Even if you couldn’t make it out to Seattle for Kscope19 this year, you probably heard there was a big update coming to the Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), or Oracle Analytics in general.
We won’t bury the lead, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is going away to be replaced by Oracle Analytics Server (OAS), which is basically the on-prem version of OAC. You’re probably wondering why and what this means for you and your organization. That’s ones of things we’ll cover in this blog post, as well as...
- Differences between Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and OAS
- How Oracle views analytics today
- New features and functions
OAC and OAS Overview
Rather than having separate terms for on-prem and cloud analytics products – Oracle has decided to put it under the umbrella of Oracle Analytics. This includes...
- OAC
- OAS
- Oracle Analytics for Applications
OAC is their flagship product — it’s complete and comprehensive. OAC will receive all the updates first and regularly. OAS will mirror OAC (for the most part, we’ll go into the differences a little further down) and will receive an update on an annual basis (12-18 months). The good news for on-prem users is, you can keep up with the OAC updates throughout the year, so you know what to expect in your on-prem update.
Current OBIEE customers will be “auto-licensed” with OAS. Oracle’s stance is that they want you to move to the cloud “on your own terms,” according to Bruno Aziza, the Group Vice President of AI, Data Analytics & Cloud at Oracle.
Aziza went over Oracle’s new Analytics direction at the Oracle Analytics Summit at Skywalker Ranch, streamed live at Kscope19.
Another big announcement made at Kscope is that OAC will no longer include Essbase as part of the platform. Instead, it will be sold as a standalone product: Essbase 19c. But no worries if you already have OAC licensing — you’ll be able to continue using Essbase as part of the platform.
How Oracle Views Analytics Today
The way Oracle views and wants you to view Analytics today may or may not be a new perspective, but it’s their perspective today and for the future. Oracle wants to help enterprises and their corresponding users achieve “100 percent data literacy,” Aziza said during the live stream.
Their new vision for analytics has three tenets…
- Augmented
- Integrated
- Collaborative
Basically, things like machine learning and AI are going to create a world in which there will be less “human involvement” on the backend. Oracle sees the augmented world empowering the end user and helping to achieve that main goal of “100 percent data literacy.” The integrated tenet is two-fold — Oracle wants Analytics to be integrated within your everyday workflow, on your desktop and mobile. The next part of the integration tenet is having your analytics integrated with all your systems and data sources. Lastly, Oracle wants analytics to foster collaboration throughout your enterprise. They want to get rid of the disconnection of having multiple analytic tools across your organization in varying departments.
For OAC and OAS, analytics will be governed, self-service, and augmented — addressing the needs of business users, developers, and IT.
Several features and functions are represented in each category, including…
Governed
- Corporate Dashboards
- Pixel Perfect Report
- Semantic Models
- Role-based Access Control
- Query Federation
Self-Service
- Data Preparation
- Data Visualization
- Storytelling
- Sharing and Collaboration
- Mobile Apps
Augmented
- Natural Language Processing
- Voice & Chatbot
- Data Enrichment
- One Click “Explain”
- Adaptive Personalization
Though OAC and OAS will look almost the same, OAS will not include the Natural Language Generator feature, a powerful feature that generates explanations of your visualizations and works in 28 different languages.
We'll post any other features that won't be included in OAS, once Oracle has finished creating the on-prem solution. Stay tuned!