Oracle launches Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

Oracle unveils new business intelligence products which aim to provide users with enhanced business visibility and alignment

Oracle's Business Intelligence suite offers users enhanced visability

Oracle has launched Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, a suite of products offering customers the chance to move ahead of competitors.

“The new drive for business intelligence is to achieve competitive advantage,” David Callaghan, Oracle's senior vice president of technology for the UK, Ireland and Israel, told attendees at the launch event in London.

According to Oracle, the new release will help customers achieve that goal through three key strengths:

• The products provide a unified environment for retrieving and examining data that resides in relational, OLAP and XML data sources.

• They feature a new integrated scorecard application combined with new developments in enterprise reporting, visualisation and search and collaboration.

• They enhance performance, scalability and security through deeper integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and other components of Oracle Fusion Middleware.

“The new release is easy to implement for departmental needs, and scales to provide unrivalled performance and scalability for the largest and most demanding enterprise deployments,” said Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management at Oracle Business Intelligence.

Event attendees, a mixture of customers and Oracle partners, were widely positive about the launch. Richard Stott, client relationship manager at The Connect Partnership said: “We looked at Cognos, but Oracle Business Intelligence is more flexible and provides a fully integrated solution.”

“What we’ve seen is quite promising,” added GSK service team manager Steve Vincent. “Most of my users’ complaints are about performance. I’m impressed with the Enterprise Management tool.”

Industry fears that Oracle’s recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems could result in a lack of focus on support for Sun’s hardware were not reflected at GSK.

“There was similar disquiet when Oracle bought out Siebel. My perception of Siebel service improved after the Oracle acquisition," said Vincent.