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Business intelligenceAccelerating business intelligence with Dell ServicesDell Services uses a holistic, collaborative approach to businessintelligence (BI) analytics that incorporates information frommultiple sources to give management comprehensive reportingon financial and operational performance. The Dell Servicesapproach is integrated across the enterprise to deliver broadbasedinsight into overall enterprise efficiency, with deep-diveanalytics that enhance perspective and decision making.The Dell Optimized Business Intelligence Analyticsprogram integrates key financial and operationalinformational analytics throughout the organization—with afocus on using best practices to standardize processes anddrive profitability. The program is an accelerated enterprise BIprocess that blends technology and business processes usingthe Oracle BI framework as an accelerator to help consolidateand deliver financial, human capital, supply chain, and otheroperational performance measures. The program is designedto take full advantage of Oracle BI Applications to extract andconsolidate data from enterprise resource planning (ERP)systems in a single process framework, enabling enterprisewideorganizational intelligence.Using Dell servers and storage along with Oracle BItools—and drawing on prebuilt configurations and solutions,including installing the Informatica PowerCenter data load tool,Oracle BI Server, and Oracle analytics applications, offeredthrough the partnership of Dell and Oracle—Dell Services canhelp organizations quickly build solutions and configurationscustomized to meet their needs and enable them to transforminformation into actionable knowledge.extract data from Oracle and non-Oracle sources;and a best-practice library of dashboards andreports. They also include guided analytics thatwalk users through analyses using straightforward,natural questions. These BI applications helporganizations shorten time to value whileextending BI throughout the organization, using asingle common foundation. Organizations can alsotake advantage of Dell Services to help optimizedeployments of the Oracle platform and OracleBI Applications in their own environments (seethe “Accelerating business intelligence with DellServices” sidebar in this article).Simplified integrationTo be effective, a BI platform naturally needs tointegrate easily with other systems. To that end,the Oracle BI platform helps reduce the integrationburden on IT groups in several ways. For example,Oracle BI tools are pre-integrated with one anotherand with Oracle transactional applications such asOracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft ® Enterprise,JD Edwards ® EnterpriseOne, Siebel CRM, andOracle CRM On Demand software.As an open platform, Oracle BI also uses a“hot-pluggable” strategy to help integrate withnon-Oracle technologies and applications. TheOracle platform is designed to easily integratewith existing IT infrastructures and data sources,including ETL tools, application servers, securityinfrastructures, and other front-end and analyticaltools. The Oracle BI platform can access datafrom multiple heterogeneous sources—includingrelational databases such as Oracle Database,Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Teradatasoftware; multidimensional sources such asOracle Essbase, SAP ® NetWeaver ® BI, andMicrosoft Analysis Services software; flat files;XML data; and unstructured data. It also integrateswith standard portals, Web services, andauthentication technologies.End users are, of course, a key part ofpervasive BI, so this focus on integration alsoextends to the desktop. An Oracle BI plug-in canintegrate BI information from Oracle BI Server andOracle reporting tools into the Microsoft Officeenvironment, enabling users to embed up-to-theminutedata in Microsoft Office Word, Excel ® , andPowerPoint ® documents.Business intelligence acrossthe organizationThe Oracle approach adds up to having oneplatform and one information model supportingmultiple delivery channels, helping to enhancedecision making and increase agility throughout108 2010 Issue 02 | dell.com/powersolutionsReprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 2. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.