Oracle Takes On Microsoft In SMB BI
SMB data warehouse software Server database business intelligence
Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One incorporates some of the same products found in the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, the vendor's mainstream BI package that debuted in March 2006. But it also includes a copy of Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One, Oracle's database product for small businesses, and the Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g toolset for collecting data and using it to assemble a data warehouse.
"This will be a very attractive alternative to a SQL Server solution," says Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle business intelligence. Microsoft's SQL Server has data reporting and analysis capabilities built into it, as well as data transformation capabilities for building data warehouses. Rodwick says the Oracle package will provide "deeper analysis and more extensive reporting" capabilities than its Microsoft competitor.
Both the Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition One versions of the BI suite include Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher for producing reports and documents, the Oracle Business Intelligence Answers ad hoc reporting and analysis tool and Oracle Business Intelligence Interactive Dashboards. Also included is the Oracle Business Intelligence Server, which provides the infrastructure for the tools in Oracle Business Intelligence SE One.
Many of the technologies in both versions of the BI suite were acquired by Oracle early last year when it bought Siebel Systems. Oracle will continue to sell the older Business Intelligence Standard Edition suite, which includes long-time Oracle products such as the Discoverer reporting tool, Rodwick says.
The suite does not include any of the performance management software Oracle now owns after its recent acquisition of Hyperion Solutions. Rodwick says Oracle is still developing integration and packaging plans for the Hyperion products with an announcement likely sometime next month.
The new BI suite, which runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system, will be licensed to organizations with a minimum of five users and a maximum of 50. Growing companies can easily move up to the Enterprise Edition after they exceed that limit, Rodwick says, because applications, reports and dashboards built for the SE One version can be migrated to the enterprise suite.
Oracle will be charging $1,000 per-named-user for the SE One BI suite. The per-processor price tag for Microsoft SQL Server Workgroup Edition is $3,899 and $5,999 for the Standard Edition. Business intelligence software vendor Business Objects also is moving aggressively into the SMB market with pre-configured packages of BI tools " but no database " with a $20,000 starting price.
While the SE One BI suite will be available through Oracle's on-line, telemarketing and direct sales channels, Rodwick expects the bulk of the suite's sales to be through the vendor's reseller channels.