Basheer Khan, managing partner at systems integrator Innowave Technology LLC in Irvine, California, and an official of the Oracle Applications User Group, said most Oracle users have been forced to use disparate BI tools that were packaged with PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards or Oracle enterprise applications in the past.

The new BI suite from Oracle will provide a single option for these users, he added.

Oracle President Charles Phillips said BI will be a "fourth leg" of products for the vendor, along with its database, enterprise application and middleware product lines. The new suite will include query and analysis, enterprise reporting, dashboards, workflow, business activity monitoring, and integration with Microsoft Office and Excel. It will tie together best-of-breed products on top of a common metadata model and user interface to allow users to get more consistent reports and results from analyses of data sources across the enterprise, Oracle executives said.

Keith Gile, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said that Oracle has not had a strong BI strategy. Instead, its BI tools have been part of the database, application server or enterprise applications, he noted.

While he applauded Oracle for laying out its plans for an integrated BI suite of tools and applications, Gile said the company will still have some ground to make up in terms of competing with established vendors of best-of-breed reporting and analysis tools.