Oracle Analytics Cloud
Oracle is a global provider of enterprise cloud computing, offering software, platform, infrastructure and even data as a service. With over 170,000 employees, Oracle is one of the giants in the market.
The Oracle Analytics offering (OA) rests on three major pillars: its flagship product for BI and analytics Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) running on Oracle Cloud, Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) for on-premises and multi-cloud deployments and Fusion Analytics for embedded analytics within the vendor’s portfolio of business applications. Oracle Analytics utilizes the tried-and-tested but modernized foundation of Oracle BI (OBIEE) and incorporates some of its modules, such as Publisher for developer-oriented pixel-perfect reporting, to provide extended functionality and compatibility.
Oracle Analytics Cloud incorporates business-user-oriented capabilities for the complete analytics cycle. It offers modules for developing and deploying formatted reports, interactive dashboards and analytics suitable for business users. Its goal is to create an integrated data, AI and analytics platform in which OAC plays an important part. It is also used to embed analytics into every Oracle product.
Recently, Oracle has introduced many innovations into OAC, such as the new self-optimizing, in-memory analytics engine. The models created by the new semantic modeler can be consumed by third-party applications such as Power BI, enhancing the value of models maintained in Oracle Analytics.
Augmented data preparation for business users and custom data transformations via Data Flows are also provided, as well as visual analysis in a comprehensive and integrated analytics platform. Furthermore, integration with Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW) is constantly evolving to benefit from central and governed data models. Oracle Analytics Server, the on-premises version of OAC, brings the capabilities of the cloud platform to organizations requiring on-premises deployments or wanting to run it in other clouds.
With Automated Insights and ‘Explain’, users can leverage automated insights generation powered by ML and NLG. Relevant drivers, patterns and clusters are identified and visualized with little to no effort. Beyond that, forecasts leveraging weighting algorithms can be created based on the drivers identified with one click too. Natural language queries (‘Ask’) can be used to analyze data without deep technical know-how or to search across all data sets cataloged in many supported languages.
Complementing the portfolio, machine learning algorithms are embedded out of the box with Oracle Analytics Cloud. R and Python scripts can be embedded to leverage the results of advanced analytics models. Additionally, ML algorithms embedded in Oracle databases can be leveraged without shifting data, providing enhanced speed and flexibility for analytics.
User & Use Cases
It seems that a good portion of survey respondents this year are customers of Fusion and/or NetSuite Analytics, Oracle’s pre-packaged content for business software customers based on Oracle Analytics. In that context, it is not surprising that 76 percent of customers use the product for dashboards, 76 percent for ad hoc query, and 62 percent for analysis. These are the primary usage scenarios of what is quite a broad suite capable of serving way more scenarios and users.
A few other figures confirm this observation. Firstly, the mean number of users (257) and the median of 50 seem rather low for Oracle Analytics. Moreover, an average of 29 percent of employees use the product, which is above the overall survey average of 21 percent. Finally, more than half of the respondents this year claim to have used the product for operational BI and in embedded scenarios.
The split of respondents by company size is also interesting. About half came from large enterprises and 41 percent from small companies with less than 100 employees. That leaves only 7 percent from mid-sized enterprises. Overall, Oracle Analytics customers have a median of 3,000 employees.
Current vs. planned use
n=28
5 products most often evaluated in competition with Oracle Analytics Cloud
n=29
Percentage of employees using Oracle Analytics Cloud
n=29
Number of users using Oracle Analytics Cloud
n=29
Tasks carried out with Oracle Analytics Cloud by business users
n=29
Company size (number of employees)
n=29
Want to see the whole picture?
BARC’s Vendor Performance Summary contains an overview of The BI Survey results based on feedback from Oracle Analytics Cloud users, accompanied by expert analyst commentary.
Contact us to purchase the Vendor Performance Summary- Register for a free sample Vendor Performance Summary download
- If you have any questions, feel free to contact us