Oracle Discoverer Migration: What are Your Options ... · PDF filesolution for transactional...

Oracle Discoverer Migration:

What are Your Options,

Challenges & Opportunities?

By: Graham Spicer

Sales Director, UK

September, 2016

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Oracle Discoverer Migration: What are Your Options, Challenges & Opportunities?

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY When Oracle announced their support plans for Discoverer in 2014 it was clear that in 2017, after 20 years, Oracle

Discoverer had come to the end of its life with the end of Extended Support in June 2017.

This paper talks about Oracle’s decision and what it means for support of their customers that choose to continue

to use Discoverer after June 2017. Whilst Discoverer customers will continue to receive sustaining support from

Oracle, what will happen when the next release of EBS or database no longer supports Discoverer? What happens

if you move from EBS to Oracle Cloud?

We look at the options available to you: Do Nothing, replace your Discoverer Workbooks, or Migrate your

Discoverer EUL and Workbooks to a new tool. We will discuss the pros and cons of each, consider what Oracle

recommends, as well as consider the challenges facing you in making your decision.

With this great challenge, there are also many opportunities to do things better, improve processes, and give

more to your users. We discuss these opportunities and provide our solution to enhance your user experience.

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INTRODUCTION At some point during June 2017, Oracle will stop extended support for Discoverer. Granted, Oracle will then

provide “Sustaining Support” to Discoverer customers, but what does that mean?

This is what Oracle says: “Sustaining Support maximizes your investment protection by providing maintenance for

as long as you use your Oracle software. Features include access to Oracle online support tools, upgrade rights,

pre-existing fixes and assistance from technical support experts.”

However, Oracle Sustaining Support does not include:

• New updates, fixes, security alerts, data-fixes, and critical patch updates

• New tax, legal, and regulatory updates

• New upgrade scripts

• Certification with new third-party products/versions

• Certification with other Oracle products

How long before you need to upgrade to a version of Oracle EBS or database that will no longer support

Discoverer?

You have made a significant investment in Discoverer over a significant number of years, so you understandably

want to protect that investment, but why wouldn’t you also consider this now as an opportunity to provide your

users with: greater functionality, access to more data (both Oracle and non-Oracle), different and easier modes of

use? These are just a few of the opportunities that you might want to consider.

So, with less than one year to go, what exactly are the options available to you, the challenges you will face and,

more importantly, the opportunities this now presents you with? Again we discuss each of the opportunities we

have identified.

Finally, we suggest how we, at Splash Business Intelligence, can help you make this decision and why SplashBI is

the perfect tool to provide you with the best, quickest and most economical solution to meet your needs of both

now and the future.

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OPTIONS So what are your options? There are basically three options: Do Nothing; Replace your Discoverer Workbooks; or

Migrate your Discoverer EUL and Workbooks. Each of these is discussed in detail in the sections that follow.

Do Nothing Stay comfortable! You could do nothing and continue to use Discoverer while relying on

Sustaining Support from Oracle after June 2017. In the short term this is certainly the least

cost and effort option, but are your users going to be happy using an out of date reporting

product? What will that do for their careers and what impact will it have on your ability to

recruit new staff? What about your IT strategy, are you allowed to continue using

“unsupported” products?

All this option really provides you with is the ability to put off making a decision now. Some of you might believe

this to be the best short term solution; other pressing needs, existing large projects, staff shortages, lack of

funding, etc may well be in your thought process. However, that need not be the case – as you will hopefully

conclude by the time you finish reading this.

Replace your Discoverer Workbooks. There are plenty of options here with a large number of Oracle partners offering solutions, as well as Oracle

themselves and other third party software vendors. Oracle is pushing OBIEE, a potentially expensive and not ideal

solution for transactional reports. Let’s look at what Oracle have to say,

Oracle’s Recommendation to Discoverer Customers is:

“Recognizing that our customers who are using Oracle Business Intelligence are looking to Oracle for specific

recommendations on their business intelligence strategy, in this section we provide specific guidance:

• Upgrade to the latest Discoverer 11g releases

• Protect the investment you have in your existing Discoverer technology by upgrading to the latest release

ensuring the best possible support. However, no new features or enhancements will be made to Discoverer

beyond 11.1.1.7.0.

“License migration to Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite: Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite

provides a broad set of features tailored to every aspect of the business analytics market place. Oracle

recommends Discoverer customers to do a license migration to Oracle BI Foundation Suite.

“Oracle E-Business Suite Customers: Oracle recommendation for Oracle EBS customers using Discoverer

prepackaged content is to replace their Discoverer implementation with the Oracle BI Applications.

“Conclusion: Oracle’s strategic direction for business intelligence and reporting is with the Oracle Business

Intelligence Foundation Suite. Oracle recommends migrating to our strategic business intelligence offering by June

2015.”

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So that was what Oracle had to say when they announced their support plans for Discoverer in 2014. Not a lot

has changed, they still recommend moving to either OBIEE or OBIA. Quite apart from cost and suitability, we also

discuss technical challenges with this option within the Challenges section.

As already mentioned there are a significant number of third parties, mostly Oracle partners, marketing and

selling products to replace Discoverer. Some of these are true transactional reporting tools, whereas others are

true Business Intelligence and Business Analytics products.

The problem with the former set of products (transactional reporting tools) is that they will only replace like with

like, some may improve your user experience but mostly they will just provide you with the same functionality

you are already using. Whilst that may met your immediate needs, what about all of the improved functionality

you could put in place now and will certainly be expected to provide your users with in the near future?

Whereas with the BI & BA products, whilst gaining some additional functionality and certainly improving the user

experience you will also lose the basic functionality of producing standard and statutory reports. You may also

find that with some of these products you will actually have to purchase 2 or 3 different tools to provide what you

need.

In addition what you are actually doing here is replacing one product with another. You are not retaining any of

your previous investment, you may even have to create new tables and views out of Oracle EBS and possibly even

have to create a datamart or data warehouse. This equates to cost, both licencing and consulting - can any of

these third party providers deliver their solution without any consulting effort – and time. How much will it cost

and how long will it take to replace your Discoverer estate?

You shouldn’t also forget security, not only for data access but also the ease with which Discoverer currently fits

with your Oracle usage.

There is obviously a third option – Excel. Currently more than 750 million people use Excel around the world and

there is no doubting that it could be seen by many as an improvement on Discoverer in many areas but security

and data integrity become a big question.

Migrate your Discoverer EUL and Workbooks Surely what’s needed is a solution that will provide a quick turnaround from start to finish, offer up the lowest risk

to your current reporting needs, providing a lower cost option and protecting your investment in Discoverer by

keeping the reports you already have.

That can only be achieved if a solution provides a true migration tool and path. You will need to migrate your

users and responsibilities, export/upload your Discoverer EULs and workbooks and migrate the EULs to an

equivalent type of business area and migrate your workbooks to reports. Ideally any such tool should also provide

an audit trail providing all the details relevant to the existing workbook and its replacement report.

Oracle offers a tool to migrate from Discoverer to OBIEE: Discoverer Metadata Conversion Assistant. The

Discoverer Metadata Conversion Assistant is an Oracle command line utility to convert a Discoverer EUL to and

OBIEE RPD. It doesn’t convert Item Classes, Folder Conditions nor Security. Furthermore, it doesn’t actually

convert workbooks, you have to do this manually by writing reports in OBIEE once the RPD has been migrated.

Oh, and you also have to find a workaround for EBS security. You have to remember whereas Discoverer was

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developed for Oracle and, in particular, EBS that wasn’t the case with OBIEE, which until 10 years ago was itself a

third party product.

If Oracle had developed a true replacement for Discoverer with a migration path, you would surely expect Oracle

to provide:

• A Product Built as a Discoverer Replacement

• A Migration Utility – Fast and Accurate

• The Ability to Merge EULs

• Maintenance of the Existing Report Infrastructure Intact

• The Ability to get EBS DFF/KFF

• A Facility to Run Reports from Excel, Mobile

• An Easy to Learn with Added Functionality and Features

• Inherent EBS Responsibility Security & User Authentication

• The Provision of Dashboards with Pre-Built Visualizations

• Report Scheduling, Distribution & Bursting

• Drilldown Capability Through Reports, Dashboards, Excel and Mobile

• Multiple Output Formats

• In-Memory Analytics & Data Mashups

• The Ability Connect to Other Data Sources, including Fusion

In terms of Discoverer workbook migration, you would expect the product to match like with like by migrating:

• EULs

• Business Areas

o Folder

o Joins

o Item Classes

• Workbooks/Sheets

o Columns

o Conditions

o Sort

o Calculations

o Page Items/Totals

o Security

However, none of this is included. All that is provided is a command line tool to convert the metadata to RPD.

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CHALLENGES So, assuming you don’t decide on option 1 (to do nothing for now), what are the challenges you will face? (Even if

you do choose to do nothing for now you will still face these challenges in the future, so as they say, forewarned is

forearmed.)

Are you able to fund and resource a project to replace or migrate Discoverer?

This will undoubtedly involve the licencing of a new, probably third party, product although you will be saving on

previous Discoverer maintenance costs. In addition to licences, as we have already discussed, many of the

products on the market will incur significant third party consulting costs.

Even if you can fund and resource a project, will existing projects take priority?

What if you could just use your existing Discoverer users to undertake the bulk of the project in a short timeframe

whilst causing minimum disruption to those same users, to IT and existing projects.

Can you find a way to retain much of your investment in Discoverer and your investment in your users?

It all comes back to that migration tool as discussed earlier.

We have thousands of workbooks that have been developed over the years, how do we manage the cost and effort

required to replace or migrate those?

Well, you could consolidate EULs and workbooks, especially if the new tool provides for scheduling, distribution

and bursting.

Can you continue to use your current EBS security and user authentication to

access data via any replacement to Discoverer therefore ensuring data

integrity?

Again, this all depends on whether you find a tool that truly migrates and has a

utility that was written as a replacement for Discoverer.

If you are thinking of moving to OBIEE, how easy to use is the Oracle Discoverer Metadata Conversion Assistant?

Will it be just as expensive and time consuming as any other third party product?

Prior to the Oracle announcement of ending Discoverer extended support would Oracle have recommended using

a third party BI tool for transactional reporting?

In order to overcome some of these challenges, early on in your thinking, there are a number of questions you

should be asking of yourself, your users and any potential supplier:

• Does the tool rebuild the reports or does it migrate them?

• Does the tool require huge service or consulting spending to “convert” the reports?

• Does the tool keep your report infrastructure in place?

• Does it convert the business areas, EULs, folders, conditions, calculations, totals, joins and hierarchies?

• Does the tool enhance your user experience? Does it provide: Mobile, Excel, Dashboards, Scheduling and

Distribution as examples?

• Does the tool require additional hardware?

• Does the tool support Cloud/Fusion connectors?

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OPPORTUNITIES If managed properly, this will provide you with an opportunity to provide additional functionality to your users

without the need for a huge budget or a time consuming project.

Think of all of this improved functionality that you could provide to your

users:

• Consolidation of Workbooks – how many workbooks do you have

that are 90% duplicates?

• Also convert FSGs with full drill-down functionality

• Provide Insight & Analytics, not just Reporting, with Dashboards

and Visualizations

• Scheduling, Distribution and Bursting functionality for reports and dashboards

• Integrate with Oracle Cloud with support for Cloud/Fusion connectors

• Access on Mobile on any device without the need for a separate product

• Excel as an optional front-end with run, edit and refresh capabilities

• Combine other Data Sources – not just EBS, not just Oracle

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How can WE help YOU? As a replacement for Discoverer, we could suggest multiple different reporting frameworks that are specific to

EBS. While many are tried and tested products that will resolve the challenges previously referenced, none would

present you with all the opportunities we have discussed.

SplashBI is an on-demand business intelligence and reporting tool that provides users with access to create,

modify, and run their own dashboards and reports. It can connect to any data source, and even offers an in

memory database reporting option. SplashBI can be accessed on any platform and device, from PC browsers to

your tablet, from your phone to Microsoft Excel… All of this on a single platform!

Around the same time as Oracle announcing the extended support end-date for Discoverer, we were already

looking at the next generation of our reporting products. Oracle’s announcement presented us with an

opportunity.

SplashBI is not only a modern BI product, but also has a built-in Discoverer migration utility. This utility seamlessly

converts Discoverer workbooks and business areas to SplashBI Domains and Reports. The utility supports all the

data sources that Discoverer workbooks are built upon, including datamarts, warehouses, online transaction

processing systems and Oracle E-Business Suite. It not only converts the workbooks, but also the fields in the

Discoverer folders that the report is based upon, thereby allowing the converted report to be modified without

the need to customize or extend the original Discoverer view. The utility directly reads the Discoverer metadata

from the EUL schema, and user can then choose the business area/workbooks to import into SplashBI.

No additional database objects or

views are created in the source

database or EUL schema during

conversion. All of the fields with

user friendly description in the underlying folders are automatically available in the report column selection with

an auto hide if the folder is not joined with main folders.

Not just a Replacement… the next generation to Discoverer SplashBI provides more than 150 visualizations for users to view their data via charts and dashboards. With the

intuitive UI, users no longer require developer experience to create meaningful dashboards. Dashboards are

created by combining multiple charts into a single view, and charts are created simply by dragging and dropping

dimensions and measures. SplashBI dashboards provide the ability to drill down into the data behind your charts,

even allowing for the underlying data to be exported into Excel.

Most BI tools are just that, graphical representations of your data. But what about the transactional data in your

system? At SplashBI, we understand the importance of reporting and have built out a comprehensive reporting

module that allows users to easily run, modify, and create their own reports. If you have data from multiple

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sources, you can combine it into a single report within SplashBI, rather than manually through Excel. Additional

features include:

• Multiple Output Formats, including PDF, HTML, Excel, and more

• Ad Hoc Functionality

• In Memory Reporting up to 4 TB

• Active Directory Support

• Scheduling

• Distributing

• Combine Data from Different Sources

(Data Mashup)

• Connectors for EBS,

• Taleo, PeopleSoft,

and more!

• 100% web based – No Software to Install on User’s Machines

• Microsoft Excel Front End

SplashBI is a truly agnostic business intelligence tool. It has connectors to Oracle Fusion products as well as many

other non-Oracle data sources, including Taleo, PeopleSoft, EBS, Access, Excel, plus more!

Most Recent Client Success One of our most recent clients is one of the largest insurance providers in the world. They purchased SplashBI and

began their project to migrate almost 2,000 Discoverer workbooks as quickly as possible without outside

consulting assistance.

They easily met their goal, converting all their Discoverer reports within 50 days. Additionally, they were able to

undertake the conversion project themselves with a 98% success rate. This saved them downtime, effort, and a

lot of money! This is the kind of successful project that SplashBI can provide to all our clients!

Summary So why do we think you should migrate your Discoverer EULs and Workbooks to SplashBI? We are 100%

confident that SplashBI will help you overcome all of the challenges discussed earlier, plus it will protect your

investment in Discoverer, in Oracle and in your users. SplashBI also provides all of the additional functionality we

have highlighted in the Opportunities section of this paper.

Apart from training and implementation, there are no hidden consulting costs. Additionally, license costs are

probably considerably lower than you would expect. In our experience, there is no other tool that can provide as

much ‘bang for your buck’. Don’t believe us? Talk to us about a free trial in your environment today and let us

prove it to you!

For more information or a personal, live demonstration of the SplashBI tool and Discoverer Migration Utility,

email [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]

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