Welcome and Introduction
Welcome to the Cloud Investment Plan for Oracle Analytics. This document provides you with an end-to-end view of Oracle’s product strategy and innovation plans for analytics, focusing on autonomous analytics. You will hear from our customers, our partners, and the Oracle Analytics team about how our solutions are creating value across a wide range of use cases and industries.
We are making tremendous strides in innovation, and we are recognized as a market leader by independent analyst firms Forrester Research and BARC. Our cloud-based solutions are integral to the success of thousands of businesses worldwide. In fact, today we have more than 5 million people using Oracle Analytics solutions as part of their daily decision-making.
We have a singular focus: to be the #1 provider of analytics value in the cloud marketplace. We are committed to each and every customer’s success. We encourage you to actively participate in the Oracle Analytics community and provide us with your direct and candid feedback on our strategy and product direction.
I hope you enjoy this ebook, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Waqar Hasan
Senior Vice President, Oracle Analytics
We’re committed to each and every customer’s success
Chapter 1:
Vision and Strategy
Analytics permeates every aspect of our lives. No matter what question you’re asking—whether it’s about employees and finances, or what customers like and dislike and how that influences their behavior—analytics gives you the answers and helps you make informed decisions. Traditionally, however, analytics has been limited because it was human-driven and labor-intensive, requiring specific skills. Autonomous analytics fundamentally changes that.
Autonomous analytics combines machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) with data to enhance human interactions, eliminate mundane tasks, reduce bias in analysis, and enrich your decision-making and predictive ability. Autonomous analytics reveals hidden patterns and makes actionable insights more accessible by empowering everyone to use data to drive every process, direct every interaction, and inform every decision so that you can achieve the outcomes you envision.
Our analytics strategy is simple and direct:
Autonomous Analytics powers all actions to be data-driven.
Vision and Strategy: Autonomous Analytics Powers All Actions to Be Data-Driven
Vision and Strategy: Autonomous Analytics Powers All Actions to Be Data-Driven
Three primary design objectives guide our autonomous analytics strategy.
Expand Insights Consumption
To drive broad consumption, we make it easy for everyone to interact with information so that you can engage, analyze, and act in a way that is natural—asking questions in plain language, searching for answers, and receiving insights as narration. Cut through information overload with relevant, personalized insights, delivered proactively to you in the context that makes the most sense.
Power Deeper Insights
Systems must provide autonomous capabilities that help you dig deeper into your information, explaining drivers of performance, uncovering hidden patterns, and helping you get more from your data. Use these insights to model new scenarios, make intelligent decisions, and amplify insights through collaboration and social sharing.
Accelerate Time to Action
It’s critical to remove constraints on time and scale. You must condense the time it takes to go from raw data to insight to action. Many previous systems were designed for a limited set of use cases, and computing infrastructure was complex and costly to change. Our strategy is to create one platform for a broad range of business use cases, all integrated into a common data and analytics metaphor.
Expand Insights Consumption:
Simplify every interaction, cut through information overload
To expand the consumption of insights, we encourage broader adoption by adapting the analytics interface to the way people work. The true value of an analytics regimen is not measured by size, scale, or breadth, but by how many people and processes use it to drive decisions.
Video: Natural Language Interface
Video: Natural Language Interface
Context is key. You want personalized access to information that’s important to you when you need it, anticipating your needs. Understanding where you are, what time it is, your interests, and who you collaborate with means your system can provide the best insights at the precise moment you need them.
Speed is a factor. Sometimes you just need to get an answer quickly. You can use text and voice to search and explore the data based on familiar terms such as “Revenue by product line and country.” Oracle Analytics Cloud can autonomously query the data and create the best visualization to illustrate the answers.
Words can enrich. Through a natural language interface, visualizations are complemented by an autonomous narrative that changes as you navigate. The text summarizes salient points so that you can focus on what the data really means and filter out the dissonance that comes from different interpretations of a visualization. Natural language generation makes the analytic experience much more conversational.
Words can enrich. Through a natural language interface, visualizations are complemented by an autonomous narrative that changes as you navigate. The text summarizes salient points so that you can focus on what the data really means and filter out the dissonance that comes from different interpretations of a visualization. Natural language generation makes the analytic experience much more conversational.
Video: Natural Language Interface
Power Deeper Insights:
Helping you find and act on hidden insights
To deliver deeper, more meaningful insights, you can either rely on significant human effort and lots of smart people, or you can energize your efforts and use the power of machine learning to automate a wide range of tasks.
Deeper analysis and recommendations. Autonomous analytics can recommend what data to analyze, how it could be augmented, and what it really means. It can suggest key drivers and insights to guide analysis, and it can recommend the best way to interpret data and what actions to take as a result. When autonomous analytics is viewed as a pipeline process—from discovery to prediction—its reach is virtually unlimited.
Scenarios and what-if models. Understanding insights is just the first step. The next step is to use those insights to build scenarios and what-if models—visualizing a set of alternative outcomes by using built-in intelligence to determine the actions you should take next.
Collaboration and social networking. Finally, you can amplify your impact by tapping into the collective wisdom of the crowd and leveraging collaboration and social sharing of insights, and insight recommendations based on the social network itself. By combining the power of humans, machines, and data, you unleash a powerful force for change and transformation.
Video: Explain with One Click
Video: Explain with One Click
Accelerate Time to Action
Reducing the lag time between understanding and action
Methods we use to ensure that acceleration is not hype but reality include:
Machine assisted self-service—Autonomous recommendations are based on data usage.
Integrated functionality—Centralized metadata is defined once, creating a unified experience across devices and data for faster adoption and learning.
Prepackaged content—Smart connectors for many different data sources and key performance indicators (KPIs) by role support rapid understanding of business performance.
Robust cloud architecture—Elastic cloud services enable you to take advantage of compute resources and access data wherever it resides—in the cloud, on premises, or both.
Autonomous cloud platform—Managed, self-governing services remove traditional overhead and automate repeat tasks to speed time to value.
Video: Natural Language Generation
Chapter 2:
Customer Success
We value your experience and insight and are committed to actively engaging you to understand your needs and collaborating with you on product investment decisions. The goal of analytics product and portfolio investments is to empower your success and innovation.
We use several channels to understand your experience and needs and to collect your feedback.
One-on-one relationships with the account management and customer success teams
Local and regional user groups
Partner and customer advisory boards (CABs) across Oracle
In December 2017, the inaugural Chief Data Officer Council was formed to generate insights into and feedback about emerging best practices in big data and analytics. Throughout 2018, Oracle product teams will continue to diligently engage with customers through existing relationships and channels and expand the use of digital platforms to streamline customer experience and engagement.
As part of this, we sponsor and participate in several Oracle CABs, which offer opportunities to share leadership, peer insights, and best practices, and provide access to industry and product experts within Oracle.
We actively engage and collaborate with you on product investment decisions.
Celebrating Your Success
Several of our Oracle Analytics customers celebrated success at Oracle OpenWorld 2017 by taking home Oracle Cloud Platform Innovation Awards as part of Oracle’s Excellence Awards. We recognized these companies for innovation in analytics.
Anthem This national health plan provider was recognized for its success in creating a new human resources (HR) solution, People Data Central, by deploying Oracle’s analytics in the cloud, enabling deep analytical expertise together with broad operational insights.
Watch the video
iCabbi This taxi dispatch specialist took home an award for its rapid deployment of Oracle Analytics Cloud. With the assistance of Oracle partner Vertice, they deliver on-demand analytics to their customers, transforming taxi companies and other businesses in ground transportation into more data-driven organizations.
Watch the video
RUMO Brazil’s largest rail-based logistics operator was recognized for creating a big data analytics environment that enabled it to analyze rail conditions to predict and prevent accidents.
Watch the video Watch the videoRUMO Brazil’s largest rail-based logistics operator was recognized for creating a big data analytics environment that allowed them to analyze rail conditions to predict and prevent accidents.
Several of our Oracle Analytics customers celebrated success at Oracle OpenWorld 2017 with Oracle Cloud Platform Innovation Awards as part of Oracle’s Excellence Awards. We recognized these companies for innovation in analytics:
Anthem This national health plan provider was recognized for its success in creating a new human resources (HR) solution, People Data Central, by deploying Oracle’s analytics in the cloud, enabling deep analytical expertise together with broad operational insights.
Watch the video
iCabbi This taxi dispatch specialist took home an award for its rapid deployment of Oracle Analytics Cloud. With the assistance of Oracle partner Vertice, they deliver on-demand analytics to their customers, transforming taxi companies and other businesses in ground transportation into more data-driven organizations.
Watch the video
RUMO Brazil’s largest rail-based logistics operator was recognized for creating a big data analytics environment that allowed them to analyze rail conditions to predict and prevent accidents.
Watch the video
Analytics in Action
From small and medium businesses to large enterprises and government agencies around the globe, our customers and partners are transforming and modernizing their enterprises with Oracle Analytics. A few examples include
Toyota. The Ha:mo (harmonious mobility) network connects personal and public transportation to transform communities and lower CO2 emissions by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Oracle Data Visualization to show customer usage patterns and uncover actionable insights.
Watch the video
Cummins. “Now our HR leaders can follow in real time what’s going on in the organization,” says Fabio Fukuda, director of global human resources information systems and business intelligence at Cummins. “That’s going to lead to more questions, and that’s when we’re going to get into the true analytics.”
Read the article
Deloitte. Richard Solari, consulting managing director at Deloitte, shares his view that Oracle has always had a powerful set of technologies to take companies from reporting to analytics, and now those technologies are united in one platform in Oracle Analytics Cloud.
Watch the video
Skanska. Conny Björling, head of enterprise architecture at Skanska AB, reports that he was drawn to Oracle Analytics Cloud because he wanted an enterprise platform that Skanska could build on.
Read the article
Chapter 3:
Innovation Plans
Autonomous Analytics for better business and a better world
We believe analytics is fundamentally about people.
People putting their expertise into action by using all information available to them.
People being empowered by new technologies that augment human experience.
People reaching new levels of insight and performance thanks to autonomous analytics, which streamlines value by automating mundane tasks, improves the quality of analysis by helping to remove human bias, and enriches decision-making and prediction.
By “people” we mean you. Your needs and experience, along with the changing analytics landscape, are the foundation for our strategy.
Your needs and experience are the foundation for our strategy.
We believe that the cloud is more than just a deployment choice—it breaks down the barriers between people, places, data, and systems to fundamentally shift the way people and processes interact with information, technology, and each other. And we believe autonomous analytics is essential because it activates your potential by freeing you to work on what matters, instead of worrying about what’s running.
To execute our autonomous analytics vision and strategy, we are investing in development efforts across our key design objectives.
Extend Insights Consumption
Extend Insights Consumption
Conquer information overload with personalized, proactive analytics delivered in a rich visual experience that can be embedded into your daily systems and processes. Together with role-specific content and KPIs, Oracle Analytics Cloud helps remove the barriers created by complex interaction, making more insights more consumable by more types of people across your organization.
Power Deeper Insights
Power Deeper Insights
Uncover hidden insights through rich what-if and predictive modeling and autonomous analytics, powered by machine learning and adaptive intelligence, which together enhance self-service data visualization, preparation, and discovery. Easy collaboration and social sharing help amplify insights to extend your organization’s collective expertise and inspire innovation.
Accelerate Time to Action
Accelerate Time to Action
Find the time to focus on what’s important with an autonomous cloud platform that reduces administrative overhead by combining the best of existing and emerging technologies in a single solution. Oracle Analytics Cloud helps you easily analyze data of any type, in any environment, speeding your time to value.
Extend Insights Consumption
Today we offer a rich visual analytics experience that makes it faster and easier for you to consume, socialize, and share contextual insights through
Personalized and proactive insights delivered dynamically via native and adaptive mobile capabilities, getting you updates no matter where you are.
Conversational interfaces that enable you to use voice and search to ask questions of your data
Collaboration tools that empower you to socialize insights and drive results, including scheduling delivery of pixel-perfect reports
Autonomous analytics, including automatically generated natural language explanations of attributes and analysis, as well as virtual reality experiences that enable you to easily capture data from the world around you for analysis
Contextualized analytics that enable you to integrate new visuals and analyses into Oracle Analytics, and to integrate Oracle Analytics into non-Oracle applications
Operational reporting via Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI), which is embedded into Oracle’s SaaS application portfolio
Freely available Oracle Data Visualization content packs, enabling quick-start self-service analytics for key roles in Oracle’s SaaS applications
Autonomous Analytics Should Be:
Quick to start, easy to use, agile, and intuitive at every level of experience and skill
Adapting dynamically to your needs, assisting you at every turn
Easily connecting you and your colleagues, driving opportunities for innovation
Investments
To enable you to get the best value from analytics, we are working to make it easier for you to broaden their reach by providing
Expand use by
a. Enabling self-service use cases through tighter integration of data visualization with Oracle SaaS products
b. Improving usability through targeted enhancements of Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence Answers and help
c. Delivering better coverage for application content to enable more comprehensive and cross-functional analysis across all SaaS application content areas, working in concert with application areas for prioritization
Accelerated time to value by
a. Delivering packaged cross-functional and cross-application content
b. Developing new targeted business process excellence dashboards that
c. Developing role-based reports and dashboards that:
Concept model for next generation analytic applications
Enlarge the model
Additional roles are planned and will be evaluated based on market demand. These applications will initially source content from Oracle SaaS applications; future data sources will be evaluated over time. The next-generation applications will be deployed as SaaS applications with named user subscription options.
Role-Based Content Packs
Role-Based Content Packs
HR and Recruitment VP
Channel Sales Manager
Service Manager
Service VP
Campaign to Order
Power Deeper Insights
Deep, valuable insights are necessary to drive broad consumption. Today we offer a unique combination of depth and breadth that empowers you to ask new questions, get better answers, and uncover formerly hidden insights via
Fast, fluid self-service data discovery, visualization, and storytelling
Automatic visualization of insights and one-click advanced analytics
Ad hoc analysis and reporting that are fully mobile, with an adaptive user experience that adjusts the display depending on the device
Self-service machine learning capabilities that identify patterns, clusters, outliners, and anomalies in any data
Easy self-service data preparation and blending
What-if scenario modeling and Microsoft Office integrations, including the industry’s leading multidimensional analysis engine (Oracle Essbase) for the rapid development of complex business models, with sandboxing that enables you to perform individual what-if analyses
Video: Western Digital
Video: Western Digital
Investments
Depth typically comes at a steep cost of both people and time. Our goal is to reduce those costs for you by using machine learning and adaptive intelligence to power an autonomous experience that helps extend your expertise. Our investments in this area include.
Oracle Analytics Cloud Action Center
Oracle Analytics Cloud Action Center
Oracle Analytics Cloud Action Center
Accelerate Time to Action
Oracle Analytics Cloud is a complete platform for data-driven innovation. Today it includes
Elastic services that enable you to use and pay for only the resources you need
Enterprise-grade granular security via a combination of roles, entitlements, and object and data-level protection
Centralized storage and management for all cloud data, both managed and self-service
An industrial-strength semantic layer combined with robust data modeling tools to enable governance across a unified catalog for enterprise analytics models, enterprise data sources, and self-service data
Seamless hybrid deployment options, including lift and shift from on-premises Oracle Business Intelligence (Oracle BI), so that your data can be anywhere, and analysis can take place in any environment
More than 45 data connectors, with built-in intelligence for Oracle enterprise resource planning and SaaS applications
Flexible data integration services to accommodate your existing architecture and business rules and processes
Investments
There will always be more data. Analytics systems must therefore be built to enable future workloads and possibilities, while at the same time accelerating the time to action. We are building Oracle Analytics Cloud to be a future-proof autonomous platform, and to that end we are continually investing in the following
Although our strategic investment is in our cloud platform, we understand that many of you are still early in your cloud journey or are in regulated industries that require you to keep your data or applications on premises. To help ensure that you have what you need to support your current business and to plot a practical path to the cloud, we are releasing an update to Oracle Business Intelligence 12c on premises that includes several enhancements, most notably an upgrade of the integrated version of Oracle Data Visualization.
Chapter 4:
Plotting Your Journey to the Cloud
As you chart your analytics and data management cloud strategy, there are two considerations that must remain central to both your near-term and long-term deployment goals.
Agility— Your organization increases its operational agility by leveraging a continuously updated, highly available cloud platform that can be rapidly provisioned and elastically scaled to meet any project demand, large or small.
Expediency— Business can’t wait for all data to be perfectly acquired, organized, and managed in a single environment. Your project’s agility shouldn’t be hindered by the current state of the data landscape surrounding your analytics initiatives. You need to achieve quick results, even if the required information is spread across multiple systems—in both private and public data centers, and in any cloud ecosystem.
Oracle Analytics Cloud fully delivers on these two considerations with both architectural and economic flexibility. It offers you a robust yet flexible platform for deploying analytics at any scale across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployment environments. You can safely choose the appropriate starting point on your journey to the cloud, based on your own unique requirements and company policies, while still taking advantage of all the benefits that cloud architecture and subscription economics can offer.
In the pages that follow, we outline the range of options available to existing Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI Applications, and Oracle Essbase customers.
Cloud First
For many of you, the first step in your journey to the cloud is to consider deploying net-new analytics projects in the public cloud, instead of the traditional on-premises stack; also known as Cloud First. This gives you the quickest time to value because it streamlines new activities and avoids the analysis and effort to completely migrate existing projects. Many new projects can be up and running within days or weeks. This approach also lets you experiment with the latest and greatest software options to gauge which follow-on projects can fully leverage modern capabilities.
Cloud @ Customer
If you are eager to achieve the benefits of cloud operations but are unable to move to public cloud environments for regulatory, privacy, or other corporate-level reasons, we offer a unique solution through the Cloud @ Customer option. This option delivers Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to your data center. Rather than procuring hardware, installing software, and managing the system, you can easily consume cloud services on your premises on a subscription basis, just as you do with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Oracle provides the hardware, installs the Oracle Cloud software, and manages the day-to-day operation of the Oracle Cloud Machine infrastructure and Oracle Cloud. You can use these cloud services as building blocks to accelerate the development of innovative applications.
Keep and Connect
After you have become familiar with the basics of cloud-based analytics, your next decision is what to do with existing on-premises reports, dashboards, and databases. This can be stressful because there are potential risks in migrating any existing production system.
Oracle Analytics Cloud makes this process easier because it allows dashboard migration and database migration to be considered separately. If you are using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition version 11.1.1.7 or later, you can readily lift and shift your business intelligence models (RPD) and corresponding dashboards (web catalog) through export and migration utilities into the latest Oracle Analytics Cloud environment. It’s important to note that you can leave the corresponding databases and data warehouses on premises.
This mode is Keep and Connect, or hybrid cloud. Oracle Analytics Cloud lets you query and visualize data sources directly from the cloud without physically moving any data. This technique is also popular with Oracle BI Applications customers who want to move version 7.9.6.3 or later deployments to a more flexible infrastructure. You can also begin new projects in Oracle Analytics Cloud that access on-premises data.
Keep and Combine
As you expand your analytics to include any type of data, you will benefit from the power of Oracle Analytics Cloud to combine data from many sources—on premises, the cloud, SaaS application data, and third-party data—to address more use cases across your enterprise.
This hybrid mode is called Keep and Combine. It addresses data from any source as content for any type of analytics. It provides you with maximum flexibility while supporting a diverse, heterogeneous data architecture.
Lift and Shift
For some, the cloud is the ultimate destination and it makes sense to move everything there. For others, the cloud is where you start—especially with Oracle Essbase. This mode is called Lift and Shift.
Oracle Essbase has been redesigned and optimized for cloud deployments. Benefits include higher server concurrency and performance, a new cube designer to quickly model and publish cubes to the cloud, and broader integration across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and third-party data sources. The path to the cloud for Oracle Essbase offers you flexibility and control. You can leverage the following methods to move on-premises deployments to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure:
Use the Lifecycle management utility to extract/import all artifacts to the Cloud
Convert outlines to DBX Excel workbook and use Cube Designer to build cube in cloud
Run the REST command line tool to import all artifacts and associated files
Some additional resources can help you decide which path is best for you.
Regardless of which path you follow, we offer solutions to help you meet your goals. New projects are straightforward, and large, complex deployments can be migrated efficiently and successfully. Once you are in the cloud, instead of spending critical resources on operations, you can focus on what really matters—unlocking business agility and innovation across the full spectrum of your analytics needs.
One Architecture, Multiple Modes
Processing
Infrastructure
Infrastructure
Use Cases
Data Center
Data Center
Banking, Healthcare
Data Center
Infrastructure
Intelligence Enterprise
Edition or Oracle
Business Intelligence
Applications On-premises
Deployment
Locations; Customer
Data Centers, Third-
Party Data Centers,
Oracle SaaS, Oracle
Public Cloud
Infrastructure
Intelligence
Enterprise Edition
Deployment with
Expanding SaaS
Apps, External Data
Infrastructure
Infrastructure
On-premises
Oracle Essbase
Chapter 5:
Engaging with Oracle
Analytics is about asking questions and getting answers. We are committed to an active and open dialogue with all members of our analytics community, whether you’re a long-term customer or new to Oracle and just seeing what we have for you.
Connect with Us
There are many ways to provide feedback, gather insights from peers, and express your requests and ideas, including:
Oracle Developer Community is a user community in which technical experts connect with questions, answers, and best practices. It is a technical community and includes Q&A for all on-premises and cloud BI and analytics offerings.
Oracle Cloud Customer Connect offers online community forums for connecting with people for answers, announcing events, taking training, and getting product updates. It includes an Ideas Forum for posting and voting on product ideas. This community is open to Oracle Cloud customers and partners. In 2018, we will roll out an Oracle Analytics Cloud forum on Oracle Cloud Customer Connect.
Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) are exclusive events where Oracle brings together forward-thinking customers to help shape the future direction of Oracle products. The Oracle Analytics team has participated in several CABs and will continue to drive and participate in these events.
Oracle’s Customer Visit Centers (CVCs) help you reimagine your business and envision the digital transformation of your organization. Peer-to-peer discussions drive briefings and workshops that run one to three days. Interactive and effective dialogue is the goal.
Oracle OpenWorld one of the world’s largest technology conferences offers you the opportunity to find the most relevant content for your business and technology needs; network with peers from around the world; get hands-on experience with Oracle solutions; and preview what’s coming next.
Oracle User Groups accelerate value realization and customer success through ongoing engagement, education, and experience sharing. These independent communities thrive on networks and knowledge, sharing the latest best practices in technology and providing the functional guidance needed to help their members succeed in today’s increasingly dynamic environment.
The Oracle Analytics Product Team is available to you, with product management and development leaders all over the US and Europe. We value your feedback, ideas, and insights and look forward to working with you, either at one of the many Oracle cloud, technology and applications events we participate in, or one-on-one. To connect with us directly, please ask your account executive or Customer Success Manager to arrange a meeting.
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