New Oracle BI Tools Tap Into Data From Rival SAP Applications

Monday the company unveiled a version of its business intelligence software that works with financial accounting applications from SAP, the vendor Oracle competes head-to-head with in the enterprise applications market.

Oracle said Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP, a new module within the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications line, would help organizations derive greater insight from their operational SAP systems, improving cash flow and profitability in the process.

While some businesses with SAP Financial Accounting already use Oracle BI, those integrations had to be custom developed. The new offering provides pre-built integration capabilities.

"For years SAP customers have used Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to deliver complete, relevant insight across their organizations," said Paul Rodwick, Oracle vice president of product management, Oracle business intelligence, in a statement. "Having pre-built analytic applications to support the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle's Siebel CRM and Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, it was natural to extend that support to SAP with Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP."

SAP trumpeted Oracle's move as evidence of SAP's market success. "Today's announcement by Oracle highlights both the size of the SAP financials customer base and the opportunity that SAP is already realizing today by delivering packaged analytical applications dedicated to the finance line of business," said James Fisher, senior director of marketing, finance solutions at SAP, in a statement.

The new analysis software is available today as part of the Oracle BI Applications Release 7.9.7. Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP includes a pre-packaged ABAP code-compliant adaptor that works with Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition to integrate data from SAP Financial Accounting with the Oracle BI tool.

The software also includes pre-built metadata mapping, metrics and an analytic data model to reduce deployment and integration time. For analysts and managers who work with the extracted data the analytic software provides key performance indicators, role-based dashboards and more than 200 reports.

Oracle and SAP are bitter rivals in the enterprise applications market. In November Oracle won a $1.3 billion judgment in a copyright infringement lawsuit that charged that an SAP subsidiary had illegally downloaded software and support materials from Oracle Websites.