Data integration will be one of the major themes at
Oracle's OpenWorld conference this week.
The conference itself integrates Oracle's previous applications
conference, Oracles AppsWorld, with its technology conference,
OracleWorld, into a single show. But if opening day is any
indication, OpenWorld will focus more on the technology behind the
applications than on the applications themselves.
Oracle unveiled Business Intelligence 10g, a business
intelligence architecture that rolls up numerous Oracle business
intelligence point solutions into a single product.
Oracle BI 10g will include Oracle Discoverer, Spreadsheet
Add-In, Warehouse Builder and BI Beans. Discoverer, a query,
reporting and analysis tool, is in fact several years old. What is
new about the package is its ability to access both relational and
OLAP data.
According to Oracle's Steve Illingworth, senior director of
business intelligence products, the challenge in business
intelligence until now has been the need for IT to have different
tools and skill sets to capture different types of data, put it
into different data buckets and access it. "This is the first tool
that goes against relational and OLAP data," he said.
But although Gartner research director Bill Hostmann gave
Discoverer an overall thumbs up, he also said there was a big gap
in its reporting capability. "Competitors like Cognos have an
integrated reporting capability. Oracle will have to address that,
but it is a big step forward."
Oracle Spreadsheet Add-In will give Excel users direct access to
Oracle OLAP data and store the data in the database rather than on
the local hard drive.
Oracle Warehouse Builder will generate the code to extract data
from a variety of application data types, including SAP, Microsoft
SQL Server and IBM DB2.
Oracle BI Beans are re-usable Java components that will give
business users the same query and presentation interface, whatever
type of data they are accessing.
The other news around Oracle BI 10g is the unbundling of the
business intelligence tools from the application server. According
to Hostmann, users will benefit from Oracle's ability to focus on
business intelligence as a single product rather than part of a
monolithic applications server package.
Oracle's CRM division also had news yesterday on integration.
Last summer Oracle announced that its customer services components,
Oracle Service 11i.10 applications, would share the same customer
data with its CRM sales and marketing applications. In August, the
company announced the integration of sales and marketing customer
data.
Oracle Service 11i.10 now connects and shares data with other
CRM applications, including marketing, sales, HR, supply chain and
financial business systems.
Robb Eklund, vice-president of CRM applications marketing at
Oracle, said companies were looking for new ways to reach customers
with promotions and marketing campaigns in the light of growing "do
not call' and anti-spam initiatives.
"By integrating marketing with service such as call centres and
field service, companies will be able to upsell and cross-sell to
drive revenue using the call centre," he said.
Eklund said Oracle could achieve a high degree of integration
between these applications by building all of them on top of its
database. "Because it can access all of a customer's information, a
company can design personalised marketing programmes."
Yesterday, Oracle also announced a new spares logistics
capability that integrates parts inventory with scheduling and
human resources. With this capability a company could schedule
on-site calls based on parts in stock and the skill level of the
field service technician.
Oracle Business Intelligence 10g will be available in the first
quarter of 2005. Oracle Service 11i.10 is available now.
Ephraim Schwartz writes for InfoWorld