Oracle Magazine - November/December 2010

NetApp’s Oracle data warehouse contains information from many domains, and users can create cross-functional reports that tie many business functions together. For example, the sales staff can access forecasts, goals, pipelines, opportunities, orders, bookings, customer activity, channel activity, and more. Finance can track revenue from forecast to booking including order backlogs, shipments, margins, and adjustments to the general ledger.

“Most other companies have distinct BI
implementations in different pockets of the
enterprise or business functions,” contends
Wang. “Our eBI solution springs from one
unified framework for the whole enterprise.
We’re leveraging the power of integrated data
and analytics to cross-pollinate ideas among
the workforce. I have been involved with
many large-scale functional BI successes in
other large enterprises, but they are dwarfed
by the scope of this implementation.”
NetApp’s architecture includes Oracle
Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g,
Oracle Portal, Oracle Content Manager, and
other enterprise applications.

“We have millions—if not billions—of different analytics in our BI applications,” adds Wang. “We are letting people access this information from mobile devices, including iPads and iPhones from our intranet portal, and from analytic routines embedded in field portals and other enterprise applications.”

BT
bt.com
Headquarters: London, England
Industry: Telecommunications
Revenue: US$32.2 billion
Employees: 100,000
Oracle products: Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition 11g, Hyperion Financial
Management, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle
SOA Suite, Siebel Customer Relationship
Management, and Oracle Product Information
Management Data Hub
SNAPSHOTS
NetApp
netapp.com
Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California
Industry: High technology
Annual revenue: US$2.8 billion
Employees: More than 7,000
Oracle products: Oracle Business Intelligence
Enterprise Edition 11g, Oracle Database, Oracle
SOA Suite, Oracle BPEL Process Manager,
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, Oracle
E-Business Suite, Oracle Financials, Oracle
Content Manager, Oracle Portal, Siebel
Customer Relationship Management, and
PeopleSoft applications

“Action Framework enables end-to-end
workflows and creates integrated processes,”
Wang explains. “It also lets you click on a
metric and directly link to the associated
transaction system to create closed-loop
workflow processes.”
NetApp also plans to use Oracle’s new
mapping capabilities to display BI analytics
and metrics on territory maps for the sales
team. “We want to give users a simple view
of important business activities through our
portal, in conjunction with search, content
management, and collaboration applica-
tions,” says Wang.

EX TENDING BI THROUGHOUT THE ENTERPRISE

Wang identifies several of the new capabilities in Oracle Business
Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11 g as crucial to the company’s BI
vision. For example, the Action Framework feature helps NetApp
utilize SOA, BPEL, Web services, and other technologies to create
closed-loop business processes. “BI isn’t just about gaining insight;
it’s about taking action,” he emphasizes. “Guided analytics means
there is an invisible hand behind our framework to help people
find information and then use it to drive decision-making. Action
Framework will make it easier to embed these guided analytics into
our business processes.”
In the past, most BI applications were disconnected from the
surrounding business processes. A user would look at a report or dash-
board to learn something about the business, and then take action by
picking up the phone, typing an e-mail message, or launching another
business application. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
11 g’s Action Framework feature connects these gaps by enabling
integrated workflow processes and helping BI users link insight with
action. For example, if a sales rep uncovers a service-renewal opportu-
nity while working in the BI application, he or she can directly launch a
process to generate a service-renewal code from the same screen.

A UNIFIED INFORMATION MODEL

BT and NetApp exemplify Oracle’s enterprise BI vision: comprehensive reporting, analytics, and alerting functionality built on an open, unified infrastructure. Both BT and NetApp are standardizing on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g because it has evolved into a complete BI platform for managing and optimizing enterprisewide performance.

With integrated support for OLAP, inter-
active dashboards, ad hoc analysis, proactive detection and alerts,
advanced reporting and publishing, mobile analytics, desktop
gadgets, and more, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
11 g’s hot-pluggable design enables customers to take advantage of
both Oracle and non-Oracle datasources and applications. “You can
always drill down to the detailed transactions,” Wang says. “You
can always roll up to the high-level KPIs. Users have different entry
points and different functional views, yet there is one cohesive
framework underlying it all.” 