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Q: Please give us your take on the favorite BI buzzword: “pervasive BI.” Is it similar to “information democracy”?
Basically, they are two sides of the same coin. In a pervasive BI state, you have a single version of the truth and are able to deliver it to the right people at any level of the organization or the extended organization, such as customers and partners. If you have implemented pervasive BI, you are on your way to achieving information democracy: the capacity to deliver information to anyone who needs it, when they need it, to make the right business decisions.
Q: What are the current technological barriers to pervasive BI/information democracy?.
Actually, all the technology is already here today. What we’ve been waiting for is a single vendor to pull it all together and make it simple.
In a way, the barrier is really too much technology. For the last 15 years or so, organizations have had to come up with piecemeal solutions to solve disparate problems. A company might have hundreds of different spreadsheet-based solutions across its organizations, all of them built up haphazardly over time.
Now it’s possible to take a systemic approach. Why make departmental decisions when an enterprisewide approach is available?
Q: How do you think the combined Oracle and Hyperion offerings will overcome those barriers?
The breadth and depth of both the Oracle and Hyperion offerings are remarkable, and they also complement each other extremely well. By combining Hyperion and Oracle, we can bring action into the BI equation—putting the dashboard together with the gas and brake pedals.
Oracle already had some fantastic BI capabilities that expand Hyperion’s. Then there is the “aspirational” level: now that I have insights, how can I drive action? Together, Oracle and Hyperion can bring the industry’s most sophisticated insights and couple them with Oracle’s industry-leading enterprise apps and workflow technology. That makes for a much more actionable system, with intelligence built right in to business processes.
Q: Could you briefly describe the road map for integrating Hyperion and Oracle offerings? What are some of the strategic products customers can expect to see?
Oracle and Hyperion will deliver the industry’s first complete heterogeneous enterprise performance management system that integrates information from enterprise resource planning, financial performance management, and operational business intelligence systems. Specifically, the complete system will combine an integrated business intelligence foundation that brings together the strengths of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite and Hyperion’s BI toolset, a suite of operational business intelligence applications, and a suite of financial management applications.
Q: What is the first step a company needs to take toward implementing pervasive BI?
The biggest mistake I see is that organizations are driven by a technology agenda. We saw that in the late 1990s, when CIOs built technology and then went to the business side and said, “Now do something with it.” So the very first step is establishing a business agenda. What is the most important deliverable, and how can technology achieve that?
The big difference with Oracle’s approach to pervasive BI is that you can implement it one piece at a time. But that doesn’t mean a piecemeal solution. Because the Oracle/Hyperion combination offers such depth and breadth of capabilities and because of its ability to provide systematic delivery, customers can start with a particular need and then add more and more capabilities while reusing the technology that is already in place.
Q: What is the “next big thing” for BI?
The truthful answer is that the next big thing is here right now. It’s the integration of business intelligence, analytics, and operational and financial applications into a single system. There are already a few early adopters, but there are thousands and thousands of organizations that haven’t begun the journey. Oracle is right here right now with the next big thing.
Q: With the growth of superfast processors, huge databases, and grid computing, what does the BI platform of the future look like?
First of all, I have never had a customer tell me that it will have less data next year. The more successful you are, the more data you’re going to generate. The advances we’re seeing with very large databases (VLDs) and 64-bit computing are giving us the horsepower to go for even-more-complex solutions.
Every time I get a new laptop, I think it’s faster than I need it to be, and then in 12 months, it feels like a boat anchor. That’s the case with BI. I think a lot of people don’t understand the potential power of 64-bit computing. They think it’s 2 times 32, but in fact it’s an exponential difference. Think of it this way: if 32-bit computing equals the data in a city block, 64-bit computing represents the entire surface of the earth.
Q: Can you talk about the connection between BI and performance management?
Enterprise performance management connects the dots and closes the loop between planning and goal setting, monitoring and analysis, and reporting and alignment with corporate goals.
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