the report. However, some questions cannot wait that long, and users need to know the answer as quickly as possible. On the other hand, analytic tools just need raw data and users can those data to generate reports whatever they need for whatever questions/purposes (if they know what those data means well and have some basic knowledge with database).

The setup is quite straightforward, unless you need to deploy with a cluster. Components in a model/presentation layer can do it simply by dragging and dropping, if all the calculations are done in the database. Although, some settings,such as "Write Back", is not that easy. They need to be configured, but you have no idea where to configure it unless you go through the documentation, and even some blogs perhaps.

I helped implement it as part of the vendor-side team.

Just keep the model as simple as possible, it'll make works much easier afterward.

It has easy integration with Oracle DB for clients who run an Oracle Warehouse.

It has given clients visibility into their operations from a holistic viewpoint. In my current project, we are using the tool to track movement of cases, managements, and clients are able to trace where their cases are and how long they have been in the different stations in the organization. This has improved on the overall performance of the organization as there is accountability.

There is a need to improve on meta data definition, for instance we should have one Dat Dimension that allows heterogeneous definitions. At the moment, every subject area has a copy, this is repetitive effort. There is a need to easily report from different facts without having to circumvent the system's normal design.

Metadata management, more visualizations as there aren't many, i.e. heat maps. The Dashboard layout area could be enhanced to allow more intuitive designs, as the limitations of having Sections and Columns in the sort of order they can in can inhibit exciting designs. Exporting of related Physical Joins without having to go to each join to extract.

I've used it for eight years.

Yes, at one client we upgraded versions and lost functionality due to the fact that Oracle had stopped supporting Office 2007. In the newer versions, we had to go through a lot of trouble to get the functionality to work, it was a very simple thing. In the newer version, when we exported graphs it ignored the lines and the tables were merged into a single line, and you can imagine why the management were not happy with that.

5/10 - I really believe that they can improve in customer service.

6/10

We did use something previously, and we changed as we wanted better functionality and stability.

I have not dealt with implementations a lot.

We used a mixed team. The vendor had guys that knew what they were doing, even at some point, better than the Oracle team.

Pricing of the training should be lowered to allow more new entrants into the the field. If the price is too high, mainly existing partners can afford it, and the market does not grow. The licensing is fair, but they should try and bundle the licensing cost as licensing as almost every component tends to hike the overall price.

I have worked on Microstrategy a lot and the Microsoft platform. I find that Microstrategy is advanced in the Mobile and Visual display and is easy to use, but Microsoft is also easy to use but still has a lot of things they need to improve on.

It's a very good platform provided you have a good strategy and a strong team around.

1. Security (authentication, policy, credentials)
2. Simplicity in data modelling
3. Visualizations are better than other BI solutions

• It allows us to providing our customers an excellent solution for their business requirements.
• It's easy to use for any type of user.

I've been using it for two years, 11 months as a business analyst generating reports for our customers.

Some little issue with a network port, but this is solved in a very few minutes.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

9/10 - Excellent support from the Oracle team.

9/10 - They're excellent.

It's pretty straightforward if we have the right requirements.

No other options were evaluated.

It's a good tool and has lots of features to meet customers' typical requirements. One should have thorough knowledge of it.

• Integrated search options
• Oracle scorecards
• Pivot tables
• Map views

When reports are developed in a way that show the work done in time, work done but not in time, and work not done at all, they drive the customers to pay attention to the lagging areas. This encourages everyone to work positively towards achieving the fixed goal in hand.

Some of the legacy BI publisher features have been discarded in the newer versions. Having them would help the product. The ability to provide column description upon hovering on the header would be of real help.

I've used it for five years.

No major issues.

No major issues.

Some of the issues were in regards to the LDAP authentication setup, but it was resolved.

7/10.

7/10.

No previous solution was in place.

It was pretty straightforward and simple. All we had to do was follow the installation manual, which provides a UI to setup the tool.

It was done in-house.

All the ventures that were started based off of this product were successful. The users were actively using the dashboards and reports, while the executive level management were able to view the functioning of their respective organizations on high-level view.

Ensure you purchase a complete enterprise package from Oracle so you can get the full benefit of OBIEE.

• Crystal Reports
• SQR Reports

Ensure the application server and the web server are installed and configured as recommended.

• Delta extracts
• Scheduler
• Multiple delivery options
• Word and Excel integration to create report templates

A lot of manual processes, e-forms and paper forms were replaced by automated interfaces and reports.

Customer support and documentation.

I've used it for 15 months.

No, we're using the cloud service.

No issues encountered.

There are slow processing times sometimes, and with it being a cloud solution, the infrastructure is out of our control.

4/10.

3/10.

No, we were switching from manual business processes.

It was quite complex, due to many business-specific requirements. OTB extracts and reports couldn't be used, so customized ones were created.

Two external vendors, one from the US with a high level of expertise and one from Australia with a medium level of expertise.

It's a good product with a lot of functionality, customization, a relative easy-of-use.

- Web-based features and the possibilities it offers to analysts and developers to design reports and access the dashboard from a web browser. No need to install an application onto your laptop.

- Self-serve interactive reporting

- Map-based visualizations (MapViewer)

- Mobile app designer

- Mobile security toolkit (you can download the sources and customize it and generate your enterprise iOS application)

It helps us in quick-wins development to get the trust of users.

- Make the interactive dashboards more responsive

- Give the possibility to deploy multiple RPD productions

- Allow hot deployment of repository file (RPD) without restarting services

5 years

- All the time. The upgrade process is not clear and I encountered issues in processing it.

- Charts require flash to be rendered, but by 11.1.1.9, we can turn off flash and use html chart.

8

-Yes, SAP BW (Business Explorer).

- We were looking for more user-friendly reports/charts and tools to speed up our development. OBIEE does that.

Initial setup was complex because we needed many components:

1) A database to store the OBIEE master data (MDS and BIPLATFORM schema)

2) A web logic server to host the Java component.

3) After that, you need to know how to start all components in sequential order:

Admin Server->Node Manager->Managed Server->opmnctl

In-house

SAP Business Object, IBM Cognos

1) The integration with SAP BW is not so easy, but it's possible through XMLA.

So if your data warehouse is under SAP BW, you have to be careful in your choice of OBIEE because you will face integration and performance issues.

2) Also, the OBIEE Administration Tool is not for non-IT people. So you will need IT to design your repository properly before the analyst will be able to design reports and dashboard.

3) I found Tableau more user friendly and productive than OBIEE. So, I advise to also look there.

• Governance
• Centralized metadata model
• Integration (security, external visualizations, etc.)

Better and more interactive visualizations.

8 years

Clustering and security (SSL, SSO, etc) can be tough at times.

Support team is timely with responses, but working out through issues can take some time.

Yes, used Cognos (IBM) previously. Switch was due to management decision.

Initial (simple) set up is straight forward, but complex environments (multiple nodes, complex security requirements) can be complicated. That said, once set up the tool is very flexible and addresses enterprise-wide requirements

This is a good solution, but its strengths (centralized, secure, enterprise-wide reporting) can also be seen as weaknesses if you are looking for a more flexible, lighter-footprint reporting package with better visuals. That said, newer versions of the tool have gone a long way to catch up on the visuals side (new views, external viz options, etc) and flexibility as well (BI Cloud Service).

Dashboards, Alerts, BI Publisher. Together these 3 features make this product a great tool to present data. Users can also create ad hoc analyses easily. Integrates very well with a wide variety of data sources making it easy to present data from multiple sources in a single place.

One stop shop for all reporting, data integrity, and compliance with company standards.

Performance for large data sets.

12 years

Setting up SSL can be complex. Documentation is confusing. But other sources of information such as blogs really help.

Sometimes when lots of users get in and try to run the same report at the same time with different parameters.

Prompt but not always helpful.

Poor

Depends on the requirements and infrastructure, but proper planning makes it pretty straightforward.

In-house

Being rollover customers from a previously owned company there was confusion about licensing. Talking to an Oracle rep helped.

Excellent BI tool that is flexible and user-friendly, and getting better with each new release.