Oracle updates Business Intelligence with iPad in mind

Oracle on Tuesday updated its enterprise performance management suite, including Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) version 11.1.1.5, OBI Applications version 7.9.6.3, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions. Among the improvements to the platform with this release, Oracle has extended online analytical processing (OLAP) and in-memory platform support, improved real-time decision management, added new certifications, and has made it all available to iPad and iPhone users out of the box.

Oracle's eleventh generation of Business Intelligence middleware has expanded in two major ways: improved mobile access and usability and improved support for new data sources.

OBI's expansion in data support has included products from Oracle's main competitors: Microsoft's SQL Server Analysis Services, and SAP's Business Information Warehouse (BW). It has also grown to include Oracle's own TimesTen In-Memory Database, and Oracle OLAP.

Showing the further expansion of Apple's iOS into the enterprise space, OBI 11.1.1.5 now supports iPhone and iPad "out of the box" without requiring any design changes to reports and dashboards.

This means users of Apple's popular mobile devices now have remote access to alerts, ad hoc analyses, dashboards, reports, scorecards, "what-if" analyses, as well as the unified relational OLAP (R-OLAP) and multidimensional OLAP (M-OLAP) content. Mobile users can initiate actions and workflows directly from their mobile devices.

Business Intelligence joins WebCenter Spaces and Siebel CRM in the canon of Oracle products that support iPad and iPhone.

Since Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.3 is built on the latest OBI platform, it also gains support for iOS, giving iPhone and iPad secure access to alerts, dashboards and reports.

OBI Applications has also received an interface overhaul that includes map-based visualization in its charting and prompting capabilities, and improved integration with system management services and an improved Common Enterprise Information Model (CEIM,) Oracle's semantic layer for the platform.

"These new Oracle Business Intelligence product releases build upon the success of Oracle BI 11g and provide customers a wide range of new capabilities that extend intelligence to the iPad and iPhone, offer more powerful visualization, interactivity, performance and scalability features to their ERP and CRM applications, and optimize customer interactions and decisions in real-time," Paul Rodwick, vice president of Product Management at Oracle Business Intelligence said in a statement on Tuesday.