New Oracle BI Release Supports Apple iPad, iPhone Devices
The new BI software lineup, Oracle Business Intelligence Release 11.1.1.5, also works with a broader range of data sources including systems from rivals Microsoft and SAP.
Business intelligence software has been among the fastest growing segments of the IT market in recent years. Worldwide sales of business intelligence platforms, analytic applications and performance management software grew 13.4 percent to $10.5 billion in 2010, according to recent numbers from the Gartner market research firm.
Oracle's $1.65 billion BI software sales in 2010 accounted for 15.6 percent of the worldwide BI market, Gartner calculated, up from 14.6 percent in 2009. While that made Oracle one of the fastest growing suppliers of BI products last year, it still left the company in the No. 2 position behind SAP and its 22.9 percent market share.
The new Oracle Business Intelligence software is part of the broader Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite. "These new Oracle Business Intelligence product releases build upon the success of Oracle BI 11g and provide customers a wide range of new capabilities that extend intelligence to the iPad and iPhone, offer more powerful visualization, interactivity, performance and scalability features to their ERP and CRM applications, and optimize customer interactions and decisions in real-time," said Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management, Oracle Business Intelligence, in a statement.
With the new release iPhone and iPad users can access the full range of Oracle BI's capabilities including its reporting, dashboard, scorecard, ad hoc analysis, alerts, relational OLAP and multidimensional OLAP tools, Oracle said. Users can initiate actions and workflows from the mobile devices.
Included with the new suite is BI Applications Release 7.9.6.3, a set of pre-built analytic applications developed on Oracle BI Release 11.1.1.5 that work with financial, human resource, procurement and spend, supply chain and order management, contact center telephony, customer loyalty, marketing, pricing, sales and services applications from Oracle and SAP. They also work with a number of vertical industry applications from both vendors.
The new analytical applications also work with the Apple iPad and iPhone devices and sport a new user interface with interactive charting and prompting capabilities. An enhanced "common enterprise information model" aids development of federated queries against a broad range of data sources in relational, OLAP and XML formats. And the analytical applications offer new systems management services Oracle said simplifies system configuration, testing, deployment and monitoring.
The new BI software set includes Oracle Real-Time Decisions Release 3.1 with a new Decision Manager application for managing, monitoring and refining operational decisions across customer interaction channels.
The new release provides extended support for Oracle's own TimesTen In-Memory Database and Oracle OLAP systems, as well as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and SAP Business Information Warehouse.