Oracle announces availability of BI upgrade

Oracle on Monday released its stand-alone Business Intelligence 10g product, which offers tools for queries, reporting and analysis, data integration and management, and application development.

The price tag for Oracle BI 10g is $20,000 per processor or $400 per named user, the company said.

The Redwood Shores, Calif., software company previewed the BI product at the Oracle OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco in December. At the time, Oracle said that it intended to separate and re-brand the BI tools from its application server and sell them as a separate product that supports more end-user customization.

The product release is part of Oracle's overall strategy to create new forms of revenue from the tools -- such as content management and business intelligence -- and services surrounding its flagship database products.

The BI product components include a spreadsheet add-in with direct access to Oracle OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) from within Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, BI application development and a warehouse builder featuring ETL (extract, transform and load) functions: software that can read data from its source, format it and write it to the target repository to be exploited.

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