Interview: Oracle outlines BI master plan

Sigma acquisition will play critical role in Oracle's BI strategy, explains vice president of product management Paul Rodwick

IT Week: Oracle has been investing heavily in developing its own business intelligence (BI) software, so what motivated the August acquisition of the intellectual property assets of predictive analytics specialist Sigma?
Paul Rodwick: We already had an OEM relationship with Sigma and used its software in our Siebel Real Time Decisions (RTD) solution. We knew it was good technology and saw that by owning it we could broaden its use. We want to apply it to other customer channels - not just the call centre but any customer facing operation, such as the web site or automated tellers. We also want to fit Sigma's predictive analytics functionality into back office systems like ERP.

How would you define predictive analytics?
It is a set of analytics capabilities that can look at data and through imposed business rules and intelligent self learning it can work out and recommend the best course of action. It is particularly effective embedded within other applications, such as call centre systems where it can be used to inform the agent about the best cross and upsell opportunities to offer a given customer based on both historical data about the customer's preferences and the nature of the real time interaction.

How will you sell Sigma's products? We will offer the Real Time Decision server as a separate component for firms to build into their own apps, but we will also embed it into our Oracle pre-built apps.

So far the technology is most tightly associated with call centre environments, do you have examples of customers using it in other ways? GE is using the technology to decide how to dispatch tow trucks to road side breakdowns. It uses the RTD engine to decide which truck operator to call to provide which service. We see other field services companies using the technology in a similar way to allocate resources effectively. We also expect that customers will have other good ideas for how to use the technology that haven’t even been envisaged yet.

How will RTD fit into Oracle's Fusion strategy to integrate its various applications on a central SOA-based middleware platform? We expect RTD to plug in fairly easily to the Fusion Middleware platform as Fusion is built on open standards, while RTD also uses a modern open standards based architecture that makes integration relatively simple. We envision the functionality fitting into Fusion's SOA-based approach – RTD will be able to absorb information on business processes and recommend how to optimise them.

Do you have any practical examples of how this might work?
One example would be for RTD to analyse financial transactional information within an SOA and pick out anomalous data that suggests a fraud could be occurring and flag it up to the company.

Are you seeing much customer interest in analytics? We've looked at key trends in how information is being used to drive business processes and predictive analytics is a very powerful concept for customers. Leading companies want to know what is happening and what will happen in the future and they can get a much better insight into that through analytics. Once you have that insight you can also far better optimise almost all your business processes.

Are you concerned that some managers will reject automated decision making systems that would seem to undermine their role? It is natural for people to have concerns, but what RTD is actually giving you is the best of both worlds. The original business rules and processes that are applied have to be developed by the manager, but what RTD gives you is a learning engine that will help you optimise them. It helps the business become more dynamic and efficient. It can benefit everyone so there is no need to be scared of it.

About Paul Rodwick

Paul Rodwick is the vice president of product management for Oracle Business Intelligence products.

Previously, he was the vice president of marketing and product management for Siebel Business Analytics. A software industry veteran of over 20 years he has held a number of executive roles at companies including E.piphany, Red Brick Systems, Sybase New Media, Metaphor Computer Systems and Tandem Computers.