Oracle Exalytics: Is It A Must-Have for BI?

Oracle Exalytics was recently launched at Oracle’s Open World Event, which was held during October in San Francisco. Despite the numerous of claims of product excellence and testimonies from former clients, guests at the event were largely left wondering about the $100,000+ product.  Since the product was largely unseen, it leaves many clients asking is Oracle’s newest BI innovation, the self-described “BI Machine” an absolute necessity?

Several of Oracle’s customers who’ve used the product seem to think so.  A key feature of the project that has been touted by Oracle enthusiasts is the product’s ease of deployment. A current client of Oracle and Exalytics enthusiast, Nilson Group, which is based in Sweden, praised the software’s ability to update on the back end, without causing any project delays. Allowing the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to run on the Exalytics software eliminates operations problems that would otherwise be present on other systems.

Another client, Thomas Reuters, praised the new in-memory feature of the program that allowed it to analyze a 10 billion row data set, due to the capacity for in-memory storage. For a customer without Exalytics that attempted this same feat on traditional hardware, it would be impossible.

The main features that have been praised include the 1TB of ram (Oracle claims it can use even more data to its memory management capabilities) and exceptional processing speed, which has been known to remarkably serve up to 10,000 individual program users at once. Despite it’s success, Oracle’s newest program is not the end-all be-all solution.  No piece of hardware can take the place of the strategical and visonary components that only expert human resources can supply.  

For business owners that are looking to this newest development to solve glitches and memory problems, it looks like there is a solution. However, one must also consider the expertise and strategic vision needed to develop complete solutions customized to an enterprise or industry.

Time will tell if the newest addition to Oracle’s high-profile business tools is indeed a must for the BI community.