An Accenture Point of View. Oracle Exalytics brings speed and unparalleled flexibility to business analytics

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1 An Accenture Point of View Oracle Exalytics brings speed and unparalleled flexibility to business analytics

2 Keep your competitive edge with analytics When it comes to working smarter, organizations that want to maintain their competitive edge don t settle for merely standardizing processes and systems. High-performance organizations know how to uncover insights from mountains of disparate internal and external data sources. High-performance organizations invest in analytics. Exalytics comes to the Accenture Analytics Innovation Centers Because Accenture recognizes the value of mature analytics, we created the Accenture Analytics Innovation Centers to help clients realize how critical analytics is to their success. The Accenture Analytics Innovation Centers push the envelope on new offerings and capabilities from our alliance partners, and in this point of view we will focus on the recently released Oracle Exalytics. While the product is very new and the market has only limited knowledge, Accenture felt it was important to provide organizations that are assessing Oracle Exalytics with as much of an informed perspective as possible, while leaving room to further expand our point of view as we gain more experience with the system.

3 Mission possible: Keeping up with the demand for speed The demand for faster analytics has never been greater. An increasing number of connected devices and the growth of mobile and wired broadband makes immediate access to information more commonplace than ever. But it s hard for IT organizations to provide fast analytics. Tuning the data takes time and can be out of the analytics administrator s control. User habits are constantly changing and users need faster analytics. Accenture sees these challenges consistently across our clients and increasingly those clients want to leverage in-memory databases to improve performance. Oracle Exalytics makes it easier to provide faster analytics to more people. Consumer electronics has shown the value a systems implementer can provide when it develops the end-to-end system. Oracle Exalytics consists of Oracle hardware engineered with Oracle Business Analytics software. The hardware is an impressive array of specifications, including 40 processor cores, 1 terabyte of RAM, and Infiniband networking for 40 gigabits per second network throughput. The hardware runs optimized versions of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), Oracle Essbase, and the Oracle TimesTen in-memory database, all of which work together to provide maximum performance and significant scalability. Oracle also created features unique to Exalytics, like the Summary Advisor, which enhances Oracle BI on Exalytics. This combination of software and hardware creates a new level of flexibility to solve business needs for analytics at speed. Accenture demo takes on NYSE data Accenture acquired its own Oracle Exalytics box when the product was generally available and was one of the first systems integrators in North America to get the box running. We quickly built a demo using publicly available New York Stock Exchange data and our own generated data. Adding the Oracle TimesTen in-memory database to the Oracle BI stack through Oracle Exalytics was a valuable way to quickly navigate through 350 million stock exchange trades in aggregate form. The combination of OBIEE and Exalytics was able to quickly aggregate the data into a meaningful presentation that enabled quick analysis of a broad set of data, again at speed. Aggregate tables and Oracle BI cache are two mechanisms to provide faster analytics, but each mechanism has their own challenges and limitations. Oracle Exalytics addresses both. Summary Advisor and Oracle TimesTen do the heavy lifting In all analytics deployments, an organization must invest time to analyze, design, build, and test the right aggregate tables, because not all possible aggregates provide a performance ROI to justify the time it takes to build and maintain them. Oracle Exalytics includes the Summary Advisor, which will analyze all of the possible options and make recommendations on which aggregates to create based on the best data compression ratios and which hierarchy level combinations are most frequently queried by users. The Summary Advisor also creates the required scripts to populate the aggregate tables in Oracle TimesTen (or any database you choose) and the BI metadata code required to leverage the aggregate tables, leaving only the testing step for BI administrators to execute before moving the aggregate tables to production. Since the Summary Advisor best performs its analysis on a live production server, Accenture recommends that customers invest in at least two Oracle Exalytics machines to test the auto-generated scripts and code in a non-production environment before executing. Organizations traditionally build aggregate tables at the database level, which for many is outside the control of the team managing the BI environment. Oracle Exalytics builds aggregates in Oracle TimesTen, which Accenture recommends should be managed by the BI administrators, much like the BI server cache. This reduces the need to involve database administrators or ETL developers in the aggregate design/ build phases, which can save crucial time in the aggregate management process. It also provides more significant performance benefits over using just the BI server cache alone. The BI server cache, while useful, only captures a logical slice of the data, not entire data sets, and suffers from limitations around row level security and other dynamic user variables. Aggregates built in Oracle TimesTen are full-blown data sets, just like aggregate tables in the database, and can fully support row level security and other dynamic user variables.

4 Exhibit 1. Building a Fast System for Users Time to Deploy Test and Deploy Tune DB, Code Aggregates and Metadata, Build Agents or Seed Scripts, Tweak Configs Run Explain Plans, Analyze Report Levels/Row Compression/ Caching Options Run Performance Test on OBIEE Content Build OBIEE Content on Metadata Build OBIEE Metadata on Detail Sources Traditional *Note: You will still need to tune the database since it s not likely that the entire database will be loaded in-memory. Test and Deploy Implement Summary Advisor Generated Aggregate and RPD Code Run Summary Advisor Run Performance Test on OBIEE Content Build OBIEE Content on Metadata Build OBIEE Metadata on Detail Sources Exalytics User habits are constantly changing and users need faster analytics. Oracle Exalytics makes it easier to provide faster analytics to more people. Keep pace with changing user behavior with the Summary Advisor An analytics environment constantly evolves and user needs and behaviors change faster than IT can adapt. The performance tuning process must keep up with this rapidly changing pace, but often can t because of the sheer demands of performance tuning. Oracle Exalytics can help BI administrators adapt their performance tuning to changing user behaviors dramatically faster. Typically, you need to monitor individual aggregate tables to insure that user requests still leverage them, otherwise the processing time required to create the aggregate is wasted and users don t receive the intended performance boost. However, the Summary Advisor can execute on a regular basis and examine user behaviors across any specified time period, marrying those usage behaviors with its knowledge of the BI metadata to make the most beneficial recommendations. The time it takes to execute the Summary Advisor and test and implement the recommendations is significantly faster than the typical manual development process, which allows BI administrators to keep pace with the data users are seeing. Accenture recommends that an organization investing in Oracle Exalytics execute the Summary Advisor on a regular schedule, as often as their users need, keeping in mind the inherent agility of the Oracle Exalytics platform. Since the Summary Advisor leverages BI Usage Tracking information to recommend aggregates, organizations should run the Summary Advisor more frequently after a recent major production migration perhaps even daily and then revert to a more sustainable frequency, such as weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Only in a more stagnant and predictable environment should an organization slow down to quarterly cycles. Managing the seeding of the BI server cache on a daily basis can be a challenging exercise when user behaviors change regularly and cache-hits can be hard to obtain. BI Administrators must keep careful track of which logical requests to seed; unused cache represents wasted processing and generates administration overhead. Since Oracle Exalytics allows more robust data sets to be loaded into Oracle TimesTen, many BI administrators should revisit their cache seeding strategies. The overall time spent managing cache seeding should shift to managing aggregates in Oracle TimesTen, while the BI server cache can still be leveraged where aggregates alone can t provide enough of a performance boost and where multiple users access the same reports and dashboards throughout the day. This user-generated cache is still valuable to speed up repeated instances of the same request, and the Oracle BI server cache can be stored in-memory on Oracle Exalytics, allowing you to retrieve the BI server cache even faster.

5 Exhibit 2. Building a Fast BI System for Users Over Time Time to Deploy Opening new doors Traditional Exalytics Exalytics Over Time Oracle Exalytics not only adds value to existing OBIEE environments, but offers new customers alternative options for architecting their BI environment. The need to move and transform data for BI has been a hotly debated topic for a long time, and some customers struggle with the investment required, even with a packaged application, while other customers want access to data faster, or near-real-time. One Accenture customer used the Accenture Analytics Innovation Center to prove how the Oracle TimesTen in-memory database and Oracle software demonstrated the ability to replicate their OLTP data inmemory with minimal transformations. The in-memory database mitigated the need to transform the data for performance gains and the lack of transformations allowed the in-memory database to be loaded more frequently. Accenture believes this alternative approach can provide real value to a number of companies, especially those looking to create new business intelligence or analytical functionality. While many customers will still find the need to perform data transformations to meet complex reporting requirements, some of those same customers can begin to achieve value quickly with the combination of Oracle Exalytics and data replication. Over time they can assess where data transformations add the most value based on business requirements and build those transformations using either a packaged application or a custom approach. Delivering fast analytics is hard Oracle Exalytics makes it easier As the demands for better analytics grow in today s hyper-competitive business environment, more business people are using OBIEE, Oracle Essbase, and Oracle Hyperion Planning (which leverages Essbase). Not only does this further complicate the analytics administrator s ability to rapidly and adaptively tune performance, but servers must be robust enough to support larger scales of users. Oracle Exalytics not only provides robust hardware, but optimized versions of OBIEE and Oracle Essbase, which allow for more parallel threads, leverage more server cores simultaneously, and leverage large amounts of RAM for server caching, block access, and more. While Accenture has found the Exalytics platform delivers significant performance gains over traditional solutions, there are a number of different variables in the quantifiable results. We will share more details later this year on the quantifiable results companies should expect from the platform. Test drive your environment on Oracle Exalytics As organizations business needs dictate new demands for how we use analytics, Accenture is driving the evolution and redefining the way organizations use their data in the analytics and business intelligence space. In the Accenture Analytics Innovation Center for Oracle, we are building analytics solutions that are helping organizations maximize the power of Oracle Exalytics and OBIEE and move to a new level of high performance. The future is bright for Oracle customers looking to leverage the power and flexibility of Oracle Exalytics to provide a more robust, adaptive, and fast analytics platform. Accenture expects Oracle to build upon their initial offering to make Oracle Exalytics more capable for those who invested early and more attractive for those who waited. If you would like to test drive your BI environment to see how it runs on Oracle Exalytics, or if you are interested in learning how Oracle Business Analytics and Oracle Exalytics can mature your analytics capabilities, contact us to schedule a visit to our Accenture Analytics Innovation Center for Oracle with your Oracle or Accenture representative.

6 Contact us For more information on how to leverage Oracle Exalytics for faster analytics, contact: Brad Genson Kevin McGinley About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 249,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended August 31, Copyright 2012 Accenture All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.