The Business of Analytics
Oracle unveils analytics strategy and releases new EPM
and analytics applications, as well as Oracle Endeca.
Oracle President Mark Hurd likes to talk about business intelligence and
analytics. Just ask the crowd at Oracle
Open World Tokyo, where Hurd discussed
those topics—and Oracle’s strategy around
them—in a keynote address on April 4,
2012. At the same time, several new Oracle
products that enable faster, better decision-making were introduced.
To derive benefit from analytics, a
company needs systems that can both
handle huge data volumes and provide
very fast processing—and then they must
put that power in the hands of people who
need it, Hurd explained. “The key to ana-
lytics,” says Hurd, “is to get through tons
of information, in a fast way, with a lot of
performance—to be able to ask really hard
questions and get a decision to somebody
who can take action.”
Hurd added that today’s emphasis on
business analytics is generational. “I’m used
to taking a long time to get information,” he
said, “but my kids aren’t. My kids are used to
instant answers to whatever question they’ve
got, whenever they want, and they won’t wait.”
Joined by Balaji Yelamanchili, senior vice
president of analytics and performance
management products at Oracle, Hurd
outlined the challenges businesses face in
implementing analytics—including eight
times (or faster) data growth in the last five
years, aging infrastructures and applications,
and the need to deliver answers to mobile
platforms—and the types of solutions Oracle
provides to meet these challenges.
HAR TMANN STUDIOS
Oracle is spending almost US$15 billion
in research and development over three
years along four lines, Hurd said: Creating
best-of-breed hardware, operating systems,
databases, and applications, including business intelligence and analytics applications;
vertically integrating those components for
extreme performance—for example, cre-
Oracle President Mark Hurd
ating engineered systems built for analytics;
creating or acquiring industry-specific solutions; and producing a new generation of
applications, built on common middleware,
that can be delivered via public or private
clouds or on-premises data centers.
To showcase the early fruits of its R&D
investment in business analytics, Oracle
announced several new or updated products, including a new release of Oracle’s
enterprise performance management (EPM)
system, general availability of Oracle Endeca
Information Discovery, and several new
analytic applications. “The next generation
of analytic systems is so important because
the problem [faced by companies in today’s
environment] is getting harder,” Hurd said.
“Because there’s more data.”
EPM ENHANCED
Release 11. 1. 1. 2 of Oracle’s EPM system
delivers new modules and capabilities that
improve performance and provide companies with greater insight into their projects.
Oracle Hyperion Project Financial
Planning, a new product in Release 11. 1. 1. 2
of Oracle’s EPM system, enables project-
based budgeting, funding, approvals, and
tracking. This extends financial planning
and forecasting—which in the past typically
focused on accounts and cost centers—to
activities organized as projects. Project
Financial Planning can be used both for
projects that occur in all types of business
(such as I T, HR, or facilities projects) and
for entire operations in project-centric
industries, such as aerospace and defense,
construction, and manufacturing.
