When I discuss data warehousing and “Big data reporting” I always find that there is a substantial “Do-it-yourself” user community. There are tons of people out there running Linux and a self built MySQL data warehouse. A lot of these “do-it-yourselfers” are engineers, scientists, scholars and computer geeks with a lot of data to analyze. I tend to find that these people love graphs, charts and data intelligence. Frankly many of them would, and do, build their own graphing engines for their needs. But many would be more than happy to use a pre-packaged tool. Given their “DIY” nature it is unlikely that these users would go to the cloud (most times the data warehouse is on their own machine). But at the same time they’re not going to buy an enterprise reporting suite due to the high costs. As such many of these opportunities just slip away to smaller vendors or self-coding. But Oracle has a very unique position where they could easily tap into these kinds of opportunities.
With Oracle’s acquisition of Sun they have a wealth of “DIY” type tools. Good Virtual Machine managers, good OS, MySQL and Java. These users already have a data warehouse, they just need a good, easy way to get at it. Oracle’s OBIEE RPD is an elegant, easy tool to use and, in my opinion, it’s the easiest meta-layer configuration tool I’ve seen. Oracle could offer up a very basic scaled back version of the RPD with a basic OBIEE server and tap into this market.
Certainly, Oracle will not get incredibly rich by doing this (if it could it would be doing so already). However, with something like this they could build product momentum and a bigger base. Fact is a lot of these kinds of users end up going to work companies and organizations that would be within Oracle’s “sweet spot”. There is a need out there and with some adaptation Oracle is well poised to meet it.
