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Acquisitions Plus Product Development Equal Powerful Business Intelligence, Says Oracle's John Kopcke
By combining strategic acquisitions with ambitious new product development, Oracle has changed the landscape of performance management, business intelligence guru John Kopcke told an overflowing audience at November's Oracle OpenWorld conference.
Kopcke, former CTO at Hyperion, now serves as senior vice president of Oracle's Business Intelligence and Performance Management Global Business Unit–and is the driving force behind Oracle's vision for its new Enterprise Performance Management System.
"Not only is Oracle's EPM solution the most comprehensive," Kopcke told the crowd, "but it's based on category-leading products across every important area of the BI solution stack. And the industry is taking notice."
Kopcke cited Oracle's recent ascendancy in the eyes of analysts, including its presence in Gartner's leader quadrants for BI Platforms, Corporate Performance Management, and Data Warehousing–the only company to be in all three.
Oracle Integrates So You Don't Have To
Until now, the promise of BI has been largely theoretical because companies have had to manage piecemeal solutions to solve disparate problems. Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System changes the BI equation, according to Kopcke.
"Rather than buying multiple BI, ETL, and data warehousing tools, then building everything from scratch," explained Kopcke, "Oracle prebuilt BI applications enable organizations to roll out BI far more quickly, at lower cost, to a broader audience of users, and with a greater rate of success."
Breaking Out of Isolation
Often companies already have many components of EPM, but they exist in isolation within silos, according to Kopcke.
"A company may have a fair bit of variance analysis, but how deep can it drill down if actuals and plans don't match?" asked Kopcke. "Or it may move from an annual budget to a rolling forecast, but how does it assess changes in the market?"
"Oracle's unified metadata model is a key step in breaking down silos," said Kopcke.
"With Oracle, every end user and every department has the same consistent view of information, tailored to their role. With Oracle, you 'model once, deploy everywhere."
Kopcke then went on to give real-world case studies where Oracle EPM solutions are already contributing to companies' bottom lines.
For example, the finance department at Southwest Airlines used to spend 75 percent of its forecasting efforts merely accumulating and collating data. Now data gathering takes only 10 percent of its time -- leaving more time for value-add analysis.
The result: Southwest Airlines is now able to forecast within 2 percent of outcome, said Kopcke.
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