17 Jun 2014 Oracle Discoverer De-Support: how do you visualise your future BI and reporting?

If you are still using Oracle Discoverer for some or all of your reporting and BI requirements, you are probably struggling to deliver on user demands for better mobile/tablet access and richer information visualisation to improve interpretation, understanding and informed decision-making. Also, it’s not new news that Oracle Discoverer is on its way out.  It ceased to be Oracle’s strategic BI toolset as long ago as 2006, when OBIEE came to the fore as Oracle’s new flagship BI platform.  Premier Support ceases in June 2014, and Oracle recommends all customers to migrate away from Discoverer by June 2015. Many customers invested considerably in Discoverer prior to the release of OBIEE, and through challenging economic times have sweated the asset rather than undertake the transition to a more state-of-the-art platform. Now that Discoverer is moving into its final stages of life, it is time to revisit the strategy for current Discoverer customers.

Why should I be migrating away from Discoverer?

From a business viewpoint, you are already well behind the curve in terms of the BI capability offered to you by Discoverer – and that could easily mean that you are falling behind your competitors who have gained the edge of working with newer, more able technology. The releases of Discoverer around 2006, including Discoverer for OLAP, were actually pretty good at the time and brought it to a comparable level with other products of the day.  But just look around at what else has changed since then in the IT world – mobile devices, social media, advanced visualisation, big data – so that today, even if Discoverer is doing what it says on the tin, it is not equipped to move forward in any way.  Many end-user capabilities that are considered “must have” today are just not possible with Discoverer; indeed, even in its heyday, whilst Discoverer was a good workhorse, it never did score particularly good ratings for usability. The last “features” release of Discoverer was 11gR1 in June 2009, and the terminal release of bug fixes and minor features was 11.1.1.7.0.  According to Oracle’s latest Statement of Direction (March 2014), there will be no further releases.  Premier Support ceases in June 2014, and Oracle recommends all customers to migrate away from Discoverer by June 2015. A common objection from some customers is that they have a large estate of Discoverer reports and it would be far too major, complex and costly a task to replace them all.  Some customers have many hundreds of Discoverer reports, so at first glance it may indeed look like a huge task and not worth the cost.

However, a closer look may reveal that:

• Actually, a large percentage of the “hundreds of reports” is redundant now – many of them are old versions or multiple temporary re-hashes of the same report.  So it may be that only tens of reports are still fit for active purpose.
• Many of the reports are being used solely as a staging post to extract data to Excel for wrestling into shape for the final output – this is clearly an inefficient, error-prone and costly (in human time) process
• There is a now cottage-industry of Excel (or other tools) producing newer report requirements that were not built into the Discoverer suite because it was not meeting the business need.  Again this could be costly, slow and error-prone.  Maybe the IT department thinks that Discoverer is still delivering what is required, but the business has moved on and may even have purchased other BI tools
• Every time the underlying systems are upgraded, the whole Discoverer suite has to be re-tested and modified – Discoverer does not have the same metadata capabilities as OBIEE.  Many customers implemented Discoverer direct against transactional systems or eBusiness Suite without a data warehouse, meaning that every change to an underlying database could mean major rewrites of the Discoverer reporting suite.  The cost of a few iterations of this could outweigh the cost of replacement.

What do the changes to available Support mean?

When Premier Support ends (June 2014), the main change is that Certification with most new third party products/versions and new Oracle products ceases.  You can choose to keep the rest of the available Support features by paying an additional fee for Extended Support (free to June 2015). If you choose not to opt for Extended Support, or in any case from June 2017, then you are on Sustaining Support.  This provides updates, fixes, security alerts, critical patch updates and upgrade tools/scripts for pre-existing issues only – not for anything new that occurs.  Also, there is no further certification against other Oracle or third-party products.  Basically you could maintain the software as-is, but if you were to change any of your source systems, database versions, etc, then you would be running the risk that if it broke, you would have no Support redress. You are maybe planning on moving forward in other areas – e.g. an R12 Upgrade to eBusiness Suite, or migrating your database to 12c.  If you have any such major changes planned, it makes even more sense to reconsider whether Discoverer remains fit for purpose or whether it is now time to look at its replacement.  If you plan to move to the Fusion edition of eBusiness Suite, BI Foundation Suite becomes a pre-requisite. Oracle specifically recommends that you should migrate by June 2015.

What should I replace it with?

Conventional wisdom, and Oracle recommendation, says:

• Migrate the licenses to Oracle BI Foundation Suite or OBIEE.  There may be a partial rebate on the costs if you have a current Support contract, but this depends on versions and needs to be checked with your Oracle Account Manager (ClearPeaks can facilitate and advise on this)
• For each Discoverer report, consider whether it is more appropriate to replace with Answers (the OBIEE analytic tool) or BI Publisher (the OBIEE tool for more structured reporting)
• If you are an eBusiness Suite customer with packaged Discoverer content, replace with Oracle BI Applications

However, there are further considerations in making your decisions:

• If you run direct against source databases – e.g. eBusiness Suite – would you benefit from changing to a datamart/warehouse approach to both future-proof your reporting and open up your data for analysis by making it available in a more digestible form for business users?
• If your Discoverer “reports” are in reality being used for data extraction to another BI toolset, should you replace this manually intensive process with a proper ETL tool such as Oracle Data Integrator?
• If your user base is small, could you migrate to the less costly BI Standard Edition One? (there are restrictions on this product so you would need advice)
• If the business users have already moved on and adopted – in part – an alternative BI tool, does it make sense to enhance it to an Enterprise approach and incorporate the Discoverer content into the chosen BI toolset?
• Would the use of a discovery-based BI tool fit your requirements better, or complement your more structured reporting?

ClearPeaks specialises not only in OBIEE/Foundation Suite, Oracle BI Applications and Endeca, but also in leading third-party BI products, so we are well-placed to provide advice on your best approach.

How should I go about it?

It makes sense to consult the expertise of a specialist BI implementer since, having waited this long before migrating, you will want to get it right!

ClearPeaks can help you to review your current estate of Discoverer reports with a thorough Health-Check and analysis of usage, together with capturing some of today’s aspirational requirements of the business rather than necessarily just doing a like-for-like replacement.  We can assist with licensing considerations, reviewing alternative replacement strategies, and making sure that you get the best fit at the most acceptable cost, with a solution that will hopefully live for as long as your Discoverer solution did! We can help you to plan the migration, train appropriate IT staff / power users in the new technologies, run and test the migration scripts if appropriate (although in many cases it is more effective to use the old report as a design template and rebuild from scratch), and generally assist you through the implementation.  Or if you prefer –and are all busy with the day-job – we can take the problem away and build your new solution on one of our servers then commission it when ready to switch over.

Just give us a call and we will be delighted to help assess what is right for you!