In the first part of our Platform Knowledge Drop video series, our CTO, Gustavo Gonzalez, turns his attention to Analytics Cloud, a portfolio of Business Intelligence tools offered by Oracle. Gustavo brings over 25 years of Oracle experience to the table, and today gives us an inside look at the analytics capabilities of Oracle’s Analytics Cloud.
The highlights are below, and you can catch the entire 3-part series on Youtube.
First off, what is Analytics Cloud, and what does it include?
Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) is a platform to unlock the potential of your BI data. It includes a portfolio of tools to improve business decisions, including Oracle Essbase Standards, data visualization, and Oracle Smart View.
OAC revolves around four main pillars:
- Connect: Liberate all data and connect with over 50 data sources.
- Prepare: Use powerful tools that allow data blending, wrangling, cleansing, and modeling.
- Explore: Self-service data visualization allows for intuitive exploration of data.
- Share: Build collective intelligence through collaboration with peers, and spread insights across the organization (or the world!).
Data visualization – what, why and how?
The Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service helps make sense of the typically complex process of blending and correlating data sets. Intuitive features like drag-and-drop and automatic data blending allow you to produce fast, fluid insights from a variety of data sources – and the ability to share visualizations to any device and add comments means everyone in the organization benefits from them.
What about compute – is it true you can scale “on the fly”? And what about costs?
It is. With Compute Shape, Storage or Cluster you can scale up or down. For example, if a service is running slowly or needs more storage, compute shape can be scaled up. Conversely, when the workload is reduced, scaling down can save costs.
As for costs, Oracle’s pricing offerings for IaaS and PaaS beat out top competitors like Amazon or Azure – so moving into the cloud shouldn’t be a financial problem.
Speaking of moving to the cloud, what will be different? Can I expect the same tools and functionalities?
There’s no loss of capability when moving to OAC; every product available on-premise has a similar or better counterpart in the cloud. With OAC Enterprise Edition, there is a migration path for OBIEE to the cloud. Processes like patching and maintenance are still simple, and the use of new AI technology allows non-technical users to be more effective than ever.
What’s next for OAC?
We’ll likely see the continuation of AI and Machine Learning techniques being integrated with Analytics Cloud. Particularly exciting is the prospect of integrations with personal assistant voice devices – in the not-so-distant future, you may be asking Alexa or Siri to display a data visualization of your team’s pipeline!