By the way the press reacted to the recent Oracle Business Intelligent Suite announcement you would think Oracle was new to the BI market. Oracle has been in the BI market for many years and has had several attempts at providing BI solutions, many of which have failed. The problem up until now has been that Larry Ellison has never taken BI seriously. Things appear to have now changed with the acquisition of Siebel. Siebel Analytics (which was based on technology acquired from nQuire) is a significant revenue earner for Siebel. It's good to see that Oracle has realized the importance of this product and has made it the centerpiece of its new BI strategy. At present Siebel analytics is DBMS agnostic. I hope it will stay that way. Oracle stated that it would remain so, but also said that it would exploit the features of its Oracle DBMS in future versions of Siebel Analytics. This seems to be a familiar refrain from vendors following an acquisition!

The biggest problem facing Oracle is the large morass of overlapping Oracle and PeopleSoft BI products it has. Will its salespeople understand what BI products to sell? Oracle also indicated that it would keep the Siebel relationships with Informatica and Acuate alive, but at the same time said it intends to develop its own solutions. As usual Oracle seems to want to own everything.

Although Siebel Analytics is a good product, the cost of $1,500 per user for the Oracle BI Enterprise Suite (in which it is embedded) could be a significant inhibitor for many corporations.

The bottom line is that Oracle at last has a decent BI solution to sell. The questions remain as to whether it can deliver on its BI technology integration plans and put together a coherent sales and marketing plan for its field force.