Friday, May 11, 2012

Oracle Unfolds Details of Its Arsenal of Speed-of-Thought Big Data Analytics Tools

May 3, San Francisco – Today, Oracle laid out details of its “speed of thought” big data analytics suite at its Big Data and Extreme Analytics Summit.

The Oracle Exalytics in-memory BI machine forms the core of the analytics suite. Oracle Exalytics is a co-packaged combination of Sun hardware and various in-memory analytics software tools which have been co-designed for optimal combined performance. The set of analytics tools include Oracle’s in-memory BI Foundation, an architecturally unified business intelligence solution which caters to reporting, ad hoc query, and analysis needs. It also includes the Endeca Information Discovery tool, which was acquired by Oracle in December of last year. This combination of co-optimized hardware and software is touted as the “speed of thought” analytics which allows advanced, intuitive exploration and analysis of data – whether structured or unstructured.
 
Oracle Exalytics can work against the data from both the Oracle Big Data Appliance (a distribution of Hadoop with matching co-designed Sun server) and Oracle RDBMS.

Endeca, a suite of applications for unstructured data management, Web commerce, and business intelligence which was acquired by Oracle last year in December, has been positioned as the primary information discovery tool in Oracle’s BI suite.

The combination of Oracle Exalytics hardware and matching BI software gives businesses access to both structured and unstructured information from different sources using just one interface, thus giving them the ability to gain a deep, wide, and on-time view of their customers and allowing them to do in-context exploration of their business data in a timely manner. In addition to answering questions of whether a business has increased its revenues or missed its sales targets, businesses today want – need – to know why.
 
In the past, to gain such information, businesses have had to go to separate data sources such as promotions data, time frames, locations, channels – and still manage to get only an incomplete view of what they’re looking for, as other influencing factors such as current events and climactic changes may inevitably get missed.

With the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory machine and Oracle BI tools, businesses will be able to gather information, both structured and unstructured, from a far wider spectrum of sources – survey companies, CMS systems, customer reviews, tweets, news reports – and consolidate them all into one single view. And then, to facilitate big data analysis, the software allows you to arrange certain data according to demographical categories such as gender, age, or location.

The key features of the co-engineered Oracle Exalytics In-Memory BI machine and software were described as

  • advanced data visualization and exploration to quickly provide actionable insight from large amounts of data. Oracle claims that the software can be used by somebody with no previous training, thanks to its user-friendly interface;
  • the software allows businesses to download data as is, without need for costly cleansing, so iteration and evolution can be accelerated;
  • faster than competitive solutions for business intelligence, modeling, forecasting, and planning applications; and
  • comprehensiveness. The hybrid search/analytical database was designed to be able to collect and compile all the information – regardless of source, format, or type – that a business needs to make informed critical decisions.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Mostly Big Data developments today have traditional techniques to process the huge amount of data that must be processed.