Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications are complete, prebuilt BI solutions that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence throughout an organization. These solutions enable organizations to gain more insight and greater value from a range of data sources, including Oracle Fusion Cloud and On-Premise Applications, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, and third party systems.

Oracle BI Applications are built on the Oracle BI Foundation, a comprehensive and market leading BI platform. This enables organizations to realize the value of a packaged BI application, such as rapid deployment, lower TCO, and built-in best practices, all on one common BI Foundation.

What Is a BI Solution?

BI solution is a combination of strategy and technology for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data from internal and external sources, with the end result of providing information about the past, present, and future state of the subject being examined.

The terms business intelligence and business analytics are often used interchangeably. The term business analytics refers to examining data to find trends and insights. When used together, business intelligence and business analytics has a broader meaning and includes every aspect of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data. For our purposes, the terms will be the same.

Current business intelligence/business analytics solutions offer applications to help the user at every stage of the process to gain actionable information. This includes applications for data preparation, analysis, data visualization, reporting, and collaboration for use on premises, at the desktop, in the cloud, and away from the office with mobile capability.

Consider a solution that offers a single, integrated platform of applications. Many organizations have a legacy business intelligence ecosystem featuring multiple solutions for reporting, discovery, analysis, and other functions. Working with all those solutions can be expensive and require extensive technical knowledge. Multiple solutions can also create compatibility issues.

A business intelligence solution should be easy to access by users across your enterprise and on the road. A cloud solution offers the highest potential for accessibility and availability. It can be accessed when and where it’s needed, for individual use or shared with coworkers. A cloud solution can also be easily scaled to fit an organization of almost any size and flexible enough to meet the demands of a growing business.

Most business intelligence solutions have the capability to connect with one or more data sources. Consider a solution that offers prebuilt connections. With this type of solution, it’s easy to load and integrate data from diverse sources. Prebuilt connections eliminate the time needed to make the connections and reduce the complexity of the solution, enabling your IT people to focus on other tasks.

You want a smart solution that can make business intelligence easy—one with augmented analytics employing embedded machine learning. This kind of solution can help users in gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and conveying information—simplifying and automating tasks.

It should be able to automate data preparation, collecting information from multiple sources and consolidating it, accelerating the process and reducing the chance of errors. It should also be able to augment your analysis by recommending new data sets to include in the review for more accurate results.

Many smart solutions come with data visualization, which provides the capability to automatically transform data into pie charts, graphs, or other type of visual presentation. Users can quickly and easily see and understand patterns, relationships, and emerging trends that might go unnoticed with a spreadsheet of raw numbers.

To be a true business tool, a BI solution must be designed for businesspeople to use on their own—a self-service solution. Your BI solution should be easy to navigate with point-and-click or drag-and-drop features. It should have some type of dashboard with intuitive, interactive access to information and offer guided, step-by-step navigation and built-in functionality so that customization is not required. It should give users a choice of doing a task themselves or employing automation to handle it.

In today’s fast-paced world, businesspeople need access to intelligence aroundtheclock, no matter where they are. So consider a BI solution with mobile capabilities.

Mobile BI solutions are available with voice-enabled access and real-time alerts. You can talk to your data using a search-driven approach. You can view, analyze, and act on data in the cloud or on premises.