OBIEE vs Essbase?

For the second time in a couple weeks, I have heard from some fairly reliable guys who are Oracle Partners that the wave of the future is OBIEE, which is the new name for the technology underlying Siebel Analytics. Ouch!

It is indeed possible, depending on the sentiments and skills of the Oracle sales force that this product could kill Essbase. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that if anyone can do it, Oracle engineers can reverse engineer the repositories and multidimensional models behind the Hyperion Applications. Clearly HFM is already there. But why go technically inferior to please sales guys? (That's a rhetorical question. If Oracle kills Essbase, there is NO technical competition.)

So from a technical perspective I find it very difficult to believe that substituting any other product besides Essbase under the covers is going to give any better performance, especially the 64bit stuff. The catch is that the product stream of Hyperion finapps really are not so very demanding in the main, on Essbase. The real strength of Essbase - where it has yet to be beat, is pure datamart applications.

So I could envision Essbase becoming a specialty reporting engine sold through System 9 portals and that OBIEE (whatever exactly it is) becomes the database of record within Oracle's finapps. This would throw the market into another small paroxysm but enable another class of consultants into the fray. The difficulty is that everybody is going to have to ramp up the OBIEE skills - which means another 2 years before successful implementations are going to be easy to be had.

So the really intriguing question now is who is bumping heads with Gersten - that is if Gersten is still the big dog in Oracle's BI engineering group. Might he have sold out? Is ASO functionality at a standstill? I know that there is at least one old product guy from Hyperion who was less than enthusiastic about the direction of the BI n-tier (for n>2) platform. And I know that some infrastructure guys at my old company were just about run ragged just doing the installations and certifications of Planning, HFM et al. So maybe OBIEE adds to the confusion, or maybe it simplifies things by getting Essbase out of the way.

Either way, the future of BI is getting more and more interesting every day. Lord only knows where I'm going to end up in it. On my head if I keep up this speculative provocation. But you know me. I gotta call 'em as I see 'em. Still I'm going to look for more clues in this matter. Hmm. I should re-subscribe to Stephen Swoyer's RSS.

Comments

[Donald Macdonald]

We have been working with Hyperion Essbase since '98 and OBIEE since 2002 when it was nQuire still. There's no conflict between the two because Essbase is a database and OBIEE is a front end delivery tool. The question is, when will the connectivity be good enough to expose Essbase functionality to an OBIEE developer?
Regards

[BASH]

You can use the Hyperion tools like FR to report against Essbase. That way, yóu're not forced into limitations of a tool like OBIEE that doesn't understand essbase. You can then link to OBIEE reports (and back if you like) while maintaining the context of the reports in both directions. This way, Essbase can do what it's good at (aggregate views and lightning fast analysis) while OBIEE can offer the more detailed views of the business.
Let me know if you want more info - Bernard.AshATGmail.com