Oracle releases BI 10g

Oracle Corp. has made its 10g Business Intelligence product, which was first announced in December, generally available.

The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company has combined its business analytic and reporting tools into one standalone offering. It includes Oracle Discoverer, for querying analysis and dashboard features; Oracle Spreadsheet Add-In, which allows direct access to Oracle's online analytical processing (OLAP) from within Microsoft Excel spreadsheets; Oracle Warehouse Builder with extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities; and Oracle BI Beans, a set of custom developing tools.

The State of Louisiana's office of group benefits and department of natural resources have been using Oracle's BI package for about six months, but the company's relational database and Discoverer for far longer.

For more information: Read about how the Yellow Pages is using Oracle BI   Check out our BI Learning Guide

"This agency has been transformed," said Rizwan Ahmed, CIO for the state's two groups. "When we started the initiative, users were completely handicapped. They had to go to IT to get any reporting, even ad hoc. Their hands were tied."

Now 500 users with the state insurance agency can create their own reports and monitor the financial health of the plan while they identify potential areas of efficiency. The agency is planning to release two customized dashboards that allow its customers to access information via the Web.

"I've been able to look at a number of other BI products," Ahmed said. "What I'm seeing Oracle offer here at the moment, is a tool from one vendor which has got just about all the components. I think Oracle has a very good base footing with this but needs to commit to improving the whole aspect of the entire suite."

Oracle's advantage, said Steve Illingworth, Oracle's senior director for BI products, is that everything is built into the database already whether a customer wants data mining, OLAP or relational tools.

"Everyone has it installed," Illingworth said. "It's a licensing issue not a technology issue. We can service those results inside BI 10g."

Oracle BI is included with Oracle's Application Server 10g Enterprise Edition. Pricing for Oracle BI 10g is $20,000 per processor or $400 per named user.