KPI Partners Blog

Oracle Exalytics was recently launched at Oracle's Open World Event, which was held during October in San Francisco. Despite the numerous of claims of product excellence and testimonies from former clients, guests at the event were largely left wondering about the $100,000+ product.  Since the product was largely unseen, it leaves many clients asking is Oracle's newest BI innovation, the self-described "BI Machine" an absolute necessity?

Several of Oracle's customers who've used the product seem to think so.  A key feature of the project that has been touted by Oracle enthusiasts is the product's ease of deployment. A current client of Oracle and Exalytics enthusiast, Nilson Group, which is based in Sweden, praised the software's ability to update on the back end, without causing any project delays. Allowing the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to run on the Exalytics software eliminates operations problems that would otherwise be present on other systems.

Another client, Thomas Reuters, praised the new in-memory feature of the program that allowed it to analyze a 10 billion row data set, due to the capacity for in-memory storage. For a customer without Exalytics that attempted this same feat on traditional hardware, it would be impossible.

The main features that have been praised include the 1TB of ram (Oracle claims it can use even more data to its memory management capabilities) and exceptional processing speed, which has been known to remarkably serve up to 10,000 individual program users at once. Despite it's success, Oracle's newest program is not the end-all be-all solution.  No piece of hardware can take the place of the strategical and visonary components that only expert human resources can supply.  

For business owners that are looking to this newest development to solve glitches and memory problems, it looks like there is a solution. However, one must also consider the expertise and strategic vision needed to develop complete solutions customized to an enterprise or industry.

Time will tell if the newest addition to Oracle's high-profile business tools is indeed a must for the BI community.

Living in a global, ever-expanding economy means there are more people interacting than every before. Consider retail giant Wal-Mart, for example. The company conducts over a million transactions with customers every hour. That may sound like a feat in and of itself, but the company also keeps records associated with those transactions.

Well, it was bound to happen. After all, since we live in an age in which meeting the love of your life is now as likely to be accomplished by how accurately you've completed an online dating questionnaire as anything else, is it really surprising that the same principle has begun to be used to determine educational outcomes too?

So, your global enterprise has collected some data...  How do you start to make sense of all this raw data?

As part of a recent award win, we were asked to generate a short video that could be used as part of the various award ceremonies.   The objective was to capture, in less than a minute, the essence of KPI Partners... basically an extended elevator pitch with cool visuals.