Migrating from Oracle Discoverer to OAC? Know Your Options

Discoverer is a popular ad-hoc operational reporting and analytics tool used by both Oracle ERP and non-ERP customers. However, it reached its end of life (i.e Oracle stopped offering support for Discoverer) a few years back. 

In spite of that, some organizations have stuck with Discoverer for ad-hoc reporting and basic analysis. End of life means that: 

• There will be no product upgrades, security patches, data management improvements, etc.
• Not getting security certification with new third-party products/versions or other Oracle products
• Issues with Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and Windows (IE) upgrades.

Also, today, self-service has become important for faster decision-making without help from IT teams. Additionally, today, business users are looking for a modern reporting and analytics solution that can offer the following features and capabilities: 

1. Intuitive dashboards 
2. Fast, flexible, and easy self-service reporting and analytics
3. Operational reporting capabilities to analyze vast amounts of data that is residing in your ERP/Non-ERP Applications 
4. Ease of data analysis, possibly in a tabular format with Excel plugins
5. Automatically publish periodic reports 
6. Generate pixel-perfect business documents and financial reports to be shared with others 
7. Integrate data from multiple sources or data stores 

Is Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) an option? 

Oracle Analytics Cloud is the latest Oracle native, cloud-based BI, and Analytics platform and it is certainly one option when you’re looking to migrate from Discoverer. 

Some of the benefits of migrating to Oracle Analytics Cloud is that it enables:

• Access and transform data from multiple sources to create a single source of truth 
• Access from anywhere, anytime without compromising on security
• Self-service data visualization

A flexible and scalable solution, it can be set up easily and provides automated lifecycle management capabilities.

However, it is not without its limitations. Some of these include:

• There is no easy way to migrate your existing Discoverer reports. Reports cannot be migrated automatically.
• Very expensive and time-consuming to migrate all the existing discoverer reports
• High dependency on IT for Semantic layer development and maintenance.

Orbit Reporting and Analytics is an On-Premise/Cloud-based reporting and analytics tool that is a natural alternative to Discoverer. Orbit comes with a Discoverer migration assistant that converts all the Discoverer reports, ensuring quick time to value.

Orbit’s key features include:

• • Providing a Single Source of Truth – with live data: Like in the case of OAC, the Orbit solution can gather data from multiple sources, both on the cloud and on-premises. This provides a unified view of enterprise-wide data without the need for additional integration tools, making it a cost-effective solution. 
  • Fully Integrated, Fully Secure: Orbit is an easy-to-use tool that integrates well with underlying applications, and tightly adheres with application security by natively inheriting the security rules of these underlying applications. 
  • Self-Service: Orbit empowers business users to control data and analytics without depending on the IT team for their reporting needs. Unlike in Oracle Analytics Cloud, Orbit provides intuitive visualizations, data blending, and report distribution capabilities, letting them to run reports whenever they want and create visualizations that best suit their needs. They do not have to depend on the IT team for their reporting needs.
  • Scaling with Ease: The Orbit Reporting + Analytics does not set limits to the volume of data that can run concurrent queries. In OAC, there are storage caps as well as a limit to the volume of data you can query. In OAC, access to your own data is “throttled” by Oracle.. . With Orbit there are no such restrictions or bottlenecks so you can expand your usage to unlimited data sources, unrestricted volumes of data, and to an unlimited number of users, with complete peace of mind.
  • Pre-Built Reports: Orbit provides 1,000+ ready-to-use, pre-built reports to jumpstart business reporting. These pre-built reports are designed for generating reports for financials, supply chain, and human capital management (HCM). These pre-built Orbit Reports are fully customizable and have been created with the business user in mind.
  • Cloud-Agnostic: Orbit is compatible with any cloud server and lets you use your existing cloud investment, be it the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or any other 3rd party hosting provider. Orbit can be hosted on private, public or hybrid cloud options.
  • Cost-Effective: Orbit is a feature-rich, cost-effective solution. All the functionalities needed for reporting, analytics, and business intelligence are available with one license. 
  • Excel Integration: This is a unique feature of the Orbit Reporting and Analytics tool. Business users can pull data into Excel in real-time to use their formulas and run the reports they want.

• Drill-Down to Subledger Level: Get a granular view of your ledgers for deeper insights and better decisions.

What’s more, Orbit also comes with Managed Migration where the Orbit team will support the migration of Discoverer reports to Orbit, freeing up the IT team to focus on their core activities. It allows for Ad-hoc reporting to improve operational efficiency.

If you would like to know more about Orbit as a destination for migrating from Oracle Discoverer, Contact Us now.