Oracle Trumpets Analytics Bona Fides

Oracle President Mark Hurd delivered a speech before Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo that emphasized the rapid buildup in analytical functionality the company has made in recent months. He touched upon previous developments, such as the Big Data Appliance announced at the start of the year, as well recent news, such as its update of Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management.

The overarching theme of the presentation — and indeed, Oracle’s story line for its analytics feature set — is how the right tools can mine the right data at the right time from a company’s complex database systems.

The Right Talk

All of the major analytics vendors — IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle — discuss analytics this way now, Nucleus Research Vice President Rebecca Wettemann told CRM Buyer.

“These vendors talk not just about making the technology available, but also about how they are guiding customers in such a way that they can be on the cutting edge of analytics and Big Data with more upside and less risk than traditionally is the case,” she said.

Certainly, that approach makes sense as analytics and Big Data get ever more complicated and expensive for companies to manage, noted Wettemann.

“By focusing on how these pieces can be deployed rapidly and in manageable chunks, these systems become more attractive to customers large and small,” she said.

Latest Developments

Among the developments Oracle announced in this family of products were the update of Oracle Hyperion enterprise performance management, two new Oracle business intelligence applications, and the general availability of Oracle Endeca information discovery.

The upgraded version of Hyperion, 11.1.1.2, has new project planning and account reconciliation modules, support for Oracle Exalytics in-memory machine, and other new capabilities.

Two new Oracle Business Intelligence Applications — Oracle Manufacturing Analytics and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics — were developed for companies in the manufacturing, energy production, utilities and other asset-intensive industries.

The Oracle Endeca Information Discovery release is being touted by Oracle as among the first enterprise platforms for data discovery. It is able to combine structured and unstructured data without modeling. It is also certified to run on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine.

Nondisruptive Innovation

Oracle is not the only player advancing its feature set, Wettemann, pointed out, citing SAP’s recent release, ActiveEmbedded, which is a strong analytics play.

While the Endeca piece is interesting, “it is still a wide open field in terms of who will be a top provider of managing unstructured data,” she said.

“What will be interesting to see moving forward,” said Wettemann, “is how these different vendors just don’t innovate on the cutting edge of analytics, but how they help customers to adopt that cutting edge in a nondisruptive way.”

Oracle did not respond to our request to comment for this story.