One session we attended at this year's Analytics and Data Summit on Oracle’s Santa Clara campus took a quick dive into the how and why of upgrading to the new and/or re-branded Oracle Analytics Server (OAS). Here are some of our most pertinent takeaways on what OAS can do for your organization.
Blending BI
OAS offers the best of two worlds: Classic BI and Modern BI.
Classic BI can be described by:
- A fixed set of dashboards that requires lots of knowledge to setup
- An RPD built by IT in the back-end
- Pixel-perfect formatted reports with BI Publisher
- A framework to navigate from one analysis to another with pass-through filters
Modern BI, which is all about data discovery (but is not intended for large amounts of data), gives users the ability to:
- Connect to a wide range of data sources
- Do transformations and join multiple data sources together
- Add column and filters to the data
- Hand repeatable data flows to IT to be optimized
OAS and Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) both give the benefits of Classic and Modern analytics in one. It maintains a single version of truth for all BI users and applications and still has the benefits of self-service. Users can start analyzing information from any data source without the involvement of IT, and they also have the ability to take raw data and transform it to end-user presentations.
This all adds up to a more responsive and agile business unit able to garner deeper insights from its data. OAS allows the best opportunity for the on-premise Oracle BI user organizations to find the correct balance between “Centralized Analytics” and “Self-Service Analytics” that’s right for them. Each organization has a different answer to what the correct mix is to create Unified Analytics. While OAS allows the uses to do more with data in less time and with less effort, it also allows organizations to govern data access and data quality.
In summary:
Classic + Modern = Unified Analytics = OAS/OAC
Interested in a deep dive on the differences among OAC, OAS, OBIEE? Watch the replay of our "Analytics Showdown" webinar here.
