Business analytics is a top priority for CIOs today as their organizations have to wade through mountains of data being churned from various sources while grappling with mobile applications and Cloud computing. While most enterprises jostle with hardware, software, storage, and network components to assemble their enterprise analytics jigsaw puzzle, Oracle is marketing its engineered system, Exalytics, for this segment.
Globally, the analytics market is one of the fastest growing segments. According to Scott Tunbridge, APAC Program Director – EPM/ BI & Exalytics, Oracle, the requirement for analytics in India is exceptionally strong with the Indian economy reaching out to new markets in telecom, financial services and call centers.
Any data, anywhere
Vikash Mehrotra, Divisional Lead- BI& EPM, Oracle India, viewed the analytics market as a big revenue generator. “The size of this market, including the services and licenses, would be in triple digits and we have a significant share of that pie,” he added.
Traditional analytics software has been given a makeover. Mehrotra believed that competitive advantage could only be earned through having better information. This necessitates a shift from the traditional paradigm of analytics deployments being process-driven.
“There is no competitive advantage in processes anymore. If one bank provides a loan in 24 hours, so do the others. The operative advantage is probably in identifying the right kind of customer and offering him the deal that he is looking for. Increasingly, the top-end of the Indian market has been the early adopter of solutions that provide an operational edge. Analytics initially started as a platform for the top management to monitor KPIs through a dashboard. Nowadays, companies that are ahead in terms of the adoption curve are pushing this information all the way. These are companies that are democratizing the information flow within their organizations enabling employees across the board to access every kind of data on premise, on their mobile devices or in the Cloud,” he said.
In pursuit of new accounts
There is a thrust on analytics in B2C segments such as banking, insurance and consumer packaged goods to name a few. Oracle’s approach to tap this opportunity is going to be Engineered Systems driven. As part of this strategy, the company has introduced the Exalytics In-Memory machine, an engineered system that supports in-memory business intelligence software and hardware for handling analytical and performance management applications.
Oracle is known for up selling to clients that are already using its database products and, consequently, it is extending the Exalytics offering to its existing customer base. Mehrotra believed that, with Oracle being a large database company with a substantial market share, it could leverage the same and convince a large portion of its existing customer base into buying into its latest offering.
“We have an excellent partner ecosystem. They are proficient with vertical-specific know-how. Along with these partners, we are reaching out to the top end of the market, to people who are looking at moving to the next level,” said Mehrotra.
An open solution, Oracle Exalytics is suited for use in heterogeneous IT environments. The solution can access and analyze data from Oracle or third-party relational, OLAP or other data sources including IBM DB2, IBM Netezza, Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services, SAP Business Information Warehouse, Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise and Teradata Warehouse among others, in any combination.
All in a box
The Exa family of products have witnessed good traction over the short span of their existence. Exalogic has been among the fastest growing products for Oracle. Now, with this family of products being almost complete, Oracle is pressing ahead. It believes that, thanks to the Sun acquisition and its software strengths in the database sphere, it is better positioned than its competitors.
Tunbridge said, “SAP is application-based and does not play in engineered systems. IBM is a hardware company, that doesn’t deal much with applications as its technology is geared around database & infrastructure middleware.”
The HANA vs Exalytics dust-up is on. Tunbridge made a case for Oracle’s product, saying that HANA was purely a technology, much as the Oracle Database today.
“You buy HANA from SAP, then get the IBM hardware, then you have your business intelligence tools and applications—these all in different compartments. We, on the other hand, have stitched all of these together. HANA is about taking your existing data store and running it on a faster database. We leave the data in place where it exists and approach the data from the analytics side, using the faster response time for the business users, and incorporating an in-memory machine to do analytics, rather than just swapping the database,” he concluded.