Oracle Analytics Summit 2022

Last week I attended the second Oracle Analytics Summit at Skywalker Ranch.

The last Summit was in 2019 and attended by Jon Mead and he summarised the experience here.

The purpose of the event is unchanged, and the idea is to showcase the current analytics products and services and more importantly, get feedback from analytics customers and partners on future developments and strategy.

It was clear during the event lots had changed since 2019 and the initiative has really started to pay off, Oracle was named as visionary in the 2022 Gartner magic quadrant for analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms for the third year in a row.  Rittman Mead has certainly seen an uptake of OAC/OAS and positive customer feedback.

The event started well with a recorded opening keynote and two customer success stories. MTN being one of them. We have been working with MTN for the last five years.

The core workshops over the two days focused on three main areas:

1.     Analytics (OAC/OAS)

2.     Oracle Applications and Fusion Analytics Workspace (FAW)

3.     Data

One of the highlights for me was a couple of talks around storytelling by James Richardson.  James used to work for Gartner and is now at Oracle. He continues to look at data storytelling and how this is expected to dominate business intelligence in the future, specifically now with Oracle.

The biggest change to OAC is the introduction of web-based semantic modelling tool. This will absolutely revolutionise the way we build semantic models in OAC. I’m sure most of the readers know or have come across the OBIEE Admin tool and RPD.

“The Oracle BI Repository (RPD file) stores BI Server metadata. The metadata defines logical schemas, physical schemas, physical-to-logical mappings, aggregate table navigation, and other constructs. You can edit Oracle BI repositories using the Oracle BI Administration Tool.”

The challenge with the RPD has always been how to do multiuser development (MUD). The RPD is a single binary object and unless you edit in online mode (not advisable) it’s hard to version changes (Enabling OBIEE Concurrent development). The new semantic layer has been completely re-engineered to the latest software engineering practices thanks to the leadership of Bret Grinslade and team.  The User Interface (UI) looks modern, and you can use the UI or code directly in Semantic Model Markup Language (SMML). The lineage tool presents well. Keep an eye out for  upcoming blogs from our team on the subject as we start testing its current capabilities.

“The current version supports relations objects modelling. Essbase and OLAP are not available, and the tool is only for OAC. The traditional Admin tool will be here for a while.”

In addition there are continued improvements to OAC, focusing on AI/ML and natural language processing.

There is a continued drive to enhance Fusion Analytics Warehouse (FAW) for Fusion application users.  Additional external pipelines include SalesForce and EBS as examples.

Summary

There is a continued commitment to supporting customers and building a strong analytics community. The event was certainly filled with thought leaders in the area and hearing about customer experiences gave useful insight and feedback to Oracle product teams and partners.

Look out for our blogs on the new semantic layer and our experiences with FAW.

Customers I spoke to during the event were struggling to increase their users’ adoption of new analytics capabilities. Same reports, different platform. If you are struggling with user adoption, let us know.We have an excellent team of consultants and we have a user engagement service that helps to identify why users aren’t engaged with the reporting tools.