Oracle continued its push into the Business Intelligence (BI) software space yesterday with the launch of a new suite aimed at midmarket firms with up to 50 BI users.

The company said the new Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One would provide midmarket firms with an integrated BI and data warehousing system for $1,000 per user for up to 50 users.

Alan Hartwell, vice president of technology and channels at Oracle in the UK, said that the new toolset had been developed to remove the technology and cost barriers that typically hamper adoption of BI in the midmarket. "BI has been too difficult for smaller firms to deploy and the products were too expensive," he said. "By licensing at $1,000 per user the new product is not going to be cost-prohibitive even if you rolled it out to all 50 users."

Hartwell added that the new product brought together Oracle BI functionality and infrastructure with advanced reporting tools that it acquired recently from Siebel. "Oracle has had strong BI products for some time, but we did not have the strongest usability features," he admitted. "With the acquisition of Hyperion we have access to all this technology that is in many ways easier to use."

BI Standard Edition One integrates a range of existing Oracle BI tools, including its data warehouse builder, BI report publisher, analytics, and query and reporting functionality, with a central BI Server that draws on data sources from across the business.

"The BI Server is central to the product," explained Hartwell. "It brings together data from different systems and sources and allows firms to use existing reporting tools to access it."

Hartwell added that the product was based on the same technology as Oracle's enterprise-scale BI tools, meaning it could easily be deployed across different individual departments within large organisations as well as at midmarket firms .

"As you scale up with Standard Edition One all that happens is that you move to a different licence metric," Hartwell said. "Firms rolling it out in different departments will be pleasantly surprised about how easy it is to integrate the technology. It is all built on the same tech stack and based on 10G [database] and the same tools, so it really is a simple integration task."

However, Alys Woodward of analysts IDC warned that Oracle's latest product would have to be combined with a considerable marketing and education effort it is to gain serious traction in the midmarket. "IT is a given within the BI industry that the software could be used by many more people than have actually deployed it and all the vendors are targeting the midmarket," she said. "But a lot of midmarket firms aren’t even aware that what they need is called BI, all they know is that they don't have one version of the truth for their financial information and they need to sort out their data."

She added that Oracle and other BI specialists were attempting to exploit a closing window of opportunity when taking traditional BI query, reporting and analysis tools to the midmarket. "When you look at the trends towards event processing, real time information and process management we are seeing more companies integrate BI into their processes," she said. "The traditional reporting and analysis way of doing things could well become redundant over the next five to ten years."