The new release of Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g, Release 11.1.1.7.0, features more than two hundred enhancements across the suite and has enabled us to design and add new functionality with rich visualizations and enhance performance with in-memory features of Exalytics. I would like to highlight a few, which has been well received during our implementation, especially performance enhancement with exalytics.

Data driven visualization such as performance tiles displays a single aggregate measure in a visually prominent manner and can attract attention to key metrics. Another key visualization, a waterfall graph visualizes how each value in a series incrementally affects the whole by showing how an initial price is affected by various discounts and options.

Analysts across the world have been wanting to use this to identify gaps during pricing analysis and now an out of the box feature. Our previous write up has described usage of such out of the box features, which has been a shot in the arm over certain market leaders. Linking geographical attributes to a data driven visualization has been key metric to determine and visualize by combining analytics with maps.

Performance enhancements optimized to run on Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine, was a new armor in our stack of offerings, which can exceed expectations in extreme performance as an integrated platform and provide consistent Sub-second interactivity on par with desktop tools down from ~30 secs. We recommend to utilize the performance enhancements of Exalytics, which has proven in more than a few metrics by proving in a few customers -

Exalytics Integrated Machine - "10X faster on average and up to 100X faster in specific cases”. With Exalytics, you have access to the full BI Foundation and use Essbase to bring detailed actuals into an ASO model for much more comprehensive analysis or rapidly run allocations of budget and actual numbers, as well as generating trends for more detailed insight into the execution against the plan.

Using the power of OBIEE – and the visualisations available with Exalytics (trellis charts) – you can generate powerful visualisations into the depths of the numbers. With Exalytics you can run this and your BI Foundation requirements on a single platform.

Based on our experience, data-driven visualization which can render in the fastest time, can aid users in understanding the key metrics and is a key feature than most competitor products. I would like to highlight another interesting feature, which has proved its use beyond merit, such as directly export dashboard content to Microsoft Office formats (Excel & PowerPoint and supports previous versions till 2003) and if users export an entire Dashboard, the individual dashboard pages appear as separate Microsoft Excel worksheets in the generated export.

Business benefits outweigh the technology benefits, however with the current release oracle business intelligence foundation suite has proven beyond merit and empowers organization adopting it to drive innovation, optimize analysis with enhanced visualizations and simplify it through engineered systems.