OOW2007: BI Roadmap & Strategy, Paul Rodwick & Rich Clayton

The second major session that I went to yesterday at OOW was the BI Roadmap & Strategy talk given by Paul Rodwick and Rich Clayton. Paul we all know from the Siebel Analytics side of the business, whilst Rich has come over following the Hyperion acquisition. These roadmap talks are always a good way of seeing where the various products are going, and they're a good way to tell what the drivers and themes are going to be over the next year or so.

The first major theme of the talk was around pervasive BI, the idea that whilst today's BI tools are good, they're only ever used by a small percentage of an organization, as they require training and that you stop what you're doing, load up BI tool and perform your analysis. What Oracle are aiming towards is embedding BI into the apps that you work with as part of your normal job - the MS Office BI add-in, new Vista widgets, that sort of thing. I'm personally particularly in favour of this sort of approach, if you can just embed BI functionality in people's day-to-day applications you're much more likely to get them to start using the functionality.

Paul then listed the six Oracle BI roadmap drivers:

1. Provide an integrated Enterprise Performance Management system - this is where Oracle are working towards a combined financial / operational / transactional BI system, using tools from Hyperion, Siebel and Oracle
2. Protect, extend and evolve customers' current investments - upgrading and enhancing Hyperion System 9, Discoverer, Siebel Analytics, then moving towards an integrated system in the 11g timeline
3. Enable pervasive BI - through MS Office Integration, workspaces, gadgets, SOA and web services integration
4. Innovate in all areas of BI
5. Remain standards-based and hot-pluggable - open, heterogeneous access, cross-platform
6. Evolve to unified BI foundation - this is where the former Hyperion, Oracle and Siebel tools all work off a single, unified metadata layer and technology platform, sharing a single, multi-channel EPM platform

Paul and Rich then talked a bit more about this concept of a single EPM workspace. This will use Single Sign-On (not neccessarily Oracle's, this could use some of the heterogeneous IdM tools Oracle recently acquired and OEM'd), process integration with Hyperion HFM, a user interface filtered by security, a tabbed, DHTML interface, a single place for all your BI content. Paul did show a few interface mockups, the idea is basically to combine the workspace elements of Hyperion System 9 with the dashboards provided by Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition. Looks interesting.

We then saw a few early designs for the user interface for OBIEE 11g, there was a more task-based interface with icons for recent dashboards, recent analysis, with launch points to create new dashboards, new requests, new iBots and so on. It's quite an evolution of the current 10g dashboard interface, much more intuitive, more "Office"-style, it's obviously early days at the moment so it will probably end up changed quite a bit but so far, it looks very impressive.

After talk around Hyperion / Google One Box integration (a search interface over your financial reporting data) Paul went on to describe the Action Framework that I mentioned in my earlier posting after Ed Suen's talk. The idea around this is to give you a framework that allows you to take immediate action following some insight you have using your BI tools. You can define a system-wide catalog of actions, that allows you to define, for example, a Web Services interaction, send an EMS message, post an ESB event, navigate to Web content, execute a Java method, deliver BI content and so on, which can then be attached to a data item and conditionally displayed based on the context. The Action Framework idea is obviously going to be fairly key in the 11g timeframe, most of the things you can do already through custom Java or Javascript code, this makes it all much easier to invoke and set up yourselves, and of course with Oracle owning the middleware and application tiers it's much easier for them to set up all the enabling links.

After the BI Roadmap and Strategy talk, Jon and I went to Andy Mendelsohn's database keynote over in Moscone North. One thing that was particularly gratifying to hear was talk about the OLAP Option, particularly it's new ability to replace a huge number of relational materialized views with a single multi-dimensional Analytic Workspace, which can then be queried transparently using the query rewrite feature in the database. Cool stuff.

Anyway, today is going to be the busiest day of the week for me. After a couple of talks this morning, I'm going over to TechTarget's offices in downtown SF to do a couple of videocast interviews, then it's the main conference talk for myself on Jon on SOA integration with Oracle BI EE. After that, we're heading down to the Thirsty Bear for 6pm for the start of the blogger meetup, should be a long but productive day hopefully.