Oracle launches major 10g update

Oracle has launched a major new version of its 10g Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, which is designed to offer increased scalability, interoperability with third-party products and capabilities to make BI more pervasive in the organisation.

In order to appeal to a broad range of enterprise workers, from executives down to front-line staff, the firm has included a range of options for accessing information including interactive dashboards, ad-hoc querying and analysis, and highly formatted reporting, according to Oracle vice-president of BI products management Paul Rodwick.

There are also capabilities for users to access BI capabilities via Microsoft Office and applications.

"It's not about making querying tools simpler but being able to drive BI directly into business processes, workflows and daily activities," he said. "We took the view that different roles need to be serviced in different ways."

10g version 3 has also been designed to integrate with Oracle apps, databases and Fusion Middleware, as well as third-party applications and data sources, in order to simplify customers' IT environments and reduce costs.

"This is a big change in Oracle's capabilities; a year ago there was not this degree of hot pluggability," added Rodwick. "The BI market demands that your products work with whatever the company has already in place and almost all organisations have a mixture of [vendors'] products."