Information on Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services (BICS)

After Oracle Open world the buzzword is Oracle BI Cloud Services (BICS). Stoppage of further Informatica version of Oracle BI Applications 7964 (OBIA) and focus on Oracle Data Integrator is talking point.
Customers are worried about the direction taken by Oracle as they invested a lot and suddenly Oracle changed its focus.
For Service providers it's a challenge as well because on behalf of Oracle we have to convince our Customers how smoothly we can move them to this new world without impacting their business.

Oracle BI Cloud Service is bundled with 2 products:
1. Oracle BI
2. Oracle Database

Oracle BI Cloud Service is one of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) that is provided by Oracle Cloud.
In a nutshell we can define BICS in 4 steps:
1. Load Your Data - In present BICS for all kind of reporting we need to upload data to Cloud Oracle database. Sources can be files, on premise systems (local systems) and Cloud Applications.
2. Prepare Your Data - in raw form data is not formatted for reporting. Carry the required transformation for analysis like creating relationships across datasets, combining data from different data sources, analytic functions etc.
3. Analyze - Build your report and dashboards.
4. Go Mobile and Share - In built functionality to be available on any mobile system with high degree of security. Need to download the required applications on your system to access BICS.

Pros and Cons of Oracle BI Cloud Service:
1. Licensing cost is very less compared to on premise Oracle BI.
2. Start accessing BICS immediately (with a link) as there is no infrastructure required to set it up like on premise Oracle BI.
3. Can start using based on requirement of a department not as Enterprise wide like on premise Oracle BI.
4. Easy to use with very less complexity involved (most of the work are done using easy to use Wizards) not like on premise Oracle BI.
5. Can decommission it easily if ROI is not expected (minimum of only 1 year licensing is required for 10 users) unlike on premise Oracle BI.
6. BICS lacks Agents, Scorecards, BI Publisher etc which requires a schema definition.
7. BICS removed BI Administration Tool. Repository changes are handled by Wizard only.
8. Only online repository is accessible by BICS.
9. With BICS licensing we get 2 environment,i.e, one for Pre-Prod/Dev and other for Prod.
10. The migration of BI components is not incremental.
11. All objects repository, catalogs and users are moved together (all combined together and single object cannot be migrated) while migrating in BICS.
12. The migration overwrites all existing objects.
13. Administration is easier in BICS as there is no need of Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control and Console.

 The content published here is solely my own view.

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