Oracle Analytics Cloud Service(OACS)

The New Future of Oracle Business Intelligence

Oracle Analytics Cloud Service: The New Future of Oracle Business Intelligence

John Liette, Product Architect, BI

Earlier this year, Oracle made their newest BI cloud offering generally available with Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) , a grouping of new and refined cloud based BI products meant to deliver a wide range of capabilities to serve as enterprise scalable solutions. As of today, the Oracle Analytics Cloud products are available in two tiers, the Standard Edition and the Enterprise Edition:

Standard Edition	Enterprise Edition
Data Visualization Cloud Service	Everything Included in the standard edition
Data Visualization Desktop(50 Licenses per 0CPU	Business Intelligence Cloud Services (BICS)
Oracle Smartview	Oracle Essbase Enterprise
Oracle Essbase	Day by Day

Oracle Analytics Cloud - OAC

Interesting to note is the inclusion of Essbase in the Cloud. OAC is the first opportunity for customers to purchase the new cloud version of Essbase, although the technology of it has been ready for deployment for some time. OAC is the perfect platform to distribute this new version of Essbase, as it complements the additional cloud products, particularly when you look towards the Enterprise Edition. Essbase in the Cloud provides a tool that is impressively close to the on-premise version of the tool.

In addition to adding Essbase as a cloud option, OAC also delivers a new Business Intelligence Cloud Service version to general release. Subscribing to the Enterprise Edition nets you a newer version of BICS than you would get in the BICS standalone option. Oracle advises that it is straight forward to convert a BICS standalone implementation into a OAC Enterprise Edition subscription, but if you're starting fresh with no cloud products today, there's a very compelling case to skip the BICS standalone option and going straight into OAC to take advantage of the latest technology within BICS, but also to take advantage of connecting to the additional tools as data sources, including Essbase in the Cloud.

Using BICS within OAC also means having access to the BI Admin Tool, which is used to create, modify, and maintain the BI logical models that drive its subject areas. This tool is the same as the current on premise version of the admin tool, returning a great depth of functionality back to the administrators after BICS' stripped down, simplistic GUI version that accompanies the standalone version of BICS was viewed by many as shallow in functionality.

Of course, another boon to your practice with the package is Data Visualization Cloud and Desktop versions. DV allows users to craft new, often ad hoc reports in minimal amounts of time. With DV, users can connect to BICS subject areas, local spreadsheets, and many other sources of data to quickly craft deep, purposeful visualizations with new ways of presenting and distributing them. Users who want to take advantage of Oracle's deep visualization options but do not want to, or don't have the bandwidth to, develop star schemas and physical and logical models can now quickly and effectively connect those sources to DV to generate visualizations in minutes.

Lastly, OACs Enterprise Edition also provides access to Day by Day, Oracle's new mobile native app that connects to OAC data elements to create a new way to interact with your data. Imagine typing (or speaking) "Incremental Revenue by Product by Region for 2017" and the app generating a visualization comparing those elements for the year 2017. That is exactly what this app does now! In fact, the app is free to download and includes a demo data set to show how adaptable and functional this already is.

OAC is available now and includes these new toys that combine to be a one stop shop for your organization's reporting and analytic needs. Look for future content from MindStream Analytics as we dive into each of these tools separately to get a look at what features and functionality of each can help drive growth within your business.