Oracle has unveiled a series of analytic applications for its flagship E-Business Suite ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite that it says gives customers a more effective, richer way to comb through operational data.
The applications are based on Oracle's Endeca search and analytics technology, with each of more than a dozen announced Monday targeting narrow areas of ERP system data, such as order management, revenue management, process manufacturing and asset management.
"We have prioritised the areas where we think it's particularly critical for customers or users to get to the high-priority work they need to do," said Cliff Godwin, senior vice president of application development, in an interview prior to Monday's announcement.
While E-Business Suite users could already run queries in search of particular types of information, the new applications provide a much more intuitive and efficient interface, according to Oracle, which?acquired Endeca in 2011.
The extension applications sort and summarise ERP system data and push it into an in-memory data model, allowing users to run faceted searches as well as navigate through information via charts, tag clouds and other visualisations, according to Oracle.
"This is more than just better search," Godwin said. "We're trying to replace a lot of operational reporting."
The applications come with an embedded licence for the underlying Endeca technology, according to Godwin. They are?priced at US$1,000 per user licence, come packaged with an "all-in-one" installer, and offer support for mobile device access, Oracle said.
E-Business Suite customers must be on release 12.1.3 in order to install the applications, which are each sold separately, Godwin said. The "vast majority" of E-Business Suite customers are either on that release now or in the process of migrating to it, he said.
To some degree, the new E-Business Suite applications reflect the "pervasive" BI (business intelligence) theme Oracle has built into its next-generation Fusion Applications, wherein users receive relevant analytic data throughout their interactions with the software.
Oracle has committed to continue developing and supporting E-Business Suite and other product lines for the long term, while encouraging customers to begin adopting Fusion in modular fashion.
