Oracle BI Publisher enterprise edition compared to Cognos

[EarthDog]

We are planning for ERP consolidation (JDEdwards). Oracle offers BI publisher enterprise edition which seems to fit better for JDE operational reporting, than a separate Cognos installation.

Any thoughts / experiences on this?

[bdbits]

I've not used either recently. We had an all-day in depth demo of Oracle's BI stack a couple of years ago, but my most recent JDE experience is about six years old now. All that said...

What did you find makes it a better fit? Is it integrated into JDE, or perhaps they provide a pre-built plug-n-play solution? If this is bundled, can you use it outside of the ERP (if you care)? Can you customize what they have provided? Is it built on the JDE database (which could affect performance), or is there ETL into a warehouse?

From what I recall, the Oracle BI stack was OK but nothing that put it above the Cognos products. I seem to recall deploying changes/updates could cause user disruption, so you had to do that kind of thing after hours (might have changed). Of course, you'll want to take a look at the end-user GUI and see which might be a better user experience.

Really I think any reporting solution can be made to work. In my mind, what makes one product better than the other comes down to manageability for the IT folks, ease of use to end users, and of course cost/licensing.