Oracle Corp. has tweaked its data discovery solution with new self-service capabilities.
The company said Thursday that version 3.1 of Endeca Information Discovery offers business users additional self-service data mashup and discovery capabilities, extended support for unstructured analytics and tighter integration with Oracle Business Intelligence software.
“For business users, data-driven insights are the holy grail of competitive intelligence — difficult or impossible to glean without significant effort, and are often gained through unsecured, vigilante channels,” Keith Johnson, Oracle’s group vice president of software development, said in a statement. “The latest release of Oracle Endeca solves this challenge, allowing business users to securely benefit from simple and powerful data discovery at the speed of business, enabling them to make data-driven decisions with absolute confidence.”
The new functions include
— Self-service data mashups, allowing business users to combine information from multiple sources and conduct analysis on the complete set. Data sources available go beyond Microsoft Excel to include Oracle BI, a wide range of databases and as semi-structured data in JSON format.
Oracle said the process of creating discovery dashboards has been made even easier by through a drag-and drop layout and wizard-based configuration. Business users can now build new discovery applications in minutes without depending on IT organizations, the company says.
— Endeca’s differentiation in processing and analyzing unstructured information and correlating it with structured data has been improved, allowing users to perform their own textual mining to identify hidden concepts from unstructured sources without support from IT;
–Enhanced Integration with Oracle BI warehouses;
— Self-service data discovery that can be part of a broader business analytics strategy that preserves the value of existing investments in data quality, governance, and security.
Oracle [Nasdaq: ORCL] also said now also provides data access to website content through the Endeca Web Acquisition Toolkit. It has an agile, graphical interface for developers rapidly to access and integrate any information exposed through a web front-end. Oracle said organizations can now cost-effectively include content from consumer sites, industry forums, government or supplier portals, cloud applications, and a myriad other web sources as part of their overall strategy for data discovery and unstructured analytics.