On April 4th, Oracle announced that Oracle Analytics Cloud was now generally available with a combination of capabilities designed to provide 4 key C’s for analytics: Collaborative, Connected, Complete, and Choice.
In light of this announcement, Amalgam Insights (AI) sought to understand how this offering lined up with what was announced last fall. Oracle initially announced this version of Oracle Analytics Cloud at Oracle Open World in September 2016, which included an end-to-end solution for supporting:
- high performance analytic processing infrastructure
- Tools for data preparation, discovery, visualization and collaboration
- Pre-packaged and domain-specific machine learning models
- packaged best-practice analytic KPIs
- curated, scaled, and public data sets.
How does the current offer compare to this original package? As of April 2017, Oracle Analytics Cloud is positioned under an umbrella of four different traits: Collaborative, Connected, Complete, and Choice. This solution has been designed to provide self-service analytics with best practices for data management, scenario management, what-if analysis, and operational reporting
From a product perspective, Oracle Analytics Cloud includes the following capabilities:
- Oracle Data Visualization
- Oracle Smart View
- Oracle Business Intelligence
- Oracle Essbase Cloud
- Oracle Day by Day
Current Oracle cloud analytics customers should be well-versed in Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service (DVCS) or Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS) and should be aware of Smart View, Oracle’s interface for using data and analytics within Microsoft Office applications.
AI is looking forward to tracking the future adoption of Oracle Essbase Cloud, since this will allow Oracle to support high-performance scenario modeling and what-if analysis out of data originating from multiple planning instances and Excel. By combining these capabilities with both the availability and scale of the cloud, AI believes that Oracle Essbase Cloud will provide an additional level of analytic maturity that has previously been missing from its cloud portfolio .
Oracle Day by Day looks at the collective and continuous analytics occurring within the organization and includes both language-based and voice-based entries for people to find the analytic summaries that they’re looking for. This product provides mobile and contextualized analytics based on timing, location, and business context. AI believes that Day by Day represents one of the first major efforts in the BI world to provide users with contextualized analytic outputs and is an important step forward for supporting user adoption of analytic products.
Overall, AI believes that Oracle Analytics Cloud provides a compelling suite of analytic services. When Day by Day is considered, AI believes that Oracle Analytics Cloud has evolved beyond the offering initially promised at Oracle Open World. But will it sell? AI also took a look at the pricing to find out.
Currently, Oracle Analytics Cloud comes in two types of services: Non-metered Services and Metered Services. Both of these services are split into a Standard Version and an Enterprise Version. The Standard Version includes Data Visualization Cloud Service, 50 licenses of Data Visualization Desktop, Oracle Smartview, and Oracle Essbase. The Enterprise Version also includes Business Intelligence Cloud, Oracle Essbase Enterprise (which includes sandboxing, scenario management, and the ability to connect to cubes), and Day by Day as well.
The Metered services top off at twice the cost of the Non-Metered services, which makes sense in context of the flexibility associated with be able to purchased metered cloud services. The oddness of the per-hour rate makes more sense when this pricing is listed in Euro and the metered services translate into 9 Euro and 18 Euro per hour, respectively.
This translates into a non-discounted rate of $60/user/month for Standard Cloud services and $120/user/month for Enterprise Edition. At this price, AI believes that Oracle will be able to compete with the likes of Birst, Domo, and GoodData on a price basis, leaving the competition to functionality and user requests. With the additions of Essbase and Day by Day to the Oracle Analytics Cloud, AI positions OAC as a top-tier cloud BI solution that should be considered by both existing Oracle customers and net-new customers seeking an enterprise-class cloud BI solution with a hybrid cloud understanding of migrating and supporting business data.