Users looking for an enterprise class cloud BI solution should take a look at Oracle Cloud BI Services. It offers some essential features missing in many other products, and particularly a separate staging environment before solutions are put into production, a robust metadata layer, and a level of inbuilt intelligence with recommended visualisations for queries.
As with so many products Oracle provides an easy-to-use interface for charts, graphics, tables and dashboards to be created. Drill down, pivots and filters are built in to the dashboards and a bewildering number of options are presented with a right click on any dashboard object.
Mobile support is particularly good with both android and iOS devices providing access to dashboards, reports and other forms of analysis. This plays well with the collaboration features, which are controlled through finely-grained security mechanisms.
The Oracle Database Schema service provides the full capability of the Oracle database in a cloud environment. Multiple data loading tools, RESTful web services and full SQL and PL/SQL (web services data upload) functionality mean most data sources will be accessible and manipulable. This allows organizations to integrate information into their analytics from on-premises systems, as well as from other cloud solutions and 3rd party applications.
Regardless of source, the data is presented in a single semantic layer, meaning users don’t have to know anything about the underlying data structure to quickly create meaningful BI applications. The semantic layer also propagates consistent definitions across the enterprise, supporting corporate governance and data stewardship.
All-in-all it’s an industrial strength solution to cloud BI, but it is more likely to be of interest to existing Oracle users than organisations simply looking for the most cost effective solution.