Oracle OBIEE Reviews

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.

Implementations were focused on reporting and centralizing all data delivery and access to the Business.

End-users can cross the data from dimensional models with external Excel spreadsheets, while from a BI strategy point of view this is not ideal since that Excel data should be incorporated in the DW, but from the end-user perspective, they gain some empowerment to explore and integrate the data

OBIEE is an enterprise Business Intelligence tool, the semantic layer is very organized which helps to provide the subject areas and how the end-user visualize the data.

The WebLogic administration could be more intuitive or simplified especially when you are focused on OBIEE

More than five years.

OBIEE requires a whole ecosystem to run smoothly, it requires a stable infrastructure with minimum compute power standards, and  Besides of having the right infrastructure(for the OBIEE application), the database setup (init params) is also important.

 It is as stable as the knowledge the team has about the product and how to manage that,

Every project is has its own challenges, sometimes technical, sometimes acceptance, different environments , different approaches, different perceptions .

From a infrastructure perspective, from 11g version onwards OBIEE runs under weblogic where we have the DOMAIN concept, by default, after installation OBIEE runs under one node which represents the server where it is installed, and you have an option to scale up to other nodes, thus increasing the compute power .

The installation and initial setup requires specialist knowledge .

I have implemented through consulting companies . 

not cheap but it is worth it

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.

The most valuable features are what you can do with it. It's the insight of the data that really gives the management the capability of looking beyond what they probably currently have within the transaction system.

Now with 12c, there’s also data mash-up, which gives them the capability to look at different data, join them on the fly and look at the key indicators, which can probably give them insight into the business.

Performance is a key point, but it's always a give and take with performance: What do you really want to achieve versus what you can really get, and what does that cost? That's the key, I think, from a performance perspective.

I have been using it for 10 years.

It is a stable solution. We have been using it since it was Siebel; since before Oracle acquired Siebel. It has been almost 15-16 years. It's pretty old. Now, with the new release, they're adding on more and more capabilities.

It's pretty scalable. You can scale it differently; you can scale it horizontally or vertically. With the new upgrades, it's pretty amazing the things that you can do with it.

Technical support are very knowledgeable because this product has matured a lot from where it was initially.

With every release, the setup is getting easier and easier. When we started out, it was more complex; now it's getting more and more easy.

Based on what I have seen, based on different implementations, it's one of the tools that is pretty reliable in the market, that is pretty stable. As long as it meets your requirements, you should be fine. I don't see any issues with it.

When I’m deciding to work with a vendor like Oracle, I think about how much they are willing to collaborate and make their product succeed. It's more about partnership; it's more about reliability, but it's also about dependency. You often get stuck with products you're implementing and the solution might not be available onboard, so you have to go and reach out and get the solution.

The most valuable features of OBIEE for me are definitely the graphs and reporting that it provides. The data it displays look really great and they're easily customized.

Sales people have a different kind of mindset and they want to see different varieties of reports. If somebody wants to see data by store, or by store in a particular ad, and their district managers want to see something with the region specifically, OBIEE can provide them that detailed data.  Also, through BI Answers, we can get data that's time-specific, holiday-specific, weekday-specific, or weekend-specific. We can easily configure and manage pretty much any metric we want across our retail business.

Some of the main disadvantages of Oracle would be they don't give the whole privilege for the end user to customize the way they want. Some things can only be done by an admin or a business analyst, and then really only someone familiar with OBIEE would be able to do it. But unlike other product, like Domo or Tableau, irrespective of the database, you can write run-time reports by an end user. The interface is going to take care of it and, depending on the variables that they change, they would get the data. Data remains the same, but you are giving more to the end user to handle.

We have no issues with deployment.

We've had some stability pain points with OBIEE. Operationally it's fine, but cloning causes big stability problems.

It has a Repository Creation Utility that has its own schema. It's on a production database so when you clone them, they're going to come with the same schemas where you won't be able to run those well for the test database. You'll need to export or import so that before the clone you drop and recreate the whole BI suite.

Setting it up or even upgrading it is definitely not for someone within the first year of their career. You really need to to be experienced and to know a lot of things, such as integration, how it behaves, its parts, and a million other things before you start to get the hang of it.

We implemented it ourselves with our in-house team.

I did a demo with Domo, but those guys were right behind me for more than a year. We didn't have any plans with Tableau, but it may be a solution that we could eventually migrate to.

I wouldn't recommend it as there are many other product out there, as long as your database is covered with RDBMS or other warehousing database. If you're freshly implementing, there is no reason in going with a 90's-style solution in 2016.

I use different servers in OBIEE that are reflected as different subject areas on the application, and I can use one of them. For example, I have one subject area for marketing, the second for finance, so I have two subject areas available. I can use one of them that's not available for designing each function. Each file has or also contains mobile options. If the best model is a different file, I have to import it.

I like that Oracle OBIEE comes with more options. For example, more options with data security, user security, and other security. It's more complicated than Microsoft, but it gives you more options. They also added the part for machine learning, which is good.

It would be better if it had a wide range of visualization options. For example, Microsoft Power BI has an extensive range of visualization options, but it's not available in OBIEE. There are also some conflicts because it's complicated, but the cloud application is easier. They added some features for ETL with the on-premises application, but we need a different or a separate application for ETL in the cloud. In the next release, I would like to have more AI features.

I've been dealing with Oracle OBIEE for about two years. 

The initial setup is complicated and time-consuming.

We are a very big organization with many different data sources. For large organizations like ours, I would recommend OBIEE. If we are speaking about a medium or small company with limited data sources, then I may recommend Power BI.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Oracle OBIEE a nine, especially for organizations using large datasets.

We are using it for analysis purposes for different areas, such as sales, production. We are also using it for the financial data and quality module. We have customer complaint dashboards and all sorts of things.

It helps our senior management in reviewing the performance of sales, production, and customer complaints and taking decisions accordingly. These are the areas for which we have designed custom warehouses. All the data is available on a daily basis. They can see the performance on a daily basis. They can look at the performance of the Sales site, pending dispatches, and inventory status. All these things are available in custom dashboards, which helps them in making decisions easily.

The primary reason for using OBIEE is connectivity with Oracle E-Business Suite. It makes it easy to connect with our Oracle E-Business Suite. There are the standard dashboards available, which we sometimes use, and now we are looking for customized dashboards.

In the on-premises version, the feature for connecting and selecting the data between the databases looks a bit cumbersome, but I am not sure. The person who is using it takes a lot of time to design a data warehouse. When I ask him why is it taking this long, I get a response that this is something that he has to design, and there are different tools that are available. He has to write the ETL and design the warehouse according to the customer's requirement, which takes a lot of time.

Its visualization should be enhanced, and there should be a feature where you can easily create your custom data warehouse.

I have been using this solution for approximately seven years.

It is very stable. It is much stronger than any other solution that I've seen till now. I have heard that Microsoft's solution goes down, but Oracle is very stable.

Scalability is available. It depends on how you want to scale. Right now, we want to define our custom databases and custom warehouse. Therefore, we are creating customer data warehouses, and accordingly, we are designing our dashboards in a custom application. You can also connect it with any third-party software.

They are very good. We are on support right now, and they are providing support whenever we need it. They provide prompt support through their portal.

It is straightforward. Basically, if you look at the technical part of it, it is very simple. You can just follow a step-by-step process, and you can easily finish it.

It is reasonable, but it depends on how you're going to use it. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I would rate Oracle OBIEE an eight out of ten.

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.