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.

It's one of the common integrated recording tools. I have been in the OBIEE world for quite some time. It's another powerful tool with certain aspects that are like no other tool. Three categorization layers gives us a lot of flexibility, which I didn't realize was possible on other reporting tools.

Prior to this, I was on the ETL side and slowly transferred to the reporting layer side and OBIEE was another good planning factor for me on that.

I would say the biggest need for us is non-structured data. Most of the time, our users come up with an Excel file they want to integrate. It's pretty much impossible in OBIEE. I'll put it that way. When it comes to the BI world, maybe you can do that in SAP Business Objects, and as a company, we have OBIEE and Business Objects as parallel tools people use.

That is always one of the things that we always lag behind and maybe people think Excel, but that is not one of the most powerful things businesses use. If you cannot satisfy the Excel needs, it doesn't matter how cool or how technically focused, consistent, compliant data you have; you can't use that if you can’t integrate it.

There are a few things, like variables and other stuff. Maybe they could allow the editing of reports. Those are the basic features. You cannot copy and paste a report, a particular section, which a lot of people said to us that they have to go through.

A focus on the user experience is what OBIEE needs. As a technical guy, I understand why it works and why, but if it doesn’t sell the business? Make it more user friendly. I'll put it that way.

I rate a product based on how it allows me to help the organization and my role is to provide reports. Success comes only when my customer accepts it. Right now, it's unidirectional and the other piece; there are some things, which are a pushback. It could be a lot of factors, not specifically OBIEE, but OBIEE plays a major role.

Most of the time, we have issues we are facing.

I have used Oracle OBIEE for the last 3 years.

It is a stable product. It has it's own life cycle and as the near future comes, it takes its own time, but once it gets stabilized, we're pretty much good.

We are using it to a good amount of extent, but I believe it's scalable. There is some kind of heaviness to the application. If it can be compartmentalized, then they will have it really good. Right now, they are trying to scale it to an extent we could do, but it comes with some kind of administrative work from our side.

Technical support is okay. I will put it that way. We had our own ups and downs. As a company, from our side, we are platinum customers to Oracle. I don't want to go through the regular route of technical support. We know what we are asking. I'm not that new at this. I don't want to go through a 10-step process to reach somebody, because we work with them to correct some of their product issues.

Apart from that, we get assistance. I won't say we don't get it, but we also had a structured model to interact with Oracle and that they are getting better at that. I came to know that in 12c. They are making it easy for us to give our issues to them. They have the ability that we can click on a case and give them whatever they need. Hopefully, that should solve our problem with Oracle.

When I came in, there was a framework already existing. I was more stabilizing the issues, and this is what my knowledge is about. Setup was not straightforward. There are a lot of things that my friend was initially doing and was going through. I came and then helped them and stabilized it more; not specific to the OBIEE, but from the OBIEE stack. Those are some things that need to be improved.

We use Oracle OBIEE for reporting.

I like the cloud deployment feature. There are about 20 new features, and they are available on mobile and more. I haven't used any of them, but these features are highly attractive.

It could be more user-friendly. For example, the RPD layer could be more straightforward. From a user's point of view, the visualization, especially the graphs, are not as attractive when compared to other tools like QlikView and Qlik Sense.

I have been using Oracle OBIEE for about five years.

Oracle OBIEE is quite stable. 

I think Oracle OBIEE is scalable.

If you compare Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE licensing, then Oracle products are much better. With Qlik Sense, you have to pay per client and per use. But we get Oracle OBIEE along with the Oracle database, making it much more cost-effective in the long term.

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

It's the connectors, the adapters. Built in connectors with different ERPs, you can plug in XL, other sources of data. It's very easy to configure. It's very easy to use.

It's so easy for us to see everything on a single dashboard, instead of looking for the information, and then compiling it in some sort of spreadsheet. We can just go on the dashboard and measure our success while looking at our financial data, even our HR data. 

It's great. We are able to do a lot of analytics. We can set goals, annual goals, using this tool. It's very easy to create our dimensions and our facts and see which metrics are being hit and which are not.

I think Oracle has already come up with a couple of data visualization pieces, instead of just reporting. Today, I saw from a couple of versions of what they are coming out with. I think it's pretty cool. I think it satisfies all the business needs that we have.

Super stable. In the initial phase, 10 years back when we started using it, at that point, it was a bit finicky, but it's been perfect.

I think it was scalable enough.

I think, especially with Oracle OBIEE, we have not created any service requests that I know of. Maybe once or twice. 

We have used their ERP as well and we had to create a lot of service requests, tickets. But with OBIEE, it's very easy to use, and we have not had that much trouble. The tool has been in the market for a while, it's very stable.

We were trying to use a custom based tool. That didn't work. Every time we had to make a minor change, a technical person had to be involved. A lot of different layers, and it was like product delivery. It was a continuous development. This was a big change for us. It was pretty much plug and play.

We needed some technical expertise, including me - I have some background in using different business value tools - so I knew. It was not that hard after reading their documentation. It was easy.

The most important criterion when looking at vendors is their experience with bigger clients. That helps a lot. Lessons learned, they put it out there. They tell in their white papers. There's a lot of information out there to help you before you even decide to use a tool. That's great.

It satisfies 99% of the business measures related to analytics, reporting, and dashboard views; it satisfies all of those.

I would say first, analyze your business requirements and see if this is the right tool for you. There might be cheaper options, looking at your business requirements. Oracle is a big company. That's the most important piece of the puzzle, you have to look at your own requirements and see if everything meets your needs. Other than that, I think if your requirements are to have a tool which has dashboard capabilities, and you have analytical needs, and reporting needs, I think this satisfies pretty well.

Obviously the most valuable feature is the data, both in the way it's presented visually with graphs and just the accessibility to that data.

It empowers users to perform ad hoc analyses themselves rather than having to go to IT or somewhere else. That makes it much more efficient for our users to do their jobs because they have access to data analysis in front of them instead of having to find that information elsewhere.

It would be beneficial to allow the user to further personalize their own page a little bit more instead of just being presented with data. I think the user interface still needs more fine-tuning. It needs to be easier to create user reports. People who first use it don't know where to get what they need as there are so many tabs and so many things you can do. It would be nice for it to be made more intuitive.

We've had no issues deploying it.

I would say it's pretty stable. We've had no issues with instability.

It has scaled well for our needs.

We've opened tickets and the IT side handles that. I'm more on the functional side. We send the request to IT and they open up the tickets, but the turnaround time is a little long.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, thought I haven't heard that it was particularly difficult or complex.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

We didn't evaluate other options because we did a pilot program ten years ago and we already had the licenses and infrastructure in place for it.

It's a valuable tool and it really benefits our work. The main thing is to let your users know how valuable it is so it's worth their effort to learn how to use the tool.

It's just drag-and-drop, versatile, very user-friendly, and intuitive. OBIEE makes data analytics easy.

It's provided versatility to both the user and developer sides. It can present data in various way to the end user. With it, we have options on what to do and how to present information, such as in graphical form. There are several graphics, in fact, such as pie charts or any other kind of data illustration.

The Oracle installation instructions tell you to install the product and give it a name, a skimmer name would be dev. That way it's called dev because you’re doing the operation in dev. Call it dev BI platform, but even that is just a skimmer name. The best thing would be to just call it BI platform and leave it at that. That way, to move to any environment, from dev to test to prod without changing anything. In dev, it's great, but if your test environment is called test something, your users would be test something. Now your guys on the dev BI platform suddenly don't work here because it's dev. In production, you have to call it prod something. The bookshelf says call it dev, but you really shouldn't do that. Really it should be just BI platform.

If you have a lot of Oracle products, they would conflict if they are running the same box due to code names, code numbers, and pretty much use the same numbers. So, if you have Oracle Data Integrator and OBIEE in the same box, they would conflict. They would want to be in their own separate boxes to be able to work together. They don't work together, but they do help each other. ODI just makes the data available to how you want it. You need separate boxes, and once again, that means space and there's obligations with Oracle where you cannot have "something something" on the VirtualBox. There are licensing issues there, too.

The issues we've had with deployment are with the naming conventions described in the Areas for Improvement section. Other than that, we've had no deployment issues.

It's a stable product, but Oracle products generally conflict when they're deployed in the same box.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Tableau is visualization, and OBIEE is not as visual. It's a visualization tool, but Tableau's got more bells and whistles, a more "wow" factor. OBIEE is more data driven. Also depending on the user's capability, it presents data in a way in which you can make your own reports.

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.