IBM BA Competitive Team

Oracle BI (OBIEE)

BI Solution Summary

Oracle (ORCL) is one of IBMs major competitors

across a variety of brands. They are a major
enterprise software vendor with a long history in
enterprise applications. Their key Performance
Management technology is now essentially all based
on acquisitions: Sun hardware, Hyperion for
Financial Performance Management, Siebel for
applications and for the core Business Intelligence
(OBIEE). Their Business Analytics stack is now
marketed as engineered systems (hardware and
software together) which include a dedicated BI
Appliance Exalytics. Oracle now has a purposebuilt appliance to address each of the most common
data management requirements. This has changed
the game in the industry as it is not strictly a
software sales play. Oracle has included optimized
BI and PM capabilities in their engineered systems.
For the business to get these enhancements, they
must purchase engineered systems from Oracle.
Although IBM solutions have superior performance
and technical capabilities, it is the new business
capabilities included in Oracle Engineered Systems,
such as Exalytics, which is driving hardware sales
from the business, where this was traditionally an IT
decision.
Financial results Dec 2013 see Financial results.
Headcount is now 121,868 (Q2 2014). Sales were
$9.3 billion, beating the expected $9.2 billion
Financial results
Software License revenue

$2,380 M

Maintenance revenue

$4,516 M

Total revenue software

Hardware revenue

$6,896 M
$1,323 M

Cheat Sheet: Competing against

Software and related
Services revenue
Total revenues

$1,056 M

$9,275 M

The fact that they offer multiple BI options:

appliances (Exalytics), traditional on-premise
software, Cloud (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS) can be a
strength and a weakness. Their BI appliance
Exalytics leverages Sun hardware is generally a
lower-performing option vs. IBM; however, its not
just an IT decision anymore when buying hardware
as Oracle has included new application features
exclusively on their own hardware. Their traditional
BI software (OBIEE) offering now includes big data
and streaming connectors. Additionally, there are
improvements is: visualizations, user interactions,
production reporting, mobile, MS Office via
SmartView and a new Google like search for
metadata and reporting key figures via BI Ask
(coming soon in the Oracle labs).
Along with others vendors, Oracle adopted R Open
Source as the core of their new predictive analysis
capability. This is usually a weakness, as R is not
enterprise ready (single threaded process, cannot
process data in place it has to take a copy limted
to the server its processing upon). However, Oracle
Advanced Analytic has integrated R into the Oracle
database to offload standard calculations to the
database; offers multi threaded processing and data
analysis in place (similar to SPSS). Additionally,
Oracle R can accept SQL or R scripts to execute R
functions which makes Oracles Advanced
Analytics a true engine which any application which
can generate SQL can leverage Advanced Analytics.
However, this implementation addresses high
performance, big data, scalability but not usable
for the business user; this is for the data scientist.
Like SAP, Oracle dominates in the ERP or
applications markets, have a strong middleware
platform, and push their database technology.

Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

remains a small percentage as compared to these
other pillars, but BI / BA is a critical milestone
Oracle must win. We have seen Oracle will discount
BI / BA heavily win a larger deal or ELA.
Latest version of Oracle BI is OBIEE 11g
(11.1.1.7.1) released Oct 2013 which is a patch
update. The patch release brings additional
visualizations, mobile usability, integration with
Enterprise Performance Management Workspace,
support for Apache Hadoop and Multitenancy.

IBM/Oracle Comparative solutions

In bold are what we believe are their strengths

Capability

Oracle

IBM

Professional
report
authoring
Ad Hoc Query

BI Publisher1

Report Studio

Answers

Personal analysis
OLAP style
Analysis

[none]
Answers

Dashboards

Interactive
Dashboards

Cognos
Workspace
Advanced
Cognos Insight
Cognos
Workspace
Advanced/
Analysis Studio
Cognos
Workspace
/ Cognos Insight
Cognos Insight/
Project Neo

Data
discovery/
visualization
Data Mining
/predictive

Exalytics /
Endeca
R open source
Data Mining

SPSS Modeler

Data
Integration / ETL

ODI (Data
Integrator)

Data cleansing

ODI /
Warehouse
Builder
BAM

Data Manager/
InfoSphere
DataStage
QualityStage

Real time
monitoring
Collaboration
Mobile

WebCenter
Mobile HD;

InfoSphere
Streams
Connections
Mobile

BI Publisher is ubiquitous, due to Oracle footprint

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Oracle BI (OBIEE)

Capability

Oracle

Strategy
management
/Scorecarding

Enterprise
Planning

Governance Risk
Compliance
Financial
Statutory
Reporting
Search-based
analysis

Mobile App
designer
Strategy
Management
via Oracle
Foundation
License
Hyperion
Financial
Management
(HFM)
Enterprise GRC
Hyperion
disclosure
management
(Endeca)
Oracle Endeca
Information
Discovery

IBM

Cheat Sheet: Competing against

Business
User

Metric Studio

TM1 and
Cognos Insight
(distributed
contribution)
OpenPages
FSR

Cognos search

IT

For mid-market opportunities, Oracle will position

Oracle BI Standard Edition One (see note at end of
this document).
Strategy/ tactics against IBM
Against IBM Oracle will:
Continue to leverage opportunities where clients
are heavily invested in Oracle technology and use
that in an attempt to block IBM.
Claim that if the enterprise applications are
Oracle: PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Siebel, or Enterprise
Business Suite, the client can get out of the box
functionality that no other tool, including Cognos,
can match.
State that Cognos is slow to certify on Oracle
releases and imply lower risk with Oracle.
Describe and position Exalytics as being innovative
and something that IBM does not have (a BI
Appliance). Further, they will want to say that
Exalytics solves analytics problems better and
more cheaply than the competition. See Objection
handling and references section for counters.
OBIEE Strengths/Weaknesses
Role

Strength

Traditional
professional
reporting
Oracle stack
integration
Integration
with ERP and
processes

Weakness

Product

Integration to
Oracle
infrastructure
Heavily
dependent on
IT though will
promote out of
the box
functionality
Several
solutions:
applications,
appliances,
OBIEE
Breadth:
complete BI
and PM
solution albeit
on different
platforms
Choice of
appliance or
software or
applications

Complex BI
environment
Many different tools
for different needs
with high degree of
overlap
No real collaboration
platform
Analysis (from
personal to
enterprise) is much
weaker
commonly used for
operational reporting,
as IT and Fusion
Middleware are
required
Needs many
components
different platforms
Older products being
deprecated, leads to
migration issues.
Require updates and
modifications to out
of box components to
work with ERP /
Applications.
Will require latest
middleware for
deployment (Fusion)
Many different
products and
More Oracle-centric
than neutral
Software is older and
Oracle is using
hardware to resolve
inherent performance
issues

Oracle BI Challenges
1. They are now moving towards an Appliance and
Cloud strategy: Exalytics (Analytics), Exadata
(database), however this is all dependent on Sun
hardware. See end of document for IBM assessment
of Sun.
2. The BI tools have evolved considerably: they now
can leverage Essbase adequately. However, Essbase

comes with heavy dependency on specific expertise

and is not a low-cost solution, cannot incrementally
load data as fast as TM1, and not as flexible in
application development.
3. Oracle BI is dependent on non-specific BI
components which lead to IT complexity
4. OBIEE is primarily used for systems of record,
static and parameterized reporting, as well as
dashboards centrally developed by IT advanced
analytics has not been widely adopted using OBIEE
(Gartner 2/2013).
5. Oracle is still committed to Crystal Ball 2 which
is more Monte Carlo simulation than a broadapplication statistical or data mining tool. Their new
move to R Open Source for predictive capabilities is
for the data scientist and the engine for their new
analytical apps and other applications needing
predictive capabilities.
How to Succeed against Oracle
Net New Deals (Greenfield opportunities)
Identify category of client:
Oracle-centric: ERP, Essbase, RDBMS (surround)
Legacy client: Discoverer Essbase or Brio
(convert)
OBIEE client (compete)
Qualify in/out as necessary.
Identify critical event product being sunsetted,
or new technology standardardization for
example.
Determine if client is content with current
solution /identify pains.
If Cognos on Oracle opportunity, email BA
Competitive and execute surround strategy.
Identify the BI tools in the organization or under
consideration in preparation for possible
standardization play.
Ask questions to see the larger strategy; we
have lost deals due to performance as Oracle
had positioned OBIEE with Exalytics; IBM just
positioned Cognos. Clearly identify the business

Crystal Ball came out of the Hyperion acquisition. Not

integrated to OBIEE and remains largely a spreadsheet
tool.

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Oracle BI (OBIEE)
drivers and you may need to engage IM to offer
a solution beyond just software.

Surround - leverage and embrace the

Oracle infrastructure.

Conversion
Highlight benefits of Cognos over Discoverer, or
TM1 over Essbase (leverage this COMP link)
Cognos over Brio this will require conversion
expertise however.
Compete
Determine optimum strategy, based on
qualification and discovery, plan traps to set,
anticipate objections.
General guidance
Oracle is a complex competitor. Engage crossbrand IBM teams to neutralize and block them.
Look beyond BI and beyond BA to be successful.
Look beyond pure Oracle assets (to SAP,
Microsoft) to differentiate our solution.
Position our new capabilities added in IBM
Cognos 10.2.1 try to make extensible
visualization, self service predictive or
enterprise planning an agenda item for
evaluations. Oracle does not offer such
capability.
Traps to set
1. Beyond OBIEE - components to include PM,
TM1, collaboration, predictive analytics and as many
complementary components: FSR, Open Pages,
SPSS and big data. Oracle cannot deliver on all of
these across Oracle and non-Oracle assets and
certainly not on one platform/foundation.
Example: Clients often tell us that the reason they
selected IBM was due to the strength and proven
and successful implementations of our Platform
including its ability to embrace all existing data
assets and infrastructures. As you have a complex
suite of data assets, and a mixed non-Oracle
environment, you might consider asking Oracle if
their platform supports all your data assets for
example: rich predictive solution across all these
data sources.

Cheat Sheet: Competing against

2. Around upgrade for Discoverer
Example: (for existing Oracle Discoverer clients)
Gartner says (Jan 2011) Early v10.1 customers
report a virtually seamless upgrade from Cognos 8
v4, forestalling a potential hurdle for adoption. We
understand you are considering upgrades from older
Oracle versions. Perhaps you might like to cost the
exact cost of moving from older technology (such as
Discoverer) within the Oracle stack; and then
examine if a move to IBM might not net you more
cost benefits.
3. If Exalytics is being positioned (and it will
be) look for opportunities that will not be best
served by Exalytics (such as managed
reporting). Similar to the above discussion around
accessing all forms of data sources including
syndicated data, raise concerns around using the BI
Appliance as a single source for all information,
providing all users with the right tools to perform
their jobs, and position the appliance as a
performance improvement vehicle only for Essbase
whereas we are offering in-memory capabilities with
TM1, and with 10.2 improving caching and query
response times with Dynamic Cube. Also, focus on
the business pain and look to IM to help solve a
targeted need Oracle Exalytics is expensive and
promotes vendor lock in; IBM offers cost effective
solutions which can accomplish similar results.
4. High cost of Exalytics: Set a trap: around our
Dynamic Query (DQM) solution as an Essbase and
other data sources query accelerator.
Example: As far as we can tell, based on the Oracle
public list price, by experienced IBM experts, and by
informed bloggers the actual price of ONE
Exalytics appliance seems to run well into the 3M
10 M range. Are you considering Exalytics to use
primarily as an Essbase accelerator to improve
query times? Would you like us to show you how
our Dynamic Query mode works on Essbase queries
to ALSO give great query times with capabilities
such as in-memory caching without ADDITIONAL,
add-on, costs to you, the client? We deliver all this
as part of the standard IBM Cognos 10 platform.

And moreover, it will work with your other data

sources, such as SAP BW. And dont forget to
quote Oracle: where the entire hot data cannot fit
into the memory of a single machine, the data may
be split across multiple Oracle Exalytics machines to
increase the memory capacity available for inmemory analytics. Have you assessed what that
real cost of deployment will be?
5. Stack dependencies: OBIEE is considered a
technical component within the Oracle stack and
has considerable dependencies with other Oracle
solutions. This becomes clear when considering the
cloud, as admin tools must be the same release as
the solution. The ability to quickly upgrade without
impacting other solutions is speed to value.

Traps to avoid
IBM does not have a BI Appliance like
Exalytics. No, IBM doesnt as Exalytics is designed
to give Oracles over 20 year old software a few
more years of life due to the older architecture and
inherit performance issues repurposing older
software in business scenarios not originally
designed to support. Exalytics had tuned copies of
OBIEE, Essbase and Endeca installed to solve many
of these issues (and the customer will buy both
software and hardware). Be sure to go beyond the
business requirements and position IM hardware as
an option, but not a requirement, for additional
performance.
Do not set simple traps with yes no answers
such as can we do writeback. Oracle can
perform write-back operations including to
relational sources but needs additional coding to
be performed. However they will demonstrate this
and make it look seamless. Rather make the
conversation about ability to move from (e.g.)
personal analysis (Cognos Insight) or from a
Dashboard - Cognos Workspace to TM1 seamlessly
for Business Intelligence, scenario modeling,
planning and budgeting.
Objections to handle
1. Oracle will position IBM as good for a decade past
and point to their recent acquisitions and venture

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Oracle BI (OBIEE)

into appliances as leading. Dont be put off by this

claim and point to IBM leading in all types of market
documents across Business Analytics (i.e. from
Forrester and Gartner), as well as in areas like
Enterprise Content Management, and Collaboration.
IBM is leading in Business Analytics, and continues
to invest in areas to address customer requirements
and not just rebuilding their technology and
software stack into engineered hardware.

2. IBM has acquired (almost) as many companies as

Oracle but these acquired companies/products are
kept separate at IBM. look at SPSS and Cognos
and FSR. We understand that they are all run as
separate businesses. Oracle has integrated (e.g.)
Hyperion and OBIEE. IBM has not integrated their
acquisitions as well.
Counter: IBM integrates the technologies where it
makes sense based on customer feedback, and
market opportunity. Fundamentally, the strategy
between the two companies is completely different
whereby Oracle is acquiring technologies to build
out their customer base and IBM is acquiring
technologies to round out its offering for Business
Analytics.

3. Cognos is slow to certify on Oracle technology

especially for ERP applications. Better for client to
go with Oracle, who are clearly going to be up to
date with their own technology, testing and
certification.
Counter: Cognos in fact closely follows the Oracle
releases for the key technologies (we do not certify
on test or beta product). The core of the argument
should be that Oracle is not better on Oracle and no
ERP system is implemented without customizations
thus anything Oracle provides on top of their ERP
will require modifications.

Cheat Sheet: Competing against

Elevator pitch
IBM offers some unique capabilities:
We are a proven leader in Business Analytics. We
are constantly highlighted by industry analysts such
as Gartner, Forrester et al as being the clear leader
or visionary in this space. This rating does not
happen by accident we have consistently been
early to market with certain ideas: for example we
introduced true team-based collaboration into IBM
Cognos 10.2
We offer not just traditional Business
Intelligence (like reporting) but the full spectrum of
analysis, from personal (desktop) analysis (which is
self-service), to scenario modeling, to predictive or
data mining capabilities.
We are unique for such a large (stack) vendor in
as much as we do not force a client into specific
technology choices rather we honor, support and
embrace the infrastructure choices our clients have
already made: whether that technology originates
with IBM or a competitor.
Perhaps most compelling of all we allow the user
to see his part of the business or the entire
business at a glance through our unique ability from
a dashboard style view to show: All time horizons:
past, present, future and planning.
Pricing strategy and guidance

Email BA Competitive as they have insight on

current tactics and strategies
Select correct SalesPlay
BA Resource Center
Use the analysts:
BA Analysts web site for latest client-facing materials;
Emphasize our leadership in many areas: self-service BI
Platforms and Predictive and Data Mining), Data Discovery,
Business Intelligence.
Additionally broaden to items such as
IBM Social leader link https://w3connections.ibm.com/files/app?
lang=en_US#/file/1a0d66f4-7841-4bbe-b1bd98b85878344f

Oracle Mid-Market solution for BI: Oracle BI

Standard Edition One (link) is for 5 50 users,
includes Dashboards and Answers, ETL and
dedicated use Oracle Database.
Exalytics is running different software versions: The

summary advisor wont work on a non-Exalytics machine.

The NON exalytics version is different from the Exalytics
version. That is because the Engineered System (Exalytics)
works different from a non engineered system..

Exalytics Pricing tool

Oracle pricing is public, however is subject to heavy
discount.
Overall, software is discounted 65-70% off of list
price. Larger or strategic deals can be 80-85% off
of list. These are typically the more expensive
bundled product licenses, such as BI Foundation
Suite licenses. Hardware is discounted 15-20% off
of list.

Oracle Price lists

References and resources

Actions to take:
Visit BIAAChamps
Competitive Info on Exalytics

IBM competitive support

Due to the nature of the competition for IBM vs. this
vendor, there is a lot of additional competitive
support available to you, across the brands.

http://whywebsphere.com
IBM vs. Oracle competitive portal
Sun vs. IBM
The IBM BACC for Brio to Cognos migration insight
e.g. Brio to Cognos and Learning@IBM.

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