December 21st, 2020
Modernizing OBIEE With Power BI: Here’s All You Need to Know
OBIEE is a traditional BI platform. Many organizations are using OBIEE for their BI and Analytics needs for over a decade.
However, with the introduction of modern BI platforms such as Power BI in recent years, organizations have started sensing a major setback in OBIEE – Self-service data visualization.
The crossroads
Organizations using OBIEE and looking to replace it with Power BI are in crossroads due to conflict in the interests of the different stakeholders (especially IT teams and business users) involved.
IT Teams’ reluctance to retire OBIEE
The IT teams have built a single source of truth in OBIEE. OBIEE consists of connectivity to many data sources, complex schemas, joins, and aggregations in the RPD.
The redevelopment of connectivity to data sources from the scratch in Power BI, along with the recreation of joins and aggregations, and replication of the OBIEE security framework requires a massive budget and years of turnaround time.
Hence, the IT teams are reluctant to retire a great organizational asset (Single source of truth in OBIEE) they’ve created with years of efforts.
Business users demanding to switch to Power BI
The business users are interested in visualizing the data to uncover insights and make decisions fast in self-service mode.
Since OBIEE doesn’t meet the business users’ expectations in the data visualization and self-service aspects, they tend to demand the replacement of OBIEE with Power BI.
The conflicting interests of the IT Teams and Business Users force organizations to navigate the crossroads by choosing one of the following options:
- Retaining OBIEE and ignoring its limitations
- Replacing OBIEE with Power BI through migration
- Exporting/Importing data manually from OBIEE to Power BI via Excel
- Connecting Power BI to OBIEE (and complement the self-service data viz. limitations in OBIEE)
Out of these 4 options, the first option to simply retain OBIEE and ignore its limitations is already ruled out because the organization cannot compromise on the business users’ needs for self-service data visualization.
Though the IT teams have created a single source of truth in OBIEE, the analysis and decision-making aspect still relies highly on the data visualization part.
Choosing the right path
It is challenging to choose the right path for your organization when navigating the crossroads.
You can choose between the migration and integration options depending on your organization’s specific needs and resource availability.
To help you make a well-informed decision in choosing the right path, we have created the eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Modernize OBIEE with Power BI covering all the available options, along with each of their pros and cons, and cost-benefit analysis.
