Oracle OBIEE Reviews

First Of I am an Administrator of OBIEE more than a developer or User, so my review will be more from that perspective. OBIEE is now not a big focus area for Oracle given that they now have various cloud PaaS solutions available such as Oracle Analytics cloud that does a similar job. However, OBIEE has always been a complex beast with a lot of not well-integrated moving parts.

Oracle OBIEE has improved our organization by providing business intelligence tools and solutions as advertised. We get the dashboard reports, email blasts, and dynamic access as needed. However, to get the best performance you need to understand and tune the system appropriately. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to run it in Exalytics with in-memory caching coupled to a Repository on Exadata is where it flies. So it's not meant for mom and pop shops, but if you are a global 500 fortune 1000 company, this is a tool that can get you what you need on time and even in real time.Previously we only had the option of using times ten caching bunt now we have the otion of using DBIM facility. We were one of the first SIs to adopt this technology in one of our customer implementations.

One significant improvement is the need for simplification. The set up could be more intuitive. An enterprise setup with HA and DR are pretty complex and to get a robust solution one has to play around with Real Application Cluster data sources and FAN notifications as well as WebLogic clustering and external load balancers. SSO also is not that simple to set up especially if you want all your Oracle systems to use the same SSO solution, i.e., no cheating with direct LDAP connectivity.

So there is no simple setup for HA deployment. you need to manually create a cluster deploy into the cluster , reconfigure the datasources to high availability data sources etc. Unlike hyperion for example which has automated configurator scripts that do a lot of the under covers work for the administrator and hence simplifies the ha installation.

More than five years.

This is a pretty stable solution. There is also good help from Oracle.

OBIEE is an ultra-scalable solution as long as you are willing to pay the price. Exadata, Exalytics and in memory allow this to scale to any enterprise,  and we have global 500 companies who are using this solution today.

Oracle's Technical support is knowledgeable and able to help with issues. We faced some challenging problems when upgrading very old versions of OBIEE to 1c but got some excellent support for the same.

No we mostly concentrate on the Oracle technology stack though there are other groups within my company that look at other vendor solutons. Oracle Analytics cloud now provides similar functionality in a PaaS like platform. Going forward this may be the future path for obiee users.

Setup can be quite complex for this system,.

We do these kinds of implementations ourselves. We are an Oracle SI.

We implement this for our customers who have seen multifold speedup in reporting and better visibility into their organizations. It's challenging to put a dollar value, but they have recouped their investments as compared to the systems that were replaced.

Setup cost, pricing, and licensing for OBIEE are all geared towards more substantial enterprises. A full blown HA - Dr setup can have many moving parts.

We evaluate solutions on a case by case basis based on the specific implementation as we implement BI solutions for different clients.

OBIEE is a powerful BI tool, but it is not as agile as some of the newer PaaS based solutions, eg, Oracle Analytics Cloud. 

On a scale of one to ten with ten being the best, I'd give Oracle OBIEE a rating of 7 out of 10.

Most of the use cases were related to financial reporting, project management, and operations.

One of its main features, which is a feature in pretty much every enterprise product these days, is the ability to see a single source of truth (SSOT). It means that of all the different pieces of information in today's contemporary enterprise, you can identify one set of financials, one set of production data, one set of sales, and one set of marketing data, and you can call that the truth or the gold standard. Everybody who accesses the application can refer to the same truth. This is a major benefit of not only OBIEE but many other products, but OBIEE has been doing that for a long time. Being able to access multiple data sources, being able to pull them all together, and being able to establish the same information that everybody can refer to are some of its benefits.

Its robustness is most valuable. It can handle massive amounts of data quickly. If it's properly configured and tuned, it can handle massive amounts of data very quickly to produce results. That to me is the number one feature. Everything else after 10 years becomes like second nature. 

I find it user-friendly, but some people would argue this point. It's user-friendly in the sense that if you have someone who's properly trained, then it has a user-friendly interface for self-service BI. I used to do training on that product. For someone who is not properly trained, it's difficult. 

When they converted to OAC, they made some changes that were good and some that were not so good. In terms of room for improvement, there is nothing that's perfect. One of the things that have been difficult with OBIEE during all the time that I've known it is that when something goes wrong, many times, the error messages are not specific, and you've got to spend a lot of time digging and digging and digging before you say, "Oh, okay. I figured out what it was." There should be more detailed error messages or troubleshooting messages.

I have been using this solution for 10 years.

It's generally rock solid. In fact, when I used to teach people, I used to say, "Don't worry, experiment. You can't break it." It can be broken, but most people with the access that they are given are not going to break it. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

Its scalability is very good. It's definitely one of its features for the last several versions. In the last project, there were about a hundred users. I'm probably estimating high.

I definitely have plans to increase its usage because I'm getting certified and that's my experience. So, I would like more people to use it.

I would rate them a 4 out of 5.

Positive

I primarily worked with Crystal Reports.

It's complex to set up an entire installation, especially if someone has never done it before. You've got to know a lot of other things. You can't approach it cold and be easily or quickly successful.

You can deploy it with one person. I've deployed an entire OBIEE installation entirely by myself. It's not recommended, and it's not the best way, but it can be done. I know, I've done it. To administer or manage it once it's in place, the ideal team would be at a minimum a three to four-person team. Some companies, when they say, "We need to put in BI, and we need people to do that," they're also, without saying it, asking for someone to set up a data warehouse, run ETL, build and maintain that, run the BI, build the interface, do the reports, and teach or train the employees, which is something I've done. In that kind of situation, you need a three or four-person team at minimum to distribute everything from the data warehouse work, ETL, report development, training, and so on. If the person you're asking to maintain the BI system is not asked to train users, you don't need that skill either. So, it can be done by one person. It depends on what the client desires and is expecting.

There is absolutely a return on investment with this.

I have looked at its price, but I don't remember it. I would rate it a 4 out of 5 in terms of pricing.

Before going with OBIEE, I didn't evaluate other options. While using OBIEE over the last 10 years, I've evaluated several but not beforehand. The clients that engaged me already had made the choice and did the installation, or I did the installation for them.

Talk to another company that had to put it in place and maintain it. Get the straight story from the people who deal with it every single day—not the CEO who signed the contract, not the vice president or CIO or CTO, not the people who signed the contract and then gave it to somebody else. You should talk to the actual people who put it in place and did it every day. 

If you want to put it in place, do not believe that you must hire someone who has used this product before. What I mean by that is that if someone has used similar tools and knows the basics of BI, SQL language, and so on, with a little bit of time and training, they can become proficient in OBIEE. It's complex but it's not impossible. You don't have to find someone who has used it before. People who have used other things can learn OBIEE. I do training on that product, and I can train them.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

We are using Oracle OBIEE for creating interactive dashboards and reports.

The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is the security of the solution.

Oracle OBIEE can improve the ease of use. It is a lot to learn and it could be made easier.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for approximately five years.

Oracle OBIEE is a stable enough solution.

Throughout the versions we have used of Oracle OBIEE, they have been scalable.

We have more than 20 people using the solution. We have plans to increase usage in the future.

The support is good from Oracle OBIEE.

I rate the support from Oracle OBIEE a four out of five.

Positive

I have previously used Microsoft Power BI. I have used different solutions due to the company's requirements I worked.

The initial setup of Oracle OBIEE is straightforward. Once it is deployed then we can add other modules. The installation process took approximately two hours.

The implementation of Oracle OBIEE can be done in-house. If the company implementing the solution is not experienced then a consultant can be used.

We have multiple technical staff working on Oracle OBIEE. However, the exact number is based on the needs of the project. In our previous project, we had three to four technical staff that was needed; in the current project, we have more than 20.

The licensing cost is based on the number of users using it.

I would recommend the solution to others.

I rate Oracle OBIEE a nine out of ten.

The centralized metadata model component is most valuable. 

We do like Oracle Visual Analyzer, but we do feel that it's quite immature in comparison to its competitors. There is still quite a lot of catch-up to be done, but it does still have some unique value add.

It is not very stable, and it is not consistently improved. There are a lot of gaps when it comes to design. The documentation and support from Oracle on the vision have been pretty bad over the last six years.

It is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. One of the major red flags we have at the moment against Oracle is that it doesn't support deployment on other cloud providers. We're quite heavily vested in AWS as our infrastructure, and Oracle is yet to formally support deploying on those virtual infrastructure instances. That's quite disappointing, and it also cuts them out of over 70% of the market.

Its deployment is complicated in comparison to other solutions.

I have probably been using it since 2005. 

We're using Oracle Analytics Server, which is the latest version of the solution on site. We have a trial OAC which is the cloud version, but we're primarily on 12.2.1.4 which is the previous release on site.

The platform could definitely be more stable.

It is scalable, but it is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. The biggest pain point is the alternative cloud support. They're very Oracle cloud-centric. If I need to do anything on our infrastructure that is AWS-centric or Azure-centric, there are loads of issues.

There are thousands of users, but right now, it's suffering from losing its users to Tableau and Power BI because of its various shortcomings.

The documentation from Oracle and the support have been pretty bad over the last six years. We also use Power BI and Tableau. Oracle is very poor in comparison to Power BI and Tableau with regard to user engagement, documentation, and roadmap.

They've got a lot of gaps in the community, support, and documentation. If I try and look up how to do something complicated in Oracle Analytics, I'd surely find it hard to find the information, whereas if I look up the equivalent in Tableau or Power BI, I'll find solutions pretty quickly.

I find their support model very outdated. In order to get support, I have to raise a ticket, and then I have to talk to someone who may or may not very quickly understand the problem, whereas quite often with the other products, the solution is in the community. That's where Oracle is falling behind. Their community is very poor when it comes to finding solutions, and their support is quite traditional. It's very old-fashioned.

The deployment can be done in a day. Once you understand it, the deployment isn't too bad, but the deployment complexity is still very high in comparison to other solutions. 

We did it ourselves. For its deployment and maintenance, we need a whole team of people. We probably have about three or four managers, and we've probably got 15 to 20 technical personnel or developers because many different business units are using it.

Its licensing is yearly.

I can recommend it under certain circumstances. It depends on your deployment, and whether you are starting from scratch. It is heavily dependent on what infrastructure you have and what your current people have. I would recommend it if you're a fully Oracle house. If you're not a fully Oracle house and you're heavily based on Azure or AWS, then I'd be hesitant. I'd need to do an architectural review.

As an end-user, I would rate it a seven out of 10. For an Oracle house, it would be a seven out of 10, and for a non-Oracle house, it would be a five out of 10.

The primary use case is for our various financial products. One is a trading platform called MarkitSERV. All the world-leading financial institutes are on-boarded to that client. They use the platform for trading. On the backend, we have the data warehouse of that trading platform, which helps produce quick analyses of the trading data and prepare reports on demand. For that purpose, we are using the OBIEE. We have defined a lot of trends in OBIEE so you can compare year-on-year and month-on-month data. We have various ways you can measure your numbers.

Performance is just okay. It doesn't have in-memory data. For every new analysis we prepare, it will go to the database and query the SQL. That takes a long time. That is the main challenge we are facing. People nowadays are very demanding. They want their analysis to come up very quickly, at the click of a button.

The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE, for me, would be the Web Catalog. From a development perspective, I do not need any client or any software to be installed on my laptop or desktop. Everything is browser-based, so I just open the browser and start development.

Similarly, for the end-user, it provides self-analytics services where the end user can drag and drop various fields, facts, and dimensions and prepare their reports. They can have them in the form of charts, etc. Then they can save them in the Web Catalog.

I have not seen this Web Catalog in any other tool. Web Catalog is kind of like Windows Explorer, where you can define your own folder and whatever analysis you are doing and you can save the analysis for future reference. 

One feature I would definitely like to see is the ability to provide the in-memory data. Oracle might have some plugins but, as of now, that feature isn't available out-of-the-box. You might have to purchase that feature. This is the feature that is most lacking, which we would like to have in the next release.

Also, the overall architecture. Currently, it comes in an Oracle suite. We want to have it come as a separate product and which is very easy to install, migrate, deploy etc.

I wouldn't say it's that stable. We are using it in production and we used to have one failure per month. When we're not able to figure out the reason, we just restart the services to sort it out. That might be an environmental issue, we're not sure. It could also be a tool issue. When we approached Oracle support, we could not find out exactly what caused the instability.

It's fairly scalable. It doesn't have its own engine, so everything depends on how much data your database can process.

We have used technical support. We didn't find it very useful. The responses are very slow. As the tool is very, very complex, there are a lot of scenarios that we need to go through with them. Most of the time we are not able to simulate the issues with them. Depending on the application-side logs that we provide to support, they start their investigation, but most of the time it is not that useful.

I wasn not involved in the initial setup. When I joined the organization, it was already set up. I would say that we're using only 20 to 25 percent of the features of OBI.

Setup and migration are very complex. Technically, Oracle accessory is extremely complex. These days, the industry demands a kind of Excel analysis, which is very easy to install, set up, and it's very developer-friendly as well as end-user friendly. OBIEE lacks all those features. We had to migrate from 11g to 12c and it took around six months because of the extreme complexity of the tool.

We are planning to move away from Oracle OBIEE, and to move to another tool that has in-memory data processing capabilities. Oracle doesn't provide that capability very easily, so we have performance challenges, etc. We are exploring Tableau and QlikView. They provide in-memory calculations and in-memory processing, which results in very fast throughput so that the data updates into the dashboard.

In terms of choosing a vendor, the most important criteria for me is the ability to create near real-time analysis, which OBIEE is lacking at the moment. Another is very good performance, which means it should have its own engine to process the data or even to do some small ETL operations on the data. In addition, it's the simplicity to develop and architect the solution.

All the drawbacks which I mentioned above, I would like to have all of those resolved in OBIEE. First of all, its installation, configuration, and setup should be very easy. It comes with its own application server and that creates a lot of conflict files on the server side. You have to be very careful while configuring all those files.

Technical support is another issue, where we generally do not get adequate support. And on Google, there is a lack of good material for OBIEE 12c. If you compare it with other tools like Tableau and QlikView, they have excellent community sites where you post your question and you'll immediately get a reply.

In my company, they use Oracle ERP. So they build reports based on ERP tables. So, basically, my job is to create subject areas for the client so that they can play around with the subject areas. And sometimes, we develop reports based on the subject areas.

Oracle OBIEE is very easy to use. Looking at analytics, I think they have come a long way by adding new features like visualization, which is really cool. Also, I don't have experience with really other products in the market.

Improvements are something I think they have pretty much done. They have improved many areas, like adding visualization and all that, by making it easy. So, any business analyst can play around with it without much knowledge. I think Oracle OBIEE is going step by step.

Oracle needs to improve its technical support. If they can improve in that area, it will be nice. Oracle products have a lot of complications. And sometimes what happens is, especially since I work on Oracle ERP. So when they release some modules, I don't know what kind of testing they do, but there are a lot of complications. And we break our heads and eventually end up with Oracle support because only Oracle support can solve those issues because it's software-related. So when you open a ticket, it depends on where that ticket goes. Sometimes it goes to a knowledgeable person, and then your life becomes easy. Generally, it won't end up there. So those are the things that Oracle has to improve in its support area. They have to improve significantly in that area because I see a lot of guys moving away because of that reason.

I have some experience with Oracle OBIEE. As of now, I have one year of experience. I am a customer, but sometimes we enter into partnerships with Oracle to develop certain ERP products. So, we developed Contract Lifecycle Management along with Oracle, and that product is in the market now, and a lot of government agencies are using it. We are not resellers since Oracle owns the products, but we help them develop the CLM module within ERP.

The stability of the solution depends on how much data. Right now, I don't have the scope to look into that kind of environment with a large data scale. Maybe people working in banks, like those who operate worldwide, with a lot of data, can speak on the solution's stability.

Scalability, especially considering its availability on the cloud, I think, is fine.

Oracle has a history of not really providing great support. I rate the technical support a five out of ten.

Neutral

I'm a developer, so I don't feel much complexity in the solution's initial setup. So, I will have to step into a user's shoes to see what complexity is involved in the setup phase. I think that there are three areas, in which one area is to connect to the database and create your own use and then drag that view into a middle layer. The middle layer is the data modeling layer, where you join different tables, and regarding such technicalities, if I look at them from a user perspective, it's a little difficult for them, which I think is solved with visualization by dragging, dropping and visualizing how the data looks and all that stuff. So Oracle OBIEE has tried its best to make the solution easier for users. Even though I try to look at the user's perspective, my mindset is that of a developer, so it is easy for me. I think Oracle OBIEE is doing a good job.

Since I am a bit impressed with Oracle OBIEE, I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.

My company utilizes Oracle OBIEE, and we have a dedicated local development team responsible for preparing various cases. The data sources we use are locally based, and while we are unsure of their exact nature, they are primarily used for analytics and monitoring purposes. It's important to note that our monitoring is not in real-time but rather involves analyzing past data.

Oracle seems to be a better-developed and well-created tool than Microsoft Power BI. However, Oracle is a bit complicated, especially for its users. So. I'm a part of the IT team that is involved in the configuration of these BI tools. As a member of the IT team responsible for configuring these BI tools, we aim to cater to both management and KPI areas where users only need to view data on their screens and those who require BI solutions like Oracle OBIEE for their daily tasks. While Microsoft's tool is comparatively easier to use, we are struggling to train or show users how to use the Oracle tool. Nonetheless, Oracle is a tool closer to our company's management.

Training is needed to be provided to Oracle OBIEE's potential users since it is a complicated tool. The potential users of Oracle OBIEE need to possess some IT awareness to be able to operate it. The drawback with the tool is that though it is well-created, its users are under-trained to use it.

Since Oracle OBIEE is an on-premise solution, I face many limitations, and this is also one of the issues that Oracle needs to address in the future. Moving to the cloud is a decision that would make the solution much more efficient than it is currently.

I have experience with Oracle OBIEE for more than a year. I am not sure about the version of the solution I use. I am a customer who uses the solution.

Oracle OBIEE is a scary and stable product since it is a strong and well-created tool, but it can be heavy on our company's systems compared to Microsoft's tools. In short, the solution is stable since it works properly every day.

The solution seems to be more suitable for enterprise-sized companies that are involved in serious businesses. At the same time, Oracle OBIEE is not a solution for users not used to working with such tools.

Our company has not been able to make any enhancements to Oracle OBIEE. However, the process would be relatively easy as we can easily add data sources. The reports are also simple to create. While I am unsure whether we have any servers for balancing at this moment, scaling up seems like a realistic and easy option for Oracle OBIEE.

Our company has a local support team, and in the past, we have only contacted the official Oracle support team for the solution's setup process. We haven't needed to reach out to them for anything beyond that. Even though we don't ask for any technical help from the solution's support team, they are always available to attend to all our queries.

The initial setup process for the solution was done for us by one of the local vendors, and they were able to do it quickly as they were professionals.

Before I recommend Oracle OBIEE to another person, I would ask them about their IT background since it is very crucial for the person planning to use the solution to possess knowledge of IT systems, how data is transferred, and what data types are to be able to use the tool. I would definitely recommend the solution to others if they are well-versed in the technicalities of the IT industry. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for reporting purposes. We use it to generate interactive and format-based reports and to print and export them in an Excel file.

The solution's most valuable feature is interactive analysis. Also, the layout or design of the report is easy to understand as it is similar to Excel.

They should make the dashboard more intuitive.

We have been using the solution for 15 years.

It is a stable solution. But, once in a while, it needs to restart due to memory issues.

It is a scalable solution. We have 120 users of the solution in our organization.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. It takes a day for deployment and requires a small team of two.

We implemented the solution in-house while doing the proof of concept.

The solution's ROI is good if you have published it on WebLogic, as it needs a very slim setup to work fine.

We have to pay for the licenses. But, if developers want to try out technology to get proof of concept, they allow them to do it. There are no additional costs, but there might be some charges for the Java feature.

I recommend the solution to others as it is a good product. It's an antique product from the Oracle vendor, and they are known for being one of the top IDBMS.

I rate the solution as an eight out of ten.