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This is an overview of Oracle’s main “flavors” of OAC. Both feature Data Visualization
Cloud Service with a limited number of desktop licenses.

The enterprise edition adds in BI, Day by Day, and the Enterprise version of Essbase in
the Cloud.

Organizations looking at BI/Analytics for the first time can deploy the standard edition
and be up and running in a relatively short period of time (a few weeks at most, in
typical cases) whereas BI may take a little more time if you’re modeling a warehouse
or otherwise more complex data model.

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Common thread = Visualizations

OAC, as a suite, emphasizes visualizations as the primary means of informing users.

There is a clear evolution happening in these tools as Oracle moves towards a more
consumable, actionable method of delivering analytics. This is most notable in how
Day by Day and Data Visualization work to deliver timeline/streaming types of
delivery rather than a dashboard full of text. Oracle seeks to learn from how we all
consume data via social media platform and apply those lessons to how it presents
data in the analytics cloud suite.

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OAC allows for external LDAP providers in a couple of different ways depending on
which flavor of OAC you own

Metered/Universal Credits: Includes IDCS to manage security which has options like
the Identity Bridge to sync the on premise AD server with Oracle’s cloud offering

Non-Metered: Supports connecting to a 3rd party provider like MSAD via SAML
Authentication (no longer actively sold)

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Configuring a VPN connection between OAC and your on premise data center
effectively places OAC in your network and, as far as connectivity considerations go,
makes it much closer to parity with legacy BI tools, allowing you to connect to real
time data sources, existing data marts, and other local sources of data without
needing to add layers of ETL or scripting into your project.

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Using the RPD file will keep OBIEE users and administrators feeling at home in OAC,
and more importantly, means not having to re-build existing RPD files which may be
the product of up to a decade or more of work at this point.

Deploying an RPD means users won’t be able to use OAC’s web UI Data Modeler, but
as of now, they’re likely better off building any sort of data model in the BI
Administration Tool anyway, due to the lack of depth of the web UI.

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At this point in its development, OAC is capable of serving as an enterprise level tool,
meaning security can be configured to leverage an external LDAP like MSAD, using
VPN it can connect to data sources both in the cloud and on premise, etc. This means
that OAC is effectively viewed as any upgrade with cost being the likely deciding
factor. If it is cheaper to go to the cloud, there are extremely few scenarios where you
wouldn’t be served just as well.

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BI Publisher gives a new feature set around narrative based reporting and delivery
that was lacking prior to its release in December, but OAC still lacks Delivers options
for other objects like BICS’ dashboards and reports.

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The most common enterprise solution is a hybrid cloud/on premise model.

This leverages the established functionality of on premise tools, services, and

applications. This means you wouldn’t have to plan to migrate your data warehouse
and change all of the processes that are interconnected to it just to get it ‘in the
cloud.’ Oracle supports a multitude of VPN providers to establish a connection from
Analytics Cloud to your on premise data centers.

At this point, OAC becomes a true successor for OBIEE, meaning it is capable of
connecting to the same sources of data and leveraging the years of work that likely
went into building your organization’s RPD file.

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These steps are set at a pretty high level conceptually, but the first step is establishing
your infrastructure. Since OAC is a Platform as a Service offering, you have control
over how it’s architected to some degree. This means that a key item to remember is
having a clear idea of your overall architecture picture prior to deployment.

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