David Menninger's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to offer some insights on Oracle drawn from our latest Value Index research, which provides an analytic representation of our assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Analytics and Business Intelligence 2019 is the distillation of a year of market and product research efforts by Ventana Research. We utilized a structured research methodology that includes evaluation categories designed to reflect the breadth of the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal (RFP) and vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. We evaluated Oracle and 14 other vendors in seven categories, five relevant to the product (adaptability, capability, manageability, reliability and usability) and two related to the vendor (TCO/ROI and vendor validation). To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and data derived from our benchmark research on analytics and business intelligence.

Our analysis is based primarily on Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), a public cloud service that Oracle says provides “lift and shift” support for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Oracle has developed a modern user interface for OAC as well as a broad set of capabilities. The product uses a model of importing data but also supports live access to several of the leading relational databases via its Remote Data Connector.

Overall Oracle ranks 11th in the Value Index assessment. Its best rankings are for Usability and Capability where it ranks seventh and ninth respectively. In addition to good capabilities for data access and interactive visualization assessed in the Value Index, the product provides most of the desired advanced analytics capabilities. Better collaborative capabilities would help drive its Usability score higher, as would better integration of the Essbase capabilities into the OAC offering.

Oracle’s lowest rankings are for Validation and TCO/ROI where it ranks last and 14th respectively. With a large portfolio of products, it is difficult to find and evaluate information specific to the OAC products such as case studies and services.

This assessment was based on Oracle Analytics Cloud June 2018 release. Oracle released a new version in September 2018 that includes new visualization types, data flow enhancements, data enrichment recommendations and improved search as well as other enhancements.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of analytics and business intelligence software in the industry. You can learn more about Oracle and others using our Value Index as an effective vendor selection and RFI/RFP tool; read the report here.

Regards,
David Menninger
SVP & Research Director