Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) applications are complete, prebuilt business intelligence solutions that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence and enable better decisions, actions, and business processes for everyone in an organization. Oracle BI applications provide customers with the ability to extract business data from a diversity of data sources and meaningfully integrate the data into actionable insights into the business, within a single data warehouse.
Senior Platform Products Manager, Oracle Server Technology
Location: Redwood Shores, California
Product: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications
Q:Why is Oracle's approach to BI innovative?
A:Oracle BI applications are innovative because of the secret sauce that goes into them, and for the achievement they represent to the industry. Having been in the BI business for 10 years, I feel that packing all the BI extraction and reporting functionality for so many diverse OLTP systems, all going into the same data warehouse, into a single, commercial off-the-shelf BI application, is a remarkable achievement. A lot of vendors, including us, tried to get BI applications right for years. Finally, I think we as a company get it.
The secret sauce is the canonical data warehouse and ETL algorithms, which form a major chunk of core intellectual property behind this product. The ETL algorithms collectively extract, massage, and fit data that exists in various shapes, forms, and sizes in various source systems into the target data warehouse. The algorithms are capable of extracting and de-normalizing business data from various releases of Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards applications, as well as SAP.
Q:What makes it unique?
A:Simplicity. Oracle BI software is the iPod of BI applications. Business users love it because it gives them so much visibility into their business while shielding them from the dizzying complexity of the algorithms and IT infrastructure that it uses. IT administrators love it because they can manage and customize the applications through easily understood user interfaces.
Q:Why would you say you were nominated for the innovation showcase?
A:For a couple of reasons: First, I developed an innovative ETL [Extract, Transfer, Load] algorithm that dramatically increases the performance of a class of ETL processes while simultaneously reducing the algorithm complexity and the amount of hardware required to run the processes. The algorithm now ships with every release of the Oracle BI applications product, in various incarnations.
Second, I identified new business opportunities for Oracle at the intersection of the Software-as-a-Service and BI applications space, wrote the business plan, identified a key technology barrier that was killing startups in this space (cross-data center ETL for large data payloads over wide area networks), and solved the problem. I then demonstrated a proof-of-concept for the solution, patented it through Oracle, and provided the intellectual property to the group within Oracle that was best suited to run this business. I was nominated for my contribution to Oracle's intellectual property, and for giving Oracle the edge over the competition as Oracle explores new markets and business models where few enterprise software companies have profitably gone before.
Q:How do you think Oracle's innovative culture benefits our customers?
A:Oracle's innovative culture encourages its engineers to think outside the box and to achieve technology breakthroughs that go into making products that are faster, cheaper, and more scalable than those made by our peers in the industry. Our customers reap the benefit by getting more value for their money.
Q:Who would you say is the most innovative person at Oracle?
A:I would say the engineers and product managers who have the passion to make things better are the most innovative folks at Oracle.
Q:What innovative technology are you excited about right now?
A:I am very excited about Oracle's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) suite of products. In the current economy, customers are using SOA technologies to automate and integrate business processes, which helps them save on costs and get more value out of their existing IT infrastructure.
| 
