OBI Standard Edition One Updated for 11g

A number of people asked me at the recent Training Days events whether Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One (OBI SE1) was being updated for 11g.

For anyone not familiar with Oracle Business Intelligence licensing, OBI SE1 10g was a special packaging of OBIEE 10g that had restrictions on usage (no use of Delivers, no BI Office plug-in, restrictions on number of data sources and CPUs) but also came bundled with an SE1 copy of the Oracle Database and the "core ETL" elements of Warehouse Builder as well. The main appeal of OBI SE1 was firstly, the lower per-user minimums (I think 5 was the minimum number of users for OBI SE1 10g, whilst OBIEE was set at 50), and the fact that you got a database and ETL thrown in. Once you graduated to 50 users, you were expected to move to OBIEE which also then gave you access to Delivers, additional data sources and so on.

Now I'd expected OBI SE1 to be quietly dropped when 11g came along, as the minimum users for OBIEE 11g has I think dropped from 50 to 25, and is usually negotiable if you want to come in under that. However Oracle have just announced that OBI SE1 is now available for 11g as well, and whilst it's a license-only package (there's no separate OBI SE1 download or installer), you get access to the brand-new 11g front-end plus features such as mapping, navigation actions, BI Publisher and so on.

What's excluded in this release is agents (iBots in 10g terms, so no difference there), invocation actions (to invoke web services, for example), the BI Office plugin (as per 10g), and the new Scorecard and Strategy Management feature. The same data source/CPUs restrictions are in place, and this white paper sets out what you can do, and can't do, in more detail, but if you're using OBI SE1 10g and you want to upgrade, it looks like you're in business now.