December 10th, 2020
Can You Replace OBIEE with Power BI?
Organizations using OBIEE experience hiccups in self-service data visualization, and hence considering to switch to modern BI platforms like Power BI.
Most organizations using OBIEE are using the platform for almost over a decade.
During this time, the IT teams have already created a single source of truth in OBIEE by building connectivity to many data sources, complex schemas, joins, and aggregations in the RPD. On top of that, numerous reports are created for users’ analysis.
In this blog post, we’ll see the answer to the question – Is it possible to replace OBIEE with Power BI?
The OBIEE to Power BI Migration process
There are no known tools for automating the migration from OBIEE to Power BI with minimal or no human intervention. Hence, the migration process is manual, and the process involves the following 3 steps:
- Redeveloping connectivity to data sources in Power BI
- Recreating joins and aggregations
- Replicating OBIEE security framework
The best starting point for the migration project is to list down the data sources and segregate them into the following buckets based on their connectivity to Power BI:
- Power BI’s inbuilt connectors
- Off-the-shelf connectors (Power BI certified/Uncertified)
- Unique data sources that require inhouse custom connectors
You must also take the connector costs (if any) for each of the individual data sources into account.
Cost and time estimations
The ballpark figures of the cost and turnaround time required per subject area are:
Cost of migration = $250,000
Turnaround time = 6 months
So if you have 10 Subject Areas, you’ll require a budget of $2,500,000 and a turnaround time of 5 years. The migration is a high-risk project due to the cost and time it takes to materialize.
Even if your organization is ready to meet the budgetary needs, the users will still have to wait for years to experience self-service data visualization in Power BI. The long turnaround time ultimately defeats the purpose of replacing OBIEE with Power BI. Hence, migrating from OBIEE to Power BI is not the right choice.
The Alternatives for OBIEE to Power BI Migration
If you’d like to know the alternatives for the OBIEE to Power BI migration, please take a look at our eBook on – modernizing OBIEE and OAC with Power BI!.
