What is the relationship between Oracle's SOA tools and products like Hyperion business intelligence BI?
Duncan Mills: We look at Hyperion and really any BI system as something you want to use to bring intelligence into your business processes that you're using to orchestrate the flow throughout the SOA suite. You also want to see what's happening in your processes and in your BI so you can see where bottlenecks are, so you can optimize your processes. We do a pretty good job of being able to incorporate data from almost any data port into our SOA foundation, so you can use that information as you are reaching decision points in the process. Every process branches somewhere, so the question is how do I know whether to go right or left. Often times, that's a business decision based on information stored in your BI repository.
The other piece of that which we often see is our business activity monitoring piece, which is using a real-time management framework to put a dashboard on top of your business processes. Often times, you want to compare that real-time information with the stored information. So you might say: "It looks like orders are down this morning. Let's look at the same period last month and find out if we were down at that time. Maybe it was just one of those seasonal shifts." You avoid raising red flags unnecessarily by comparing what's happening in real-time with what's stored in BI.
