Oracle Unveils New BI Apps for Exalytics Machine

April 10, 2012 Alex Woodie

Oracle last week unveiled two new business intelligence applications, called Manufacturing Analytics and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Analytics. The new offerings are certified to run on Exalytics, Oracle’s new in-memory analytics machine, and are preconfigured to work with Oracle’s E-Business Suite, although it can also work with data from JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and World and other ERP systems.

The new Manufacturing Analytics application is designed to give executives deeper insight into important elements of their companies’ operations, including manufacturing schedules, cost, quality, and service levels. The software helps customers correlate work order information with production plans, improve insight into raw materials and finished goods, and reduce work order cycle times, the vendor says.

EAM Analytics, meanwhile, gives executives insight into the cost of maintaining and operating assets, such as factories and fleets of heavy equipment or trucks. The software gives users the capability to project expected asset life and develop strategies to reduce maintenance costs and increase uptime of critical assets, the vendor says.

The new software is pre-integrated to work with Oracle’s flagship ERP suite, called E-Business Suite. However, since the new apps conform to the Oracle Business Intelligence data model, they can also work with the JD Edwards products, PeopleSoft, Siebel CRM, SAP applications, and others.

Both new members of the Oracle Business Intelligence suite are certified to run on Exalytics, the new analytic machines from Oracle that combine Sun hardware, Oracle’s TimesTen in-memory database technology, and its Essbase multidimensional database technology into one superfast machine aimed at conquering “big data.” Oracle says that Manufacturing Analytics and EAM Analytics are the first in-memory analytic applications designed specifically for those industries.

Exalytics has been a big money-maker lately for Oracle, which said the machine was its fastest growing product ever. Oracle positions Exalytics against SAP’s in-memory product, called HANA, and IBM‘s Netezza appliances and DB2 PureScale databases.