by Sid Goel

This week I have been in attendance at Oracle Open World where my focus has been on the Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) track.   The presentations have revolved around 2 primary themes: Cloud and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI).

Top 3 Takeaways

1.  Oracle BI Cloud Services (BICS)

This is a very interesting product. It is a Version 1 product so it has some limitations (i.e. you have to load your database to an Oracle Database Cloud). That being said, I think an ideal use case for this solution is data that enterprises often receive from their vendors, partners and suppliers. This data is usually intermittent and can often vary in format. Oracle BICS allows you to easily upload this data into a Oracle Cloud Database, quickly model it and produce compelling reports and dashboards that business users can see right way.  KPI is one of the few partners that were invited by Oracle to be on the BICS beta and KPI’s consultants are ready to go this solution.

2.  Oracle BI Applications 11.x using Oracle Data Integrator (ODI)

We are doing several projects with the new ODI BI Apps and are seeing customers very excited about the new content in areas such as Time and Labor Reporting in HR Analytics, Fixed Asset Analytics in Financial Analytics, etc.. Oracle has released a new utility that converts Informatica mappings to ODI. KPI is the first partner to start using and testing this utility. KPI has deep expertise in both ODI BI Apps and custom data warehouses using ODI.  Learn More >>

3.  Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) 

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) is a more mature product. It has been out for almost a year and has many customers in production. KPI feels that this product is an excellent for almost every customer and use case. KPI has deep expertise in this product and is working with Oracle on building accelerators to make it even faster to get value from this solution.  Learn More >>

Sid Goel is a founding partner at KPI Partners. As a leader in the consulting industry, he has led hundreds of successful business intelligence, ERP, CRM, data integration, and cloud-based analytical projects. Check out Sid's blog at KPIPartners.com.