INDUSTRY

Oracle today introduced Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, open, standards-based software designed for all users and business processes throughout the enterprise. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite unites Oracle's business intelligence (BI) middleware with Siebel Business Analytics. When combined with Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle's Siebel prebuilt analytic applications, the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite addresses the complete spectrum of BI and analytical requirements facing customers today, including historical, real-time and forward-looking insight, with data integration, and management. The suite, along with other software components of Oracle Applications, Oracle Database, and Oracle Fusion Middleware, delivers enterprise-wide business intelligence that is "hot-pluggable" into existing operational systems. A part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, Oracle Business Intelligence Suite features three editions. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition integrates technology from Siebel Business Analytics with Oracle's existing BI and middleware technology to offer an enterprise-wide BI infrastructure and tools. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition offers pre-integrated BI infrastructure software and tools for an Oracle environment. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One is designed as a specialized offering for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise and Standard Editions are available today. The Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One offering is planned for availability in the next fiscal year. "Our investment in Siebel Business Analytics complements our already strong BI and analytic application product set enabling us to now offer the industry's most comprehensive solution," said Charles Phillips, president, Oracle. "Our investment extends to the creation of a dedicated BI sales organization to support our expanded product offerings. We're uniquely positioned to assist customers to glean greater business insight and garner increased value from their data and applications." Oracle Delivers Complete Infrastructure to Meet BI Needs Oracle Business Intelligence Suite offers customers and partners the best foundation for building a BI system or for deploying packaged analytic applications. Enterprises have the option to deploy a pre-integrated, Oracle BI solution or take a best-of-breed approach to meet their BI requirements. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite delivers a unified, integrated BI infrastructure featuring a comprehensive set of products that are available today and span query and analysis, enterprise reporting, mobile analytics, dashboards and portal technology, integration with Microsoft Office and Excel, intelligent workflow, real-time alerting, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and more. Oracle Fusion Middleware offers customers capabilities for application development, data integration, and enterprise portals. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite enables customers to extend BI across an enterprise so that users can make informed decisions based on timely, actionable information. Developed for heterogeneous IT environments, it allows business users to collect and analyze information from Oracle and non-Oracle databases including IBM, Microsoft, and Teradata, and from business applications from Oracle and SAP, among others. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition shares Oracle Fusion Middleware's hot-pluggable capabilities that enable organizations to fully exploit the power of any non-Oracle application, data sources, and tools with the BI solution. The new suite also works with the market-leading Oracle Database, which enhances Oracle's BI solutions by providing the foundation for building a highly scalable, low-cost information management solution on all popular platforms. Oracle Database includes key BI features such as record-breaking query performance, data partitioning, bitmapped indexes, materialized views, and parallel operations to support the ever-increasing amount of data that customers need to load, store, and analyze. Automated and self-managing features make it easier to achieve industrial-strength security and 24x7 availability using low-cost servers and storage. Oracle Database also features Data Mining and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) technologies integrated within the database enabling customers and partners to take advantage of their existing investment and skills in Oracle and reap the benefits of reduced development costs and faster time to market. Oracle Offers Greater Business Insight with Oracle Applications The introduction of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite also marks a major Oracle Fusion Application milestone, while delivering value to customers today. Oracle's goal is to deliver information-driven applications that offer role-based, end-to-end business insight and industry-specific analytics that utilize Oracle's leading business intelligence software. Enterprises using Oracle applications today can take advantage of the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite to infuse enhanced intelligence capabilities. Oracle's BI suite and analytic applications enable customers to integrate diverse data sources including Oracle, custom, and third-party applications for complete business insight that leverages existing operational systems. Oracle continues to invest in its current applications, and within the next twelve months -- Oracle plans to deliver specific analytical updates by integrating the BI infrastructure of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite with PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, and the Oracle E-Business Suite applications. Also in the next twelve months, Oracle plans to release enhanced Enterprise Performance Management capabilities in PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.0, and expanded Daily Business Intelligence features in Oracle E- Business Suite release 12. Oracle also plans to deliver individual Oracle Fusion analytic applications specific to industries such as financial services, pharmaceuticals and higher education. The combination of Oracle applications and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite will provide the foundation for Oracle's next-generation Fusion applications. "The integration of Siebel's analytic solutions with Oracle ERP applications and its comprehensive data model makes for a very strong end-to- end solution for our company," said Mike Thyken, CIO, Select Comfort. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise and Standard Edition Overview Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and Standard Edition One offer customers a choice of solutions for their BI initiatives. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition allows enterprise customers to gain better insight across their existing systems and applications including SAP applications. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition integrates BI technology from Siebel with Oracle Fusion Middleware. It features: -- Relational and OLAP query and analysis for both Oracle and non-Oracle environments; -- Powerful ad-hoc query and analysis tools; -- Easy-to-use, thin-client analytic dashboards; -- Enterprise reporting and publishing to allow business users to publish reports; -- Real-time alerting to allow for proactive BI detection and alerting; -- Mobile analytics to allow business users, sales representatives, and others to have full query and analysis capability on a mobile laptop; and, -- Integration with Microsoft desktop tools to allow business users to interact with BI information using Excel, Word, Outlook, and Exchange. Businesses seeking to complement existing investments in Oracle can rely on Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition, which includes: -- Oracle BI Beans -- custom application development; -- Oracle BI Discoverer -- ad-hoc query, reporting, and analysis with dashboard features; -- Oracle Reports -- high-fidelity, enterprise reporting tool; and, -- Oracle BI Spreadsheet Add-In -- direct access to Oracle OLAP from within Microsoft Excel. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One will offer SMBs a compelling, integrated BI offering with the necessary infrastructure software and tools to quickly and efficiently deploy a BI system. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One is expected to include Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One, Oracle Warehouse Builder as well as reporting, querying, and analysis tools. Pricing and Availability Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise and Standard Editions are generally available today. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition is priced at $1,500 per named user. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition is priced at $400 per named user. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One is priced at $25,000 and is planned for availability in the next fiscal year. For more information about Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition, go to: its Web site.