Oracle OBIEE Reviews

The best feature of this product is the reporting capability and customization. It lets the users do their own reporting, slicing and dicing, and getting the visual outputs rather than depending on a partner or developer to get reports or produce management reports.

It's much easier to get different outputs rather than relying on a partner or another developer who has some experience in development, but with this product you don't need that as such.

The product can definitely improve. It is a good product compared to Microsoft Power BI or other Microsoft products, the SAP BIs and other small BIs in the market. In comparison with the others, the Oracle BI product is much more advanced; it's a heavy product. However, the issue is the cost factor. If Oracle decides to improve the cost factor and provide facilities to the user where the user can benefit, then it will be good.

Apart from the cost factor, it is a good product. Now, they are moving to the Cloud with the BICS model and adding visualization features. They are heading the right way. For us, the mobile and visualization features are more beneficial; plus with the Big Data coming in, it will really benefit us on that scale.

I've been using it for around four years.

It is a stable product. It depends for downtime. For the repository and repository refresh, you don't need that. It has both online and offline options but you can do the online repository upload as well.

It is a scalable product. It should meet our future needs.

It is a product where you have to initially set it up and position it for the future requirements so that the analysis part takes place properly. Based on that, you can get proper outputs. You can build it upon your stack, scheme, marks and dimensions.

I would give the technical support a 60/100 rating.

At times, it is difficult for us to get support, especially at the skill levels and due to the regions to which we have been allocated to in terms of support; that is also an issue. The expertise is in that particular domain like for the BI, ETLs, etc. For the modeling-related technical skills, they are lacking a little bit, as opposed to the ERP and the other domains.

The setup is straightforward but it needs expertise. The normal IT guys cannot do this. In other words, for the setup, BOMs, scaling ups and other supporting requirements, you need to have proper domain expertise and product knowledge individuals for carrying out the setup properly. Otherwise, you will not get the proper output. It is very resource intensive. If you get the wrong output, then all your assumptions and forecasts goes wrong; so it's very sensitive.

I have used both the on-premises and the cloud module.

The cloud module is still in a premature state, so it has to get mature.

Oracle OBIEE is useful for data solutions.

The solution is user-friendly.

Oracle OBIEEE's performance and licensing costs could be improved.

The solution is stable. I rate it an eight out of ten.

The solution is scalable. Currently, we have ten users. We plan to increase the usage by next year. Overall, I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I implemented the solution in-house.

There is a Return on Investment.

The licensing cost for Oracle OBIEE is expensive. We pay an annual licensing fee, and there are no additional costs beyond the standard fees.

Oracle is a globally recognized company, and its products are considered satisfactory. You can't go wrong with Oracle products. I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

Very large and complexes environments implementation, 10000+ users with 24x7 global operation and multiple EPM tools working in sync.

With a good model implemented, businesses can easily take decisions to improve anything they want.

An example I like to give is a retail company for which we developed online BI for sales. With this model, the managers follow the sales in real-time and can make decision like when, how much, and where to start a sales campaign during the day. This helps all managers to fulfill their quotas easily.

It's a great tool for the businesses as it's easy to manipulate and to create new dashboards. For the development side, it requires a good datamart to make things easier. It's very robust with a lot of resources.

It needs better parent-child dimension options that don't need to pass through OBIEE to build it. It's an easier way to update the model in case of a change of dimension size or sources.

Also, it needs better and more dynamic graphics. There are a lot of tools with better graphics and big part of BI is about this.

More than 12 years.

There were issues mainly because of a Java memory leak.

The scalability is limited because of WebLogic.

The technical support for EPM is bad. I don't remember anytime that the service support help me in something. The problem is bigger when you have a environment with more than one product like Hyperion Planning and ODI. This happens because the products have different owners within Oracle and then different supports and because this if, you open a trouble ticket of loading data to planning and you say the words ODI, you'll be pushed around the two separate support teams indefinitely, even if your company has an Oracle support director just for you.

Neutral

EPM is an enterprise suit that is made of some independent tools and to have all working together it makes it complex no matter your level of knowledge. The bigger the environment the bigger is the challenge you need to face. Maybe one day Oracle will integrate all their tools. It'll be easier and the good thing is that I saw a lot of improvements over the years.

Always talk with a Oracle representative and negotiate a discount. I already saw 99% of discounts and a free licence once.

Some times is cheaper if you get a hardware together (helps to negotiate a discount)

I'm a consultant and my only evaluation was on the database. I decided on Oracle because of the database and, during my career, their other tools are starting to come naturally.

Because Oracle products are development frameworks, your final results are as good as the people who implemented it. Make sure that your implementation team is the best it could be, at least for the first implementation. If something is implemented incorrectly at the start, it'll cost you a lot more to fix than to build a new system from scratch. Sometimes it can be so badly designed that it is impossible to fix.

I've been working on implementation for 20 years and I have seen bad implementations everywhere. In fact, I have seen the same tools implemented in the same team by two different people, with one being a success and the other a failure. In the same company, one department says that the tool does not work for them and another says that the tool is the best. The only difference was the implementer. Make sure you get a good team to implement it. The tool has its flaws, but most of time (99%) it is the implementer's fault that you have a bad or slow model.

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.

- 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.

It is mainly used for dashboards and functional reports. It provides a standard operation report from transactional systems. We are using its latest version.

Some of the dashboard capabilities are good. The dashboard capabilities that tell you what kind of reports are available and provide you a summary of the reports are valuable. It is easy to navigate and easy to download reports into Excel to utilize them. 

It should have more self-service capabilities.

I have been using this solution for nine years.

Its stability is good.

It is scalable. It is a standard enterprise tool.

Its user base would be easily up to 2,000 users. The users that we have are spread across different functions. We have some people who handle the inventory and financials.  

We do get technical support from Oracle, and we are satisfied with it.

We didn't use any other solution.

It is pretty easy and very straightforward. It is just a web link that you click. After you have the access and everything is set up, you can just easily access it.

We didn't evaluate other products. It is something standard.

We plan to keep using it. It is not going to go anywhere. It is there. It doesn't have too many self-service capabilities, but it is good for the purpose that it serves.

I would rate Oracle OBIEE a seven out of ten.

Our primary use is as an enterprise reporting solution.

The ability to do cross-applications reporting.

The most valuable features are the logical datawarehouse (business model) and distribution.

Migration on premisses should be easier (but is easier if you migrate to the cloud).

More self-services should be available for the users.

I have been working with Oracle OBIEE for more than ten years.

It was a little bit tedious to install a new release.

We have not had any trouble with scalability.

I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten. Not all of the support people are as performant with respect to the issues that we've encountered.

No

The initial setup was not really complex. Our deployment tooks approximately six months.

This was not an expensive product for us, although the price varies depending on conditions for each company.

Business Objects and SAS.

We plan on transitioning to the cloud version and I recommend the same for other people. It is the same as Oracle OBIEE but named Oracle Analytics Cloud.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is to pull reports on different departments within the organization. It's very time consuming to find these reports within the IT team. Their team has also been limited to the number of people inside there, so the reports take a little bit longer. When the reports do come out, there are very little changes that can happen to these reports. You have to keep requesting changes to these reports. It is expensive and it doesn't give us the flexibility to do what the business needs. Sometimes we've got users that need to create their own reports and OBIEE needs to be developed from scratch. It's time-consuming and there are much better analytics programs out there that can do the job even better.

We use AWF and we can plug in various data into artificial intelligence. The benefit side of that is that you can actually start to predict trends, see things that you haven't ever seen before. We've been trialing a few solutions and I sat with our logistics department last week, and we can actually see which is the most cost efficient route because we are obviously a distributor of chemicals. There are various paths that the distribution channel takes and we can actually see and pull the data of which is the most cost efficient channel or delivery method that we can deliver these goods.

Flexibility, scalability, and the speed that you can pull these reports are the most valuable features. Accuracy is also a huge factor because if it's junk in, it's junk out. I'm leading a big data modeling project at the moment. We've been modeling the data properly into a data warehouse. Currently, we've just been using an ETL database and that doesn't really work. The data is not live, it's not instant. The tools plugging into the data warehouse need to produce the results quite quickly and I know the tool is only as good as your data warehouse.

They should develop greater visualization because their visualization isn't industry leading at the moment. The way you pull the data and see the data compared to other platforms, they're lagging a little bit behind. Also, their cost. I've got Oracle account managers trying to persuade me every day to purchase these licenses. Once you purchase OBIEE, then you have to purchase the virtualization and then you have to purchase the mobile license to operate on the mobile. It's really expensive. 

It is stable. Once you go through a long process and get everything working, it does work. There's a lot of time and effort that needs to go into the solution before you get the results that you want.

Scalability is limited. The scalability compared to other products that I've seen and tested, is quite far behind.

We do you use Oracle support. We've been paying for an Oracle support subscription for four or five years, and not one ticket has ever been logged. When I came in, I've encouraged the team to ask Oracle questions. They do get back quite quickly. Their support is good. Working with our account managers, if I need to escalate anything, I can speak to them and they escalate the call. I've got that ecosystem working quite well. That does work for us.

We switched to OBIEE because Discoverer was very old and outdated. We migrated from Oracle databases 11G to 12C, and they found that Discoverer was not compatible with the Oracle database 12C. They decided to move to another platform, and the previous IT manager was very Oracle focused and orientated, which I don't agree with because Oracle is very heavy resource intensive and there are much lighter applications that you can plug into. The way they structured it wasn't very conducive to the business because OBIEE and the data that you compile on that is used for OBIEE. Now what I'm trying to do is, we're busy modeling the data for a data warehouse where we can plug multiple connections to that data. You can have mobile apps for different business criteria, business objectives, and business goals, and once you're with OBIEE your limited to that. That's the problem, that lack of research and insights causes.

When choosing a new solution, the most important factor is understanding the business goals and objectives and understanding what the business needs from that product. Once I've got all that information I then look at the different products and see what they can do. I look at the product and see how much of the business criteria it ticks off and I measure and compare it to other platforms. I rate it on a scale and see which one best suits the business.

We also looked at IBM and SAP. 

It's a great product if the business requires it, but for our business and the environment that we're in, I'd give it a three out of ten because it just doesn't meet the criteria that we need. I'm very pro-cloud, a cloud platform would be really nice. I know Oracle does have a cloud analytics solution, and we've looked into them on how to move that over, but it's really expensive for the investment that they've already made into OBIEE. These days, IT leaders like myself, the new trend is a consumption model instead of an on-premise model. Using the cloud in consuming what you need, switching off what you don't need. I've done this whole exercise with our whole ERP, we moved that through to the cloud, we moved all our on-premise services through to the cloud. With that, I can predict cost. I know exactly what's happening. I trade capital expenses for variable expense. It makes life much easier.

I would advise someone considering this solution to, first of all, define your business goals and objectives. Define what the business needs, and then analyze all the products that you're considering and see which is best suited for you. There are much cheaper solutions to work with, much easier solutions to work with. We're here in Dubai though, it's a small country, and there are companies, massive companies, that have invested millions of dollars into Oracle OBIEE and it just crashed, it failed. It wasn't what they need. The main thing, if I could advise anybody, is, you need to see what the business goals, objectives and the needs of the business are first, and then you can choose your platform.