More Evidence That Oracle Loves Essbase

Since the Oracle merger, it seems the developments concerning OBIEE and Essbase have been really exciting for traditional OBIEE people and less exciting for Essbase practitioners. The focus seems to have been on providing Essbase as another data source at the physical storage layer of OBIEE. There are advantages to that approach in that OBIEE made federated queries possible. Federated queries combine data from both Essbase and relational data sources into a single semantic layer and basically made the source of the data invisible to the end user. As implemented, the concept is fantastic for dashboards but for those of us raised on the interactivity of the classic Excel add-in, it was not really that exciting.

Flash forward to last week when I was on a demo of an upcoming product with a couple of old Hyperion friends who have recently returned to Oracle. The product, the Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (“OBIA”) Essbase Integrator, turns the OBIEE/Essbase development effort to date on its head. The purpose of the product is open the data in the pre-packaged OBIA products, such as Oracle Financial Analytics and Oracle Spend and Procurement Analytics, to Essbase. At its heart, the Essbase Integrator will take data from those applications, which is currently available in OBIEE, and spin off Essbase cubes from them. The new product will maintain bi-directional metadata on both the OBIA side and the Essbase side to minimize maintenance efforts.

Obviously, the benefit for Essbase focused people is that this product has the potential to greatly expand the footprint of Essbase throughout the Oracle customer base. The benefit for OBI customers is that they can extend the capabilities of their applications to add some of the things that Essbase does very well. Some of those capabilities include:

• What-if and scenario modeling
• Allocations
• Multiple hierarchy rollups

Let me emphasize again, this product is not yet available and Oracle is traditionally tight-lipped about shipment dates. I do know, however, that Oracle is planning a beta test cycle for the spring. If you are an OBIA customer and are interested in providing feedback during the beta cycle, send me email at timtow at appliedolap dot com with the subject line ‘Essbase Integrator’ and I will pass your information to the right people at Oracle.