Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – A New Member in Oracle Business Intelligence Solutions Offerings

This is an attempt to write about Oracle Endeca Information Discovery product set which is an enterprise data discovery platform recently added in Oracle Business Intelligence Offerings.

Current BI Challenges

The structure and non-structured data is growing enormously for most of the enterprises because of the massive growth in social websites and online business sites. Organizations need to quickly assemble a comprehensive analysis for a given subject, with information coming from ever new and changing sources, spawning new and unanticipated questions.

It is often costly to analyze data and try to answer business questions around following two areas.

Data Retrieval

Business didn’t know the requirements or potential return until they understood the data, but it was too costly for IT to go about joining the data without significant time (modeling and joining data) and IT often needed ROI projections up front to justify the cost. As data sources emerge or change, the problem intensifies. 

Data Visualization

A similar problem exists in how the information is visualized.  IT needs business to define the reports they need, but the business is constantly asking for new ways to see the information. 

IT / Business Conflicts

Because solutions require specialized IT or system-specific skill to join data, create queries, etc., the business feels its hands are tied, relying on IT. 

IT wants to ensure the solution meets requirements in an enterprise-friendly way, and give control over data presentation to the business users wherever possible.

Information Discovery

The Information Discovery is the way the business can get new answers and new insight, using an intuitive view into all relevant data on their subject, in an IT-friendly solution.

·         It offers technology that derives its model from the data itself, doing much of the modeling work on its own. This can reduce time and cost of modeling.

·         The uncertainly and change can be mitigated by using rapid prototyping capability of the information discovery tool in collaboration with the business to uncover and fulfill latent requirements

·         Non technical Business people with domain knowledge to ask the right questions can’t write the queries to express them the information discovery zero-training interfaces that bring consumer user experience innovations to enterprise software

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID) is an enterprise data discovery platform for advanced, yet intuitive, exploration and analysis of complex and varied data.

The main steps involved in Oracle Endeca Information discovery are as follows

·         Information is loaded from disparate source systems and stored in a faceted data model that dynamically supports changing data.

·         This integrated and enriched data is made available for search, discovery and analysis via interactive and configurable applications.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables an iterative “model-as-you-go” approach that simultaneously frees IT from the burdens of traditional data modeling and supports the broad exploration and analysis needs of business users.

OEID Modules

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Enterprise Architecture consists of following modules

•       Oracle Endeca Information Discovery

–      Data discovery BI tool featuring search and guided navigation with application composition

•       Oracle Endeca Server

–      Core Endeca technology blending structured, semi-structured and unstructured data with automatic indexing for fast search and analysis

•       Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment

–      Includes text analysis capabilities for extraction of people, places, organizations, quotes, and themes and core summarization capabilities for automatic creation of abstracts or topical summaries

•       Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment with Sentiment Analysis

–      Includes all of the Text Enrichment capabilities as well as advanced text analysis capabilities for extraction of aggregate sentiment related to each extracted concept. Sentiment is extracted with a score indicating the positive and negative nature of a document or an entity in the document. These scores can be used within the faceted search experience by varying ranges of positivity and negativity

•       Oracle Endeca Content Management System Connectors

–      Allows integration of content stored in various enterprise content management systems. Currently supported systems include: EMC Documentum, EMC Documentum eRoom, FileNet P8, FileNet Document & Image Services, Interwoven TeamSite, Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft SharePoint, and OpenText LiveLink

OEID Complements Existing Oracle BI

OEID complements the existing Oracle BI and it is new valuable addition in the BI solution portfolio.  

I am exploring various options/architecture OEID supports and will write about it in my future blogs.