Intelligent Enterprise

I covered most of the bases on Oracle's release of its Fusion Edition Enterprise Performance Management (Oracle EPM) release last week, but here's a bit more detail, as well as some interesting insight, on the integration of Hyperion Essbase with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). For instance, Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel says vendors are often guilty of referring to their products as "integrated" as if that's a binary variable.

The nitty gritty detail — the stuff that legacy customers are most interested in — was delivered last week by Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of server technologies, who explained that that there are two styles of integration. "Essbase can be a source to OBIEE, so you can combine relational, OLAP and ROLAP analysis," he said. "One the financial side, you can source OBIEE relational data into Essbase, so the Oracle BI Server can become a source under Essbase."

Essbase has been enhanced in the bargain, gaining a new Oracle Essbase Studio design-time environment in which you can model the cubes and associated metadata. You can also drill from Essbase into source systems, with support for lineage tracking so you can always figure out where the data came from.

There was no question that OBIEE was to be the "first string" BI offering in the Oracle portfolio, says Schlegel, but nonetheless, Hyperion Essbase (as well as Brio) customers had been asking a lot of questions about Oracle's development plans. "Oracle acquired Hyperion mainly for the EPM applications such as Planning and Consolidation, but many Oracle couldn't ignore that many of these applications are built on Essbase," he explains. "They had to find a home for Essbase, and this latest release is a solid step in bringing the two code bases together."

That said, Schlegel says that customers should understand that these are still different code bases. "You can’t use OBIEE to build Essbase Cubes, and there are still two different metadata/semantic layers between OBIEE and the Hyperion CPM applications," he says.

This gets back to Schlegel's observation that integrated is not a binary attribute. "The truth is there are various levels of product integration (e.g. portal-level integration, common security, common metadata, common look and feel, common administration, seemless navigation), and all the mega vendors will be busy integrating their BI and performance management product portfolios.”