After attending Kscope18, one thing is still extremely clear — Oracle continues and will continue to be all about the cloud. For example, the title of the Kscope presentation detailing what’s coming to OBIEE is “Oracle Analytics: How to Get to the Cloud and the Future of On-Premises.”
While that does tell you there’s still a future in on-prem Oracle BI, it's also clear that all the innovation will be put into the cloud. In this blog post, we’ll look at…
- Innovative features of Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC)
- The future of OBIEE
Note: Any updates to features, functionality, or timing mentioned in this blog post are subject to change at the sole discretion of Oracle.
OAC Innovative Features
So, why move to the cloud? You’ve probably heard the pitch — no upfront investment, shorter implementations, automatic upgrades, and so on. However, Oracle has been emphasizing innovation recently. Below are some of the innovative OAC features…
Machine learning
This is one of those terms you’ve probably been hearing a lot lately. It’s becoming a buzzword in this space and beyond. Machine learning gets rid of the blank slate — it allows your program to grow and change based on new data.
Machine learning in OAC includes…
- Auto-explain
- Recommendation of best action
- Contextual insights
- Self-learning algorithms
For users, this means users get…
- Consolidation of many sources
- Programmatic integration
- Interactive visualization
- Defined models
Automated Insights, Visualization & Narration
This feature allows users to gain better insight through natural language generation. It automatically generates text and audio to make the data easier to consume. It also automatically shows you patterns in your data that you might not have found otherwise.
Additionally, you can start with auto-created visuals and get recommendations for the best visuals based on the data being analyzed.
Automated Data Discovery & Data Preparation
This feature allows users to perform a single search through all your data, with the ability to search to find data sources and ask data-related questions.
You also receive instant recommendations for your data preparation, cleansing, and standardization.
Lastly, you can better enrich your data through semantic profiling, a function that augments data with a set of pre-seeded reference knowledge.
The Future of OBIEE
One of the “perks” of the cloud (depending how you look at it) is that releases are more frequent. Plus, they’re automatic, so you don’t have to worry about installing patches or new versions.
Oracle’s current plans for its on-prem EPM suite won’t have all the innovative features of the cloud. But, it looks like that's not the case for OBIEE — according to Oracle, when an on-prem release is planned, it will include the features of the latest cloud release. As of Kscope18, these are the releases available from OBIEE...
Current Release and Roadmap
OBIEE 12.2.1.0 (Oct. 2015)
- Enhanced User Experience
- Modern application design
- Refined homepage
- Usability improvements
- BI search
- Simplified Administration
- Quick download, easy install, and scale out
- No restarts required
- Bar file – one application file
- Mobile BI
- Mobile HD app
- Native sharing
- Spotlight search
- Project to Chromecast
- Expanded Data Source
- Cloudera Impala
- Spark
- In-Memory Analytics
- In-memory computing
- In-memory Oracle DB and Essbase certified
- Data Visualization
- Visual exploration
- Rich data mashup
- Adaptive mobile design
- Data discovery on the go
- Advanced analytics
OBIEE 12.2.1.3 (Aug 2017)
- BIP Enhancements
- Report layout/engine enhancements
- Data engine enhancements
- Regulatory and usability enhancements
- Architecture
- DV and Classic BI SSO
- Cloud -> On-Prem
- Data Visualization
- SaaS and DB connections
- Rich data mashup
OBIEE 12.2.1.4 (Available Now)
- Data Visualization 4
- Refreshed UI and homepage
- More data sources
- In-line advanced analytics
- Self-service data preparation
- Improved BI connections
- Data actions
To learn more about OAC, download the presentation...
