Intelligent Enterprise

This week is Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco and it is one of the largest enterprise software conferences in the industry. But not just that their conference has taken over the city of San Francisco but that is has over 25 press releases and announcements in three days. The keynotes at the conference from Oracle and industry executives provide some good opportunity to understand the operations and direction of Oracle and also where they feel more than confident. Highlighting a lot of the hard work they have made with Oracle 11g information management platform and rationalizing of their applications. Clearly Oracle celebrating their 30th anniversary has a lot to be proud of in their rise to one of the largest software companies in the world.

Listening in to one of the keynotes by Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, Fusion Middleware of Oracle on Tuesday, he reviewed a broad range of what is happening with their technology platform. There were many positive advancements and points in the presentation of Oracle's Fusion middleware, but one point should not be left without comment.

On slide 30 of Thomas presentation is a competitive differentiation chart of Oracle Fusion Middleware in BI and Performance Management compared to Business Objects and Cognos on 10 dimensions of capabilities and applications. Maybe it was a slip on Oracle's part, but they checked off all 10 for Oracle and gave the other vendors nothing. These include "Single, Integrated EPM System," "Real Time Financial and Operational Planning," "Enterprise Financial Consolidation," and others. Oracle can not really believe this can they?

I do not believe or endorse the chart and it is clearly not factual from my perspective. In my previous points in July's blog Oracle Boasts Leadership Position in BI & Performance Management – Should We Believe Them they tried to claim having a complete and integrated system. If you fully evaluate the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Plus, which is the combination of Oracle and Hyperion BI products together, they still have a long way to go to make it complete and integrated. Oracle has extended this and even made more claims that are not factually true when looking at the other vendors. Maybe Oracle should leave the comparative analysis of the vendors to we who track them and can provide a more neutral and factual comparison. In fact our latest version of our 2007 Midyear BI and Performance Management Scorecard provides this type of detailed comparison where we compare vendors and at least Business Objects and Cognos opted to participate in the process.

So what does this mean for you? Well, some further marketing and sales noise from Oracle to ignore. Let's get back to the BI and performance management business at hand and build a business case and evaluation of what you need for your organization. Then you can determine if Oracle or hundreds of other vendors are best fit for your requirements.

Let me know your thoughts.

Mark Smith is CEO And Senior Vice President of Research at Ventana Research. Write to him at mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com.