OBIEE – Custom vs. Pre-Packaged

Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE) is a suite of powerful and highly integrated business intelligence tools for enterprise-wide reporting and analytics. Prebuilt components include:

• Answers - Oracle BI’s ad-hoc query and analysis tool that allows users to create reports, charts and pivot tables
• Dashboards – interactive homepages with personalized reports, charts and graphics for enhanced decision-making
• Delivers – a monitoring tool that promptly alerts users of specified business activity via Dashboards
• In addition, Oracle offers add-on applications and modules to extend OBIEE’s capabilities to key organizational departments. Oracle BI Analytical Applications include Sales, Service & Contact Center, Marketing, Order Management & Fulfillment, Supply Chain, Financials, and Human Resources.

Deploying the OBIEE suite and applications require a prudent strategy with the organization’s business intelligence goals in mind. Three deployment strategies include:

1. Customizing the OBIEE suite as a standalone product (no additional applications installed)
2. Implementing the full suite of packaged applications
3. A hybrid approach with custom development and configuration of pre-built components.

Each deployment path has its pros and cons. Customization should be chosen when business requirements are unique and add-on applications cannot support these needs. This creates a solution that is fine-tuned to the needs of the business but also requires the most time to develop. On the other hand, utilizing the pre-built OBIEE applications and components is typically shorter to turn around and also leverages out-of-the-box metadata and data warehousing content. This strategy works best when the organization is a COTS shop using products from Siebel, Peoplesoft, or SAP since only the configuration of OBIEE is required. Finally, the hybrid strategy allows organizations to address standard and unique business requirements by blending the customization and configuration of the OBIEE suite and applications.

In order to fully realize the investment of an OBIEE implementation, organizations should weigh their business requirements against the suite’s out-of-the box capabilities. For more tips on whether a custom or pre-built OBIEE solution is right for your organization, see this Guident presentation conducted at Oracle OpenWorld (’08).