Oracle has released what looks to be a really great app for the iPhone.
From the iTunes App Store:
Oracle Business Indicators is a business intelligence application that provides real-time, secure access to business performance information on the mobile device.
- Requires the licensing of Oracle Business intelligence Suite, … [and a bunch of other Oracle products] … so that users can view and interact with pre-defined and customized financial, human resources, supply chain and customer relationship management analytics and business intelligence alerts.
Now, the down side is that while the iPhone app is free, all those Oracle products add up to lots of money (likely over six figures worth of money). Also, in my experience with BI applications, they require a fair amount of customization to be really useful. I hope (but don’t know for sure) that the iPhone app pulls from reports (and thus customizations) that have already been developed on the customer’s server.
Still, Oracle has released a really great app at least from a marketing and sales standpoint. I am sure quite a few “decision makers” will be ooh-ing and ahh-ing over this one during presentations. Kudos to Oracle. They were first to the punch since I didn’t see any SAP, Lawson, or Business Objects applications listed on the app store. (Speaking of which, Crystal Reports for the iPhone would be cool. Especially with an SDK.)
I am certain Oracle will not be the only BI player on the iPhone for long. I know I am planning to develop BI tools for the iPhone. It is my hope that the iPhone SDK’s method for handling notifications will make it easy for me to send some really great notification from statzen (i.e. you are getting Stumbled or tons of traffic from some big blog, etc).
I am also sure that I am one of many people that will be developing custom private BI apps for the iPhone. I currently have a OS X Dashboard widget for viewing Key Indicators from my retail stores. That will be the first iPhone app I develop. Since that stuff is using Google Apps as a back-end it will also be interesting to see how well I can manage sending alerts based on Google Docs (i.e. watch a Google spreadsheet with a Google AppEngine app and send alerts when a condition is met).
Either way the shear popularity of the iPhone makes it a prime development opportunity for developers. I am expecting that mobile BI will really take off as a result of the iPhone 2.0 SDK.
