Oracle OBIEE Reviews

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.

We use the product to bring reports to the dealers. It is performing well.

We recently upgraded to version 12c.

It mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis.

I would like more graphical charts.

While it is a user-friendly, data-driven tool, the data modeling should be easier to use. 

The stability is good.

It is good. I can use it with any type of data models, such as relational lines and dimensional lines.

The technical support is not as good as before. They used to have very good support five to six years ago. The support is now hectic and takes too much time to resolve issues. We often can resolve issues on our own before they can.

I would recommend the OBIEE over any other tool. Look at OBIEE and compare it with the competition.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: more technical features, technical support, and performance.

I like the scheduling feature. It has an inbuilt scheduler which is very good, and it allows us to create agents, and those agents can be scheduled. It's quite flexible in that respect and goes into our IT infrastructure. The outputs are sent encrypted to various endpoints. Some are internal, and some are our clients, and it's encrypted at a high level.

I do find Oracle OBIEE flexible. If there is stuff that's not in your model or schema, it's very flexible to create SQL scripts and create the data you want. It's quite nice to create a dashboard in OBIEE, and that's pretty straightforward in the way you drag and drop everything. You can create sections, and you can add elements to your page. That bit of the interface is relatively straightforward.

The graphical capabilities could be better. They are also cumbersome, and they are limited compared to Tableau, Power BI, or even Business Objects to a certain extent and Cognos. The error logging isn't great either. The errors that come out when you schedule aren't easy to understand.

I find how they filter within a query quite cumbersome and difficult to debug if somebody else has done it. You can see as you build, and I think that's where the problem is. It doesn't lend itself to debug something. For example, if you create a formula that's quite complicated, it's not easy to understand what goes with what. 

It becomes spaghetti, and it's very difficult to unpick. That's really my gripe about it, and in some ways, it's too flexible. It tries to be a Jack of all trades when it's not. I think a lot of these products, if they concentrate on trying to produce your reports, then that's fine. But when they're trying to do all sorts of other things as well, then it isn't very easy.

We get lots of support from Oracle, but I think the problem is that we get many invalid file operations. Nobody understands why. It can be a multitude of reasons, but no one reason could cause it. That's just one of the issues we've had in the last year. But the scope of reporting has gone through the roof over the previous 12 to 18 months.

We want an end-of-life OBIEE in our environment because some of the infrastructure runs unclustered. We weren't allowed to go clustered for some reason, and we never knew why. Unfortunately, going down that route means that the platform we run it on, WebLogic, has now become non-standard within our organization.

Everything's been moved off it and onto other platforms. Unfortunately, our OBIEE runs on that platform, and we're being pushed down different routes, and we don't know where we're going at the moment. Within the next two years, I don't think we'll have OBIEE in our part of the business.

In the next release, I think having the capability of being able to develop and then promote to a production environment rather than having to have separate environments will help. I know that Tableau and Power BI can be created on a desktop application, and then when it's ready to go live, you can promote it. 

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for about four years, but I don't use it a lot.

Oracle OBIEE is very stable. The only issue have is scheduling too much at the same time. It can get overloaded, and unfortunately, like most things, there are always bottlenecks. 

You're actually pushing it down a tunnel in effect, and if that tunnel's not large enough, it can't cope with the load. Some of the files and some reports are a lot bigger, and OBIEE has a limited 64,000 rows of output. It's not suitable for really extracting large amounts of data.

If I wanted to extract all the transactions on a report for one particular day, then that would blow the 64,000 rows of output. This means that we have to run it separately, and we can't schedule it. It has to be a manual task, or we have to get work done by our development people to provide that report as a standard report. This can be quite difficult at times.

Oracle OBIEE is scalable because you can cluster them and have multiple servers. You can spread the load up to a point. You can have multiple environments running under the same cluster. In our production space, we have two environments. We have a test environment, and we have a production environment. Being clustered, you can cluster those together.

When I used Cognos, it seemed as though it didn't cater to telling stories. It's like you've got to get the data out into something like Excel or another tool to do the visualizations. It can be done, but it's quite fiddly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle OBIEE a seven.

We mainly used the solution for their warehouse. OBIEE is a complete package and it includes OLAP analytics as well as OLTP. We use both features of OBIEE. 

Overall, it's a very good tool.

We have implemented the solution effectively in large organizations, like utility companies or banks. Their budgets are pretty high and they can pretty much afford the costs involved in the solution.

For their OLTP reports, like online transaction reports, we use BI Publisher, and for warehousing, we use OBIEE to populate the dashboards for the business. That's why it's so useful for us. Oracle gives us lots of features and visualizations. In the recent version of 12c, they had introduced many features in visualization as well as dashboards. 

They introduced AI and forecasting in their latest versions and they are now working on the cloud. They are also giving the latest version of OBIEE with cloud, called Oracle Analytics Cloud enterprises.

They have a new security mechanism that is very strong. 

They are introducing AI. There are good forecasting features and machine learning.

There's great forecasting features both for on-premise and cloud deployment models.

Thanks, Ms. Julia Frohwein for the review. I would like to explain the points which I had written in the first post.

The solution is too expensive for small firms. 

The solution is too expensive for small firms due to their licensing cost. Not every company has the budget to purchase the solution.

 I believe that the solution is beginning to integrate more security measures, however, more must be done.

The on-premises version does not have any AI or machine learning capabilities. They're saving those for cloud versions.

I've used the solution for five years or so. However, the last time I used it was in November of 2019.

We're actually currently using Microsoft Power BI as opposed to Oracle.

Power BI is a good tool for every business. Microsoft Power BI, as compared to OBIEE, is much cheaper than OBIEE. OBIEE, as a product, is pretty expensive for a lot of these small organizations or small companies. Microsoft Power BI is the most useful tool as compared to cost. It's cost-effective for every organization, from small to large.

I've noticed that Microsoft is adding more visualizations and comparing themselves to Oracle in order to position themselves as competitive. Of course, they also have items like machine learning, etc., that Oracle offers.

It's a pity that they are moving from on-premises in a lot of ways. There are two changes in the cloud site because they have introduced a few new steps to configure OBIEE in the cloud. There are pretty easy steps to configure OBIEE in the cloud. As a service-oriented company, we are only using their interface.

Every technology now has been shifted to Cloud. Every technology now has been introduced to the cloud instance. If you're talking about Microsoft, they have also introduced Azure cloud as well as Amazon and Oracle clouds. However, now they want to shift their Oracle technology to only cloud and in the future, we are seeing that most of the companies will shift their data to the cloud.

I was involved in the setup of both the cloud and on-premises versions of Oracle OBIEE.

The basic difference between on-premise and cloud is the fact that we as implementers are responsible for the entire picture. We have to build and install the server then handle the installation configuration and then move the data from the source application tool to the warehouse. That's only for on-premise whereby the whole responsibility is taken by us. 

The cloud, the infrastructure service, means that the responsibility is taken by Oracle. The cloud handles the technical aspects for the most part. We are only using to the warehouse because the source application moves the target in-house. The on-premise solution has three basic processes: infrastructure, installation, and configuration and then we do the implementation. In the cloud, you mostly just have to implement it.

I can't recall the exact pricing. There are three different categories. The pricing is available online. If you go to their website they're quoted there and they charge per hour band per day as they have different offers for their customers. If you want to know about their pricing of the particular categories, on their website their prices will be available there.

Their prices have changed from the last year. Right now I don't have any sense of price. However, I was part of the implementation team, and I noticed their pricing is not much higher but it's moderate pricing. 

There's a lot of competition right now between a few giants, including Microsoft, Oracle,  Amazon Web Services, and SAP as well as Tableau.

We were using the latest version of the solution at this time.

I would suggest that any company considering the solution carefully consider their budget first. The licensing is comparable to Microsoft. You need to make sure you can afford the solution.

From my experience, OBIEE is the best solution. I have five-plus years of experience working with Oracle. If you are a giant firm, if you can afford this technology, so go for it. This is a good technology. They have various solutions for customers. They have financials. They have utilities as well. Oracle has a supply chain, they have a financials, they have HRMS modules, they had a procurement module, and they have a utility stack. They have more products than anyone else. That's why they have an edge on other solutions.

I've been on webinars during the pandemic and have noticed Oracle push towards AI and machine learning, specifically on the cloud. I've also been on webinars with AWS and Microsoft and they are chasing this technology as well. Still, Oracle right now has the edge.

I would rate OBIEE nine out of ten due to the fact that their various features and their product stack are very competitive. Their various product features definitely attract customers.

We use it for KPIs. It's quite good, but the content of Oracle OBIEE cannot accommodate all of our needs. Oracle OBIEE only displays KPIs, but it does not include strategic objectives or display risk in a strategic map.

Generally, with Oracle OBIEE we can see near real-time performance in our operations. When there is a problem, it is easy to escalate it to top management and the time for management to make a decision about it is much shorter than it would be using a manual process.

The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is the reporting.

From the point of view of strategic management, I would like to have a feature, perhaps a form after we get to the KPI dashboard, to be used to note if something unusual happens in the operations. That way we could record extreme KPI situations, and track why a number is very low or too high.

Stability is okay. It meets our current requirements.

Its scalability also meet our current requirements.

We use in-house resources, since my IT team has the skills to develop in Oracle OBIEE.

I would recommend this solution but it depends on the needs of the company, of course.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor include local support and the most important is the capability of the solution to meet my requirements. It should also be compatible with our current system.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because Oracle OBIEE is capable of providing me with fairly comprehensive real-time data. However, again, it doesn't provide me with the strategic view or map or objectives, or how an individual KPI affects the strategic objectives.

It's a generic BI tool and all of the BI features are good.

We use it as an enterprise BI tool. All of the reports are in one place; that's the main benefit.

In the next release, I would like to them to add or include data visualization and mobile, which right now is a separate product. If it were up to me, I would merge them together.

It has some shortcomings, but overall it's a good, stable product.

We've been using it for 6-7 years.

It is quite stable. We've never had any issues with it; overall, it is very good.

It is scalable. We have lots of users using it and we can easily expand it.

The quality of Oracle tech support depends: if you get a good person, it's very good; otherwise, it's very bad. It's one extreme or the other.

We've been using it for a long time, so it's not like we recently went to it; it's been a long time.

I did not set it up my myself; my guys did it. It was somewhere in between straightforward and complex; it was not that complex, but it was not straightforward either. We had to get an expert Oracle consultant to help us with it, but that went well.

We selected this because we got a good deal on OBI, Hyperion and other products as a package; that was one of the reasons we picked this. Of course, features-wise it checked out equally with other tools that we evaluated. Eventually, cost plays into it.

The features that we were looking for were data visualization; slice and dicing of data; analytics, if you will; mobility; ease of use; scalability, of course; and also, response time.

You can go with OBI if you are an Oracle shop. It's better than SQL Server products. There are other products that are better than OBI, also, but it's one of the top five products.

The data modeling tier (called repository in Oracle BI technology) lets the user build and manage flexible, stable solutions for a large number of data sources, and business reporting areas.

I use the product to realize reporting and dashboard solutions on several telecommunication network test suites, thus not for any company organization aspect.

The catalog tool (to create report and dashboard)is not intuitive or easy to use. There are also some low severity bugs (up the 11.1.1.7 release).

I've used it for five years.

The product does not provide an automatic system maintenance service, thus log files continue to be collected on the disk up until it is full and it causes the whole platform stop. It requires continuous manual monitoring and deletion of log files.

The platform is powerful, scalable and flexible, but requires a huge commitment in term of people expertise in system and on the product.

6/10 - in some case they don’t help completely in finding smart solutions or workarounds for our issues.

We used Business Objects XI, and we switched to Oracle for a more impressive view, and a more interactive dashboard. OBIEE is also better equipped for the data modeling functionalities tier, and integrations.

It was complex, firstly for the platform setup, and secondly, it is required to have a large amount of knowledge and experience of the product before becoming an expert.

We implemented it in-house.