Oracle Magazine - July/August 2012

Oracle E-Business Suite 12. 1 and Oracle Fusion Financials.

ORACLE ENDECA UNVEILED

Another product of Oracle’s R&D investment in business analytics, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, is the first Oracle information discovery offering since Oracle acquired Endeca in October 2011. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables exploration and analysis of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from a variety of sources such as data warehouses, transaction systems, social media, and sensor data. These datasources can reside inside or outside of an organization, and might include sources that have never been modeled and that are constantly changing.

Information discovery, also called data discovery, complements and enhances business intelligence (BI). Whereas BI provides proven answers to known questions, data discovery provides fast answers to new questions and puts the power to ask those questions in the hands of businesspeople who know the information best. Data discovery helps companies create new key performance indicators for BI systems.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery uses a faceted analytical model, similar to that used in online shopping. A faceted model encourages data exploration by presenting all relevant data in a straightforward click-to-select manner. (Compare it to a shoe-shopping Website that lets users narrow a selection: first they might choose men’s shoes, then sneakers, then white leather, then size 9. Now extend that concept to searches for common-alities and relevant themes in multiple corporate datasources, such as ERP, customer relationship management, and HR management systems, as well as unmodeled and external datasources such as social networking sites.)

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery “takes you from traditional reporting and analysis to interactive discovery and exploration—where you don’t even know all the questions you’re going to ask,” Yelamanchili said at the Oracle Open World Tokyo launch. “You’re going to start with a question, and then move very quickly into understanding, connecting the dots, finding the patterns, and finding the outliers. And very quickly,

“Business analytics—getting the right data
to the right person at the right time to make
the optimal decision—is the most important
thing you can get from your data.”

—Mark Hurd, President, Oracle

from that point on, zero in on the real issues
and real problems.”
Oracle Endeca Information Discovery’s
three-tier architecture works like this: After
various datasources are combined and
enriched in the Integration Suite feature
of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery
(the first tier), Oracle Endeca Server (the
second tier) organizes that information into
a unified index, deriving a model from the
data if necessary—a bottom-up approach
that is the core of the Endeca application
line. The Studio feature of Oracle Endeca
Information Discovery (the third tier), with
its drag-and-drop interface, creates appli-
cations for exploring and analyzing that
information. In the process of information
discovery, Oracle Endeca’s optimization
algorithms exploit the server’s full memory
hierarchy, from on-CPU cache to disk, to
optimize system performance.

ANALY TICS APPLICATIONS EX TENDED

Oracle has also extended its current family of applications to support the need for analytics. The Tokyo announcement highlighted new offerings in this area, including Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics for SAP, Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics for SAP, enhancements to Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP, Oracle Manufacturing Analytics, and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics. (See Briefs, page 16, for details.)

These new applications, as well as Release
11. 1. 1. 2 of Oracle’s EPM products and Oracle
Endeca Information Discovery, support
Oracle’s overall business analytics strategy.
As described by Hurd and Yelamanchili, the
strategy recognizes trends such as big data,
mobility, in-memory analytics, and cloud,
and is built on four foundational principles:
Any data, any source. Deliver the ability
to tap into diverse data sets—structured,
unstructured, social media, and machine-
generated data—to improve analytics.