November 21, 2005

Oracle’s perennial confusion about analytic technology

Oracle is badly confused about analytic technology, and indeed long has been. It would be tough for me to coherently explain why without being, well, confusing. So I’ll just list a series of data points, which hopefully should suffice to illustrate the point.

That’s even before getting to Oracle’s problems in data warehousing itself, where it can’t beat Teradata and DB2/mainframe at the very high end, and low-cost options like Netezza are a looming threat as well.

What’s particularly ironic is that some of Oracle’s core marketing pitches have a lot to do with analytics. The whole integrated stack story? Doesn’t make much sense when you’re only talking OLTP; only with analytics in the picture is it coherent. The whole scalability story? A few huge websites and the like aside, that’s mainly about data warehousing now.

Obviously, Oracle has the potential to be a titan in analytics. But it doesn’t have its act at all together yet.

Comments

2 Responses to “Oracle’s perennial confusion about analytic technology”

  1. The Monash Report»Blog Archive » Scathing review of Oracle’s pre-Siebel BI products on September 23rd, 2006 9:50 pm

    […] Stephen Few offers a blistering review of Oracle Discoverer, its portal integration, and its UI in general. This fits well with what I said last November: Obviously, Oracle has the potential to be a titan in analytics. But it doesn’t have its act at all together yet. […]

  2. Gary on May 25th, 2011 3:13 pm

    I couldn’t agree more – after loving Discoverer back in late 90s, I now don’t consider Oracle for anything DW related. I might even argue even their database has fallen behind SqlServer and DB2 and especially Teradata. With no coherent ETL or BI tool or Case tool or DQ or data mining strategy – only OBI-EE which is what again?-remind me because its become just a thick fog of former other vendor products in my brain. Oracle’s so lost I don’t think they remember where their corporate office is located – I think it might be somewhere on Larry’s boat offshore.

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