What Financial Reporting options are available as Oracle Reports becomes end-of-life?

Oracle Reports is one of the most popular reporting tools in Financial Services but the product is being discontinued in 2021 and extended only via extra paid support until 2023.  It’s therefore more important than ever to consider your reporting strategy!

Most versions of Oracle Reports have now officially become unsupported. That’s why, as data becomes increasingly important to an organization’s bottom line and drives new opportunities, businesses need the ability to instantly access and distribute information to all areas inside and outside of the organization in a scalable, secure way.

Any organization that is using Oracle Reports should already be planning to migrate all reports into a new technology solution.

What are the risks of running unsupported Oracle Reports?

While it may be cost effective in the short term, running on unsupported Oracle Reports carries many risks. Oracle Reports cannot compete with modern reporting tools, so relying on Reports already puts your organization at a disadvantage.

Eventually, your hardware will need to be replaced and your operating systems will need to be updated. If a problem arises, it could affect all levels of your organization who depend on crucial reports. You would then face a choice with no good options. Either upgrade your systems to keep them patched and secure, which may be incompatible with Oracle Reports, or hang onto the legacy environments that are needed for Oracle Reports that your enterprise is reliant on.

What are the alternative options for Oracle Reports?

Since Reports will not be part of future Oracle Forms releases, what’s next for enterprises who rely on it?

There are a few options. Enterprises can remain on unsupported versions of Oracle Reports and find themselves falling farther behind. They can migrate to new reporting technology and maintain the exact same legacy system and inefficiencies. Or they can modernize their applications and reporting strategies from the ground up.

In our downloadable Whitepaper, we explore in more depth the end-of-life of Oracle Reports, and analyze its alternatives; looking at the advantages, disadvantages and complexity of migration of the following options:

  • Oracle BI Publisher

Oracle’s official successor and recommendation for reporting is Oracle BI Publisher. If asked, then Oracle would say there is only one real Oracle Reports alternative: Oracle BI Publisher. But BI Publisher (in the past XMLPublisher) is not a one-to-one replacement for Reports; it is rather another option for reporting that is quite different from Reports.

  • Jasper Reports

JasperReports is open source – well at least to a certain degree! JasperReports is developed and maintained by Jaspersoft. You can create your JasperReports using the main library and distribute them as long as you don’t change the source code. If you need further support from JasperSoft or different licensing, then you are forced to buy additional products.

For more information on the alternative options to Oracle Reports, please

Download our Whitepaper

How can intive help?

It’s not uncommon for organisations that we work with to have dozens of reports that need to be transitioned into an alternative solution. Being proactive about the process will help you plan and execute the migration successfully before the end-of-life deadline is reached.

Achieving the goal of migrating from Oracle Reports to an alternative technology solution is not always a straightforward task. We will work with you to analyse your reports requirements and gather information regarding:

  • Current architecture, licenses and number of reports to be migrated.

  • Migration plan, possible vendor and technology solutions, possibility of reuse of existing licenses and support with instruction for your internal development team to maintain the new approach.

  • Guided by business requirements we will recommend new reporting solutions that will suit your business expectation to cover scope, cost and time.

After selecting the new reporting technology we will begin the migration of reports without impact to the existing and working approach. When complete, the old approach will be disabled and reports archived.

For more information on how intive can help with your reporting strategy and migration from Oracle Reports, please reach out to us to discuss.


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