Rich Clayton | Vice President
Oracle Business Analytics
Product Group
Amidst the constantly evolving analytics market, there has been a fundamental shift from IT leading the charge to pursue analytics initiatives, to one where the business and IT share in this decision. There’s no doubt that analytics has become strategic for most organizations today, and as such has introduced a new wave of both new consumers and new expectations.
The workforce is changing, and with that change brings a new
way to work. Gone are the days where training manuals are commonplace in the
office – today’s workforce expects to get up and running quickly with an
intuitive interface. But it doesn’t end
there. While speed and simplicity are key, business leaders still have high expectations
around data quality and security. A centralized analytics platform where IT plays a pivotal
role is still a fundamental part of any analytics strategy. The combination of
both business led and IT led initiatives is the sweet spot for innovation.
We didn’t just come up with this on our own - customers have
spoken, and Oracle has listened. Here are some of the top analytic themes our
customers want.
A Path to the Cloud. Cloud and analytics are a perfect match. Cloud is about speed and innovation, not just
different economics or a pay as you go subscription model. We’re seeing customers go from purchase to
production in 17 days – for 700 users. Most
importantly, we are seeing cloud change the dynamic between business leaders
and IT professionals and how they work. Keep in mind, this doesn’t assume all data lives in the cloud. Our strategy is to provide a best in class
hybrid approach that extends current infrastructure investments and data
security with the speed and innovation of the public cloud.
Data visualization. Business people want to see the signals
before their competitors. They want to mashup
personal, corporate and big data and quickly understand the value of their
data, share their data story with their colleagues, and do it all in a matter
of minutes. Data visualization is key to the simplicity of this, and therefore
needs to be embedded into every analytic system from mobile to desktop. From department
to enterprise. From on-premises to cloud. What’s essential is continuity of
experience for fueling the analytical productivity that is expected today.
Data discovery for
all. This is no longer a task for data
scientists but for anyone trying to experiment and test the value of their
data. Discovery is not just a better BI,
it’s a whole new method for enriching data, exploring patterns and building
perspectives with qualitative and quantitative data.
Mobile. We’ve been using analytics on our devices for
some time, but now the market demand a location-aware “assistant.” Our mobile experience not only supports voice
recognition and mobile authoring, but also looks at your digital footprint to
present insights relevant to your upcoming meetings.
To support these trends Oracle has designed, built and
launched several new offerings in the last few years, such as Oracle BI Cloud
Service, Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service, Oracle Big Data Discovery and
Oracle BI Mobile. Most importantly, these new business-led solutions are
tightly integrated with Oracle’s enterprise analytics platform – Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite.
Our strategy ensures consistency of experience and
portability of analytic content across business-led and IT-led analytics initiatives,
whether cloud or on-premises. And we strongly believe that the combination of
these two modes of analytics working together is what will create sustainable
competitive advantage for our customers.