ORCL: Oracle Announces General Availability of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3

Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle(r) Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3 (Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE), a major new release of Oracle's comprehensive, standards-based suite of business intelligence (BI) infrastructure and tools products.
This latest release of Oracle Business Intelligence EE, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, delivers significant new product enhancements to further enable enterprise-wide BI including a number of usability features; tighter integration with Oracle Applications, other components of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database products; and even broader "hot-pluggable" support for non-Oracle data sources. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE, together with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, delivers pervasive intelligence that:

* Provide relevant information to all users in time to affect business results;

* Enable access to information through virtually any reporting medium including alerts, dashboards, reports, and more;

* Integrate with existing business processes and workflows; and,

* Allow the cost-effective scalability of the BI platform over time to manage data growth and user needs.

"Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE enables the delivery of reporting and analysis in Oracle, non-Oracle or heterogeneous environments," said Henry Morris, Group Vice President and General Manager, Integration, Development and Application Strategies, IDC. "With roots in the Siebel analytics technology acquired a year ago, the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE incorporates Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher to offer customers a comprehensive reporting and BI toolset at a competitive price."

New Product Features Enhance Usability
The new release of Oracle Business Intelligence EE delivers pervasive company-wide intelligence with improved usability with over 300 new features including:

* Data Mart Automation allowing Data Modeling and Creation starting from a Business View and automatically generating the physical data mart structure;

* Enhanced Microsoft Office Integration with enhancements to support output formats, data export, and live interaction with Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint;

* Enhanced Performance and Scalability with enhanced clustering, native 64-bit support, a new hypercube infrastructure, multi-pass calculation optimizations and others;

* Improved Data Visualization and End User Personalization with drag and drop layout editing, enhanced presentation variables, financial reporting, customized report subscriptions, and secure search; and,

* Lower Total Cost of Ownership with integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, enhanced mobile analytics, automated workload management, and security enhancements.

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE now offers users a full set of options to access the information they need including interactive dashboards self-service ad hoc analysis, proactive alerts, highly formatted reports, disconnected analytics on mobile laptops, and more. Release 3 enhancements to extend information to new and increased audiences include JSR-168 support, which enables organizations to embed BI portlets into any JSR-168 compliant portal. In addition, the product supports Really Simple Syndication (RSS) capabilities that enable RSS-aware applications to include BI Alerts and information as well as scalability and performance enhancements to enable even larger numbers of users.

The new release delivers sophisticated, pixel-perfect publishing and reporting capabilities via Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher, formerly Oracle XML Publisher. Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher provides a single solution for all reporting and document output needs, enabling organizations to produce a wide array of documents including financial statements, government forms, high-fidelity reports, invoices, labels, checks, electronic documents (EFT/EDI), purchase orders, and sales orders. Rather than rely upon a proprietary report design tool, the product enables report builders to format reports using a variety of familiar applications such as Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word or Excel. Documents and reports can be scheduled and delivered to email, fax, printer, WebDAV, or incorporated into interactive dashboards. Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher is available standalone or as an integrated component of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE, providing a compete BI and reporting solution to meet all enterprise needs.

Integration with Oracle Products Helps Lower Costs, Delivers Increased Capabilities
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE features pre-built integration with Oracle Applications, Oracle Database, and Oracle Fusion Middleware that helps lower total cost and complexity for customers -- while increasing the capabilities and value of the product. The product's integration with the OLAP option of Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition enhances access to information by consolidating server engines to store, view and analyze data in OLAP cubes. Additionally, the new product release offers increased authentication and security capabilities through broad integration with Oracle Virtual Directory, the Oracle E-Business Suite security model, Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite, and Oracle Internet Directory. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE and Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher are being adopted by the family of Oracle Applications and will be the basis for BI in the next-generation Oracle Fusion Applications.

Extended Web services support and integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware further enables Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE to drive Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) business processes defined with Oracle BPEL Process Manager. The product can also support multiple methods of analytics-driven workflow by initiating BPEL processes, directing the execution of BPEL processes with intelligent decision points and conditional process steps based on analytics, and delivering analytic results to users.

Hot-Pluggable Architecture Supports Third-Party Applications and Data Sources
Built on open standards, Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE's hot-pluggable design allows it to fit into any existing IT architecture and support existing applications, data sources, end user tools, and security models. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE enables simultaneous intelligence across relational, multi-dimensional, XML and flat file data sources. Release 3 builds upon this hot-pluggable design through increased certification and native, optimized support for third-party data sources and infrastructure products including the latest releases of IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and NCR Teradata, as well as expanded multi-dimensional support and new native access to SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW).

Availability and Pricing
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE is now generally available for Linux and Windows platforms. The product is priced at $1,500 per named user or $225,000 per CPU.