Oracle unleashed a bevy of new enhancements to its Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) that revamp the cloud analytics service and democratize access to data analytics.

OAC is a cloud-based service that features Oracle’s unified business intelligence (BI) portfolio and hosts traditional BI reporting tools, self-service BI capabilities, data visualization tools, and augmented intelligence capabilities. This also includes Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) and Oracle Analytics for Fusion Applications (OAX) to accommodate on-premises and application-based platforms.

At the core of the OAC refresh is a new user interface called Redwood, which will eventually be deployed across the entire Oracle applications portfolio, the vendor said. Within OAC, Redwood will connect business users, business analysts, data scientists, and data engineers to the same data set to prepare, model, explore, share, and consume insights across the analytics lifecycle. The goal is to make it possible for users, regardless of their experience, to collaborate on tasks in the most natural way possible. 

Other OAC enhancements include data preparation, predictive modeling and visualizations to automated data pipelines, natural language queries and narratives, and a new mobile app.

Joey Fitts, VP for product strategy and analytics at Oracle, said the updates are targeted at providing organizations more data value and business insights beyond simply putting it in a report or on a dashboard.

T.K. Anand, SVP for Oracle Analytics, wrote in a blog post that a new Explainable Machine Learning (ML) tool allows users to view a visual explanation of how ML models render outcomes to provide insight into influencing factors. For example, it can detail all the factors that influenced the denial of a bank loan application, which were the most determinant, and why.

Smart Data Preparation is a data profiling engine that scans source data for quality problems and misuse of sensitive data and offers recommendations for how to fix problems, including suggestions for how to improve the data.

The new mobile application makes collaboration across Oracle Analytics Cloud more accessible to members of a distributed team. Oracle Analytics Mobile App features a “podcast” capability that uses a natural language processing engine to generate audio narratives in 28 different languages to explain the happening of various sets from reports, dashboards, and visualizations.

Oracle also has included new AI and ML capabilities for built-in text analytics to extract information from sentiment analysis. This enables users to extract words, count them, visualize the results, and integrate that analysis with their original data. The vendor said capabilities to extract words from other forms of unstructured data, such as documents, will be included in later updates.

The new OAC features can be used in league with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW).

OAC joins Oracle’s growing cloud push to retrofit its image in the cloud infrastructure market to remain competitive against the likes of the cloud’s biggest players: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).  

The OAC updates come two-weeks after the vendor made its GoldenGate technology available as a fully managed data fabric platform on OCI. Oracle boldly called the move “the first cloud service to overcome the biggest obstacles IT organizations face when migrating their mission-critical databases to the cloud.” And in March, the vendor ramped up its cloud push with a new migration service for OCI called Oracle Cloud Lift Services. The free cloud migration assistance offering addresses one of the biggest pain points of cloud adoption: the costs of migration.