At COLLABORATE 13 in Denver, Oracle announced new releases of Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and Endeca Information Discovery. Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite centralizes enterprise reporting, dashboards, and analytics on an integrated platform, and Endeca Information Discovery is an enterprise data discovery platform for intuitive analysis of information from structured and unstructured sources.
More than 100 New Capabilities in Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite
Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite is Oracle’s primary product for BI and business analytics, and this particular release, version 11.1.1.7, has well over 100 new capabilities, some which were requested by end users, and others which were the result of Oracle’s own innovation, Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle Business Intelligence, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
In particular, there are new visualizations and easier to use navigation for business users which allow them to more easily do their own data exploration, apart from IT provided reports dashboards, notes Rodwick. New visualizations include Performance Tiles and Waterfall Graphs, while a new innovation from Oracle around “view suggestions” helps end users who are not very skilled at creating analysis or knowing which kind of Excel chart they should use, to select the right kind of visualization for what they are trying to accomplish.
This is the third release of Oracle’s BI Mobile capabilities, says Rodwick. Supporting business intelligence on the go, new capabilities available on the Apple iPad include support for more mobile-friendly gestures; interactive mobile access to the new Oracle BI visualizations; and enhanced capabilities for controlling and viewing content on mobile devices.
And, extending business user analysis, Oracle Smart View for Office now is the single Microsoft Office add-in for Oracle BI, Oracle Essbase, and Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management applications. New capabilities allow users to export full Oracle Business Intelligence dashboards in native Microsoft Excel. Users can create new analyses directly from within Microsoft Excel using data, calculations, reports, and visualizations managed by Oracle BI Foundation Suite and can save these views directly in their Excel spreadsheets, or to the BI Presentation Catalog.
Oracle Business Intelligence can now also access data sources on Hadoop via the Hive Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) interface.
Endeca Information Discovery 3.0 Offers Redesigned User Interface
The new release of Endeca Information Discovery is the first major functional release of Endeca since Oracle acquired the company about a year and a half ago, observes Rodwick. Supporting a better user experience, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.0 provides a dramatically refreshed user interface as well as new drag and drop visualizations to improve the discovery experience, he notes. In addition, says Rodwick, there is direct integration to Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite to enable users to leverage trusted data from existing analytic applications, along with other features.
Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.0 supports 10 localizations (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese) and Oracle Endeca Information Server now supports text data in 22 languages (Catalan, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish).
With a native JSON reader, a new connector to web service-based APIs through OAuth (an open standard for secure authorization), extended text enrichment, and improved sentiment accuracy, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enhances support for mining and understanding unstructured social media data.
With this release, Endeca also enables business users to upload personal data files into Endeca Server and create new discovery applications without IT assistance, as well as create and share new applications using managed data sets already provisioned by IT.
Endeca Information Discovery and Oracle BI Foundation Suite run better on the Exalytics In-Memory Machine, its engineered system for Business Analytics, says Oracle. Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite was the original set of products Exalytics was designed for and, after Endeca Information Discovery came into the product portfolio in 2011, that product was subsequently made available on Exalytics as well, explains Rodwick.
More information is available about Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation 11.1.1.7 and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 3.0.