Today, if you take a look around your organization, you will find people analyze data in various ways – using spreadsheets, apps, desktop tools, data analytics tools, old data warehouses, business analytics solutions, and more. Managing these varied tools to meet different data and visualization needs across departments may become expensive. At the same time, there’s an increasing pressure to innovate reports quickly and accurately with consistent results. So, how can you achieve both flexibility and structure to stay ahead of your competitors without letting costs spiral out of control? The answer is easier than you might think – Oracle Analytics Cloud.
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What is Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC)?
Oracle Analytics Cloud is a cloud based analytics platform that helps organizations analyze and visualize their data in a comprehensive, collaborative, and efficient manner. It is a single system that can empower your organization to ask any data-related question – across any environment, on any device. With this advanced platform, you can gain easy access to any data source no matter where it is. There are a variety of options available in OAC for intelligent analysis without being overwhelming to deploy and manage.
Simple yet powerful, Oracle Analytics Cloud makes it easy for users to explore their data, generate insights, and make informed decisions quickly and effectively.
Features of Oracle Analytics Cloud
OAC is one of the best Oracle Cloud Applications and owns a variety of powerful features to support comprehensive data analysis and visualization. Here are some of its key features:
Data Management and Preparation
- Data Ingestion: OAC can connect to various data sources, including on-premise databases, cloud data warehouses, and big data platforms.
- Data Profiling and Cleansing: It helps identify and correct data quality issues and ensures data accuracy and consistency.
- Data Preparation: It provides tools for transforming, aggregating, and enriching data to make it suitable for analysis.
- Data Modeling: It creates semantic models to define relationships between data elements and provide a consistent view of business data.
Data Visualization and Exploration
- Drag-and-Drop Interface: It helps in creating interactive dashboards and reports using a simple and intuitive interface.
- Pre-built Visualizations: OAC also offers ready-to-use charts, graphs, and dashboards which allow users to quickly present data insights without starting from scratch.
- Customizable Visualizations: OAC helps create tailored visualizations to meet specific business needs and preferences.
- Ad-hoc Analysis: It provides features to explore data freely and gain insights through ad-hoc analysis capabilities.
Collaboration and Governance
- Shared Dashboards and Reports: OAC provides the facility to share insights with colleagues and stakeholders directly.
- Role-Based Access Control: It ensures that your data is secure and private to your organization using granular access controls.
- Data Governance: It also implements data governance policies and standards to maintain data quality and integrity.
Integration and Scalability
- Integration with Other Oracle Products: You can seamlessly integrate OAC with other Oracle applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle ERP Cloud.
- Scalability: OAC can handle large volumes of data and support growing analytical needs.
Advanced Analytics
- Predictive Analytics: It uses machine learning algorithms to forecast future trends and outcomes for various business needs.
- Prescriptive Analytics: OAC goes beyond simply analyzing past data to provide actionable insights and uses data, statistics, and machine learning to predict future outcomes and recommend optimal actions.
- Natural Language Processing: OAC makes it easier to explore data and gain insights without requiring complex technical knowledge using natural language queries.
Oracle Analytics Cloud September 2024: More AI Integration, Connectivity and Visualization
Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) has been evolving since its inception and with its September 2024 update, it is bringing exciting features focused on enhancing AI integration, connectivity, and visualization capabilities. This update provides users with even more powerful functionalities for extracting valuable insights from their data. The main highlights from this update are:
- Augmented Analytics and Machine Learning: This update in OAC September 2024 introduces an AI Assistant that makes data analysis easier and faster. It helps users by reducing the need to know all the details of the tool and allows them to work more freely. For example, an analyst can simply ask, “What is my revenue forecast using Seasonal ARIMA for the next 6 periods, on a line chart,” and the AI Assistant will automatically create the visualization. This saves time and lets analysts focus on insights rather than learning complex tools. Even those familiar with other platforms like Power BI or Tableau can easily switch to OAC without a steep learning curve.
- Exploring, Dashboarding, and Storytelling: This update brings several improvements to exploring, dashboarding, and storytelling as well. By removing the need for complex SQL code, it has made the dashboard creation easier with simplified tools for generating calculations and building category groups.
Filtering and formatting have also been improved with new drag-and-drop features, customizable dashboard filters (layout, color, style, font), and enhanced legend display options which make OAC dashboards clearer and more visually appealing.
Additionally, users can now add reference layers to map visualizations, integrating extra data without losing interactivity. - Data Connectivity, Modelling and Preparation: This new update has also improved data connectivity, modeling, and preparation. It introduces an Automatic Caching option that enhances the performance of workbooks by speeding up data reloads. Users can now create duration calculations easily using a calculation wizard, without needing complex SQL code. They are just required to right-click on a data column to access an intuitive configuration pane where they can easily create and save their new calculation column.
OAC has also expanded its connectivity options with a new OData V4 connector, making it easier to query external data sources and applications via REST APIs. - Administration: This update adds a new system parameter for administrators to improve workbook performance too. By disabling the “Limit Values by Filters” feature across all workbooks, it has reduced potential delays when opening or navigating different projects. Workbook authors can still manually turn this feature on (if necessary).
The OAC Advantage: What Sets It Apart

OAC can help you transform your organization’s ability to extract actionable insights from your data. By focusing your analytics efforts on this unified platform, you can:
- Connect to All of your data: Oracle Analytics Cloud allows you to connect to all your data sources. Whether it’s relational databases, multi-dimensional data, data warehouses, big data from Hadoop, ERP, or CRM systems—Oracle has you covered. There’s no need for separate tools for different types of data integration anymore. Oracle Analytics Cloud provides all the connections you need to bring together your relevant data.
- Model any scenario: Only Oracle offers Oracle Essbase, the number one multi-dimensional database used by thousands of customers (available on the Cloud). Essbase lets you quickly model different scenarios and run “what if” iterations to find the best outcomes for your business. The cloud version has many improvements that make it easier and faster to create and test new ideas. You can build cubes in minutes using data flows or directly from Excel with the new cube designer in the enhanced Smart View Excel interface.
- Keep your ability to do pixel perfect reports and printing: With OAC Enterprise Edition, you can create detailed, pixel-perfect reports and share them to various places like email, printers, fax machines, file servers, and Oracle WebCenter. “Pixel Perfect” means your reports can include things like invoices, purchase orders, marketing materials, financial statements, and shipping labels with barcodes. You can connect to different data sources, schedule reports to run just once or regularly, and even split documents into different formats to send to multiple destinations.
- Tell your best story with Natural Language Insights: Oracle Analytics Cloud offers beautiful visualizations and interactive presentations from any relevant data. This, one of the most trusted analytics platforms, combines automatic chart creation with features like one-click, drag-and-drop clustering, and outlier detection. Users can easily create interactive stories based on their analysis, using hundreds of visualizations. Plus, natural language tools help automate descriptions of these visuals and make it simple to explain the insights as well
- Leverage Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to make things better: So far, we’ve talked about how you can easily create visualizations, automatically refine and enrich your data, and use search or voice commands to ask questions and generate visuals. But what if you’re unsure about what’s in your data or where to begin? This is where machine learning can really help in solving the problem of “Blank Canvas Syndrome.” Oracle Analytics Cloud now allows you to “Explain” an attribute concerning other attributes and metrics in your dataset. This helps you gain what drives your results, understand your findings, and analyze key aspects of customer behavior. You no longer have to worry about figuring out where to start.
OAC Use Cases for Different Industries
Here are some specific use cases showcasing how different sectors benefit from OAC – Artificial Intelligence’s capabilities:
Retail: Supply Chain Optimization
The Problem:
It’s critical for retailers to maintain the inventory levels in stores and warehouses. However, they generally face difficulties in doing so because even a minor supplier disruption can lead to product shortages. This scenario usually happens during sales and promotions as most of the popular products get out of stock or overstock. Therefore, suppliers look for a solution that can ensure their products are available when customers need them.
The Solution:
Here is how OAC and AI can help provide a solution:
- Data integration: Combine data from various sources such as point of sale (POS), warehouse inventory, supplier schedules, and historical sales data.
- Forecasting model: Develop a model to predict demand based on factors like seasonality, weather, marketing campaigns, and promotions.
- Proactive alerts: Identify potential stockout risks and suggest alternative strategies to mitigate shortages.
- Custom reports: Generate tailored reports for each store, providing actionable insights on maximizing sales and minimizing shortages.
Healthcare and Pharma
The Problem:
Hospitals and healthcare providers face challenges in managing patient care, particularly in predicting hospital readmissions and identifying high-risk patients. This leads to increased costs and compromises patient outcomes.
The Solution:
Here is how OAC and AI can help provide a solution:
- Bottom of Form
- Identify Objectives: Collaborate with stakeholders to set clear goals and KPIs for reducing readmission rates and improving patient outcomes.
- Data Collection: Gather comprehensive patient data from electronic health records, claims, social determinants, and wearable devices.
- Data Preparation: Cleanse and integrate data from various sources into a unified dataset for quality analysis.
- Exploratory Data Analysis: Analyze historical patient data to identify trends and high-risk factors contributing to readmissions.
- Develop Predictive Models: Select machine learning algorithms to train predictive models that identify high-risk patients.
- Implement Predictive Analytics: Integrate the AI models with OAC and create dashboards for real-time insights on patient risk.
- Intervention Strategies: Design personalized care plans for high-risk patients and ensure proactive engagement through care teams.
- Monitor and Adjust: Continuously track the effectiveness of interventions and refine strategies based on real-world performance.
Success Story: Migration from OBIEE to Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC)
Background: The client wanted to cut costs and improve efficiency by moving its existing OBIEE on-premises reporting system to Oracle Cloud. This shift allowed them to use the modern Oracle Analytics Cloud, which offered more stable and scalable self-service data visualizations. Additionally, it was also looking to transition its on-premises Essbase to the cloud to further streamline operations.
Solution: As part of the initiative, DiLytics migrated the client’s on-premises OBIEE 12c environment to Oracle Analytics Cloud, converted existing SSIS ETL packages to Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) cloud packages, and moved their SQL Server-hosted data warehouse to Oracle Cloud. DiLytics also migrated Essbase cubes to the cloud, transferred historical data, performed incremental data loads, and successfully signed off, providing ongoing support.
Result: Key business benefits include:
- A cost-effective and scalable solution where the client only pays for what it uses.
- Minimized IT overhead, with Oracle handling all maintenance and upgrades.
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How DiLytics can help in OAC Implementation?
DiLytics is a trusted partner that offers expert guidance and support throughout the Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) implementation process. With the expertise and structured approach, it ensures a smooth transition and maximizes the platform’s capabilities. At DiLytics, we help businesses navigate the complexities of OAC implementation and achieve maximum value. Here’s how DiLytics can assist:
- System Study
We conduct an in-depth assessment to understand the organization’s analytics needs and objectives. We collaborate with key stakeholders to identify pain points, business use cases, and desired outcomes, building a customized strategy for OAC implementation.
- Solution Design and Architecture
Using insights from the assessment, we design a scalable solution architecture tailored to the organization’s goals. We define the data integration approach, modeling techniques, security framework, and system design to ensure a robust and efficient OAC deployment. - Data Preparation and Integration
We assist in preparing and integrating the data into OAC by cleansing, transforming, and creating seamless integration workflows. Our team ensures data quality and consistency through established governance processes and best practices.
- Configuration and Customization
DiLytics configures and customizes OAC to suit the client’s specific needs. This includes setting up data connections, creating data models, and designing dashboards to maximize the platform’s capabilities.
- User Training and Adoption
Our team provides comprehensive user training programs to empower business users and IT teams. This training ensures effective adoption and optimal use of OAC. - Ongoing Support and Maintenance
We also provide ongoing support, including troubleshooting, technical assistance, system updates, and user queries, ensuring the smooth and efficient operation of Oracle Analytics Cloud.
Conclusion
As Oracle continues to innovate its AI capabilities, businesses that leverage these technologies stay ahead of the competition. By partnering with DiLytics, you can ensure that your organization remains at the forefront of data analytics innovation. Our deep expertise in Oracle consulting helps businesses seamlessly implement AI-driven solutions and empowers them to transform data into actionable insights without compromising on efficiency.
Whether you’re looking to start your AI journey or expand your analytics capabilities, DiLytics can help you in every way. To know more, you can reach out to us at [email protected]