Oracle has a logical argument why you should buy your business intelligence (BI) solution from the company. Having acquired ERP, CRM, and other data-intensive application vendors to pour data into the Oracle back end data store, why not analyze and distribute that data with a set of native BI tools? The counter argument often asserted by IT management, that enterprise analysis should be independent of the polygl Oracle has a logical argument why you should buy your business intelligence (BI) solution from the company. Having acquired ERP, CRM, and other data-intensive application vendors to pour data into the Oracle back end data store, why not analyze and distribute that data with a set of native BI tools? The counter argument often asserted by IT management, that enterprise analysis should be independent of the polyglot pieces that create the grist for analysis, was only sharpened by Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion Solutions in March. How might Hyperion’s offerings complement what Oracle is already proffering?The Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (BISEE) 10.1.3.2, released around the same time as the Hyperion acquisition, doesn’t reflect any of the many tools from the BI giant. Because a broad swath (not all) of the Hyperion offerings have functions parallel to existing Oracle BISEE tools, it’s impossible at this point to know what the suite will look like once the integration is completed. After an extended demo, I’ll tell you what the existing suite, BISEE 10.1.3.2, does now.BISEE 10.1.3.2 sports storage and management tools in the Oracle BI Server, which pulls data from Oracle and non-Oracle data sources for analysis. The analysis goes on in Oracle Answers. Separately-priced delivery modules include Publisher (for static reporting), Interactive Dashboards, Briefing Books (collections of dashboard results), and Delivers (a real-time alert mechanism). While Oracle developed some of this technology internally, much is here as a result of purchasing other tools vendors. I expected to see a Babelicious mishmash of interfaces, and given previous work with Oracle’s products, gnarly user-unfriendly and programmer-unfriendly approaches. Although Oracle hasn’t spackled all the interfaces into a smooth, consistent, and unified approach, I was very pleased with the design of both the tools that analysts use and the ones that end users work with. Though not particularly consistent, the interfaces don’t clash with one another either — no mean task given the multiple origins of the pieces.Oracle Answers, the browser-based centerpiece of the suite, is the analysis client. IT sets up the data so that users don’t have to know the underlying sources or locations. Analysts can form ad-hoc queries or assemble multipane dashboards. As has become less exceptional over the last year, but no less useful, dashboards support drill-down exploration both for the analyst and a downstream consumer of pre-designed (and subsequently personalized) dashboards, promoting both the wisdom of the wise and the wisdom of the crowds. Organizations can diffuse that wisdom in additional ways, my favorite being what Oracle calls Briefing Books, a set of static snapshots of dashboard panes bundled for consumers or to archive a baseline for later comparison.Key features new to version 10.1.3.2 include the ability to deliver a PDF version of a Briefing Book, drag and drop screen design for authoring dashboards, and simpler interactive filter imposition. Support for RSS subscription adds another alert mechanism. Oracle has backed up its logical argument with a sweet suite that gives existing customers a strong reason to consider native BI. Whether that will overcome the counter argument noted above, I believe, will strongly hinge on how quickly and thoroughly the creative brain-candy acquired in the Hyperion takeover gets integrated with the rest of the suite. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2 Price: Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE is priced at $1,500 per named user or $225,000 per CPU Platforms: OS: Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 Server, Red Hat Linux 4.x, Novell SUSE 9.x, Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4, Sun Solaris 9 SPARC 32-and 64 bit, Sun Solaris 10 SPARC 32-and 64 bit, AIX 5.2 & 5.3 PowerPC 32- and 64 bit, HP-UX 11.11 or 11.23 PA-RISC 64 bit2, HP-UX 11.23 Itanium 64 bit3. Web server: Apache Tomcat 5.5.x, Microsoft IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 and IIS 6.0 on Windows 2003, Oracle Application Server version 10.1.3.1, IBM WebSphere Application Server versions 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, Sun Java System Web Server 6.1, 7.0. Data Sources: Oracle 9i and higher, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and higher, Sybase SQL Anywhere, MySQL 4.1 and higher. Verdict: Oracle’s BI suite is rich on the back end and in delivery options for analysts and business-line users. In the middle of the workflow, the analysis and presentation preparation sequences, it’s got some game, though it won’t dislodge installed competitors because of those functions. The key to extending the suite to non-Oracle shops looks to be how well the company integrates, preserves, and continues to build on the Hyperion technology that complements its strengths. Technology Industry