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Verdict
Overall, Oracle Business Analytics technologies compete well with best-of-breed options. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery was the best-of-breed option as far as we were concerned prior to Oracle acquiring Endeca. This is unique technology and worthy of serious consideration as a solution to the enterprise search problem.
Oracle’s BI products represent a mature, and very large suite of solutions. However Oracle has recently added significant data visualization capability, and it compares well with newer market entrants in this space. For organizations committed to Oracle this is the obvious solution to BI needs.
Analytics, and specifically data mining and predictive analytics have been treated very differently by Oracle. Most analytics tools need data extracted from various data sources, and the resulting models stand as separate entities outside the production environment (although this can be addressed to some extent by PMML). Oracle Advanced Analytics puts the data mining algorithms into the database, along with resulting models. There are many advantages associated with this approach – not least the fact that the models are stored in a place where they can be used. Oracle has also made a significant commitment to using open source R in addition to its own data mining tools. This is a very good option for committed Oracle users, and allows them to take advantage of existing investments. It really wouldn’t make a lot of sense for such users to look elsewhere.
In addition to the data and software architectures deployed by Oracle the company offers specialized hardware for analytics, BI and enterprise search purposes. It also offers connectors to Hadoop based big data sources. The configurability of these options will be of interest to many large organizations.