The Heat is On: Gartner's 2022 Analytics & BI Bake Off

In July 2022 it was 40 Celsius (106 Fahrenheit) for almost a week in the UK, which was unheard of until 2022. Globally, adverse weather-related events seem increasingly common, from forest fires in France, to excessive rainfall in Australia. The impact of climate change is being felt in our daily lives. As such it’s relevant that for Gartner’s 2022 Analytics & BI ‘bake-off’ it chose datasets on ecological sustainability. (Bake-offs are where vendors get to show their analytic capabilities working on the same data and format so evaluators can compare their products.)

Completing the 2022 bake-off, Oracle brought a wide range of data and analytic capabilities to bear:

• To perform an instant initial exploration of data supplied by Gartner we used the Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) ‘Explain’ augmented analytics function to generate descriptive analytics and to establish key drivers of attributes like co2 emissions in literally seconds.

• To help find further relationships between sustainability measures and a range of socio-economic factors we then used an OAC correlation matrix – a great way to sniff out data worth exploring further.

• To consider if common regional geo-political groupings are useful analytically, we used OAC’s inbuilt machine learning (ML) capabilities to run a clustering algorithm. Interestingly this clustered China with Northern Europe and Australia, based on socio-economic indicators like size of family and literacy level.

• As well as using a range of OAC’s in-built data visualizations to help see patterns, groups and outliers clearly, we used a custom viz – an animated racing bar which you often see in the media and on sites like Statista – to make changes in the data come alive for information consumers.

• To show how analysis of geographic emissions can be shared in Oracle Analytics, as well as OAC’s own native mobile app, we built (or composed) a dedicated, GPS location-driven mobile app using Oracle Visual Builder’s low code toolset. The app can be downloaded to any mobile phone via a QR code.

• Lastly, and coolest of all, is the part of the bake-off demo where we show how OAC integrates with OCI AI Vision Service to analyze how Oracle’s HQ parking lot is used. This shows how Oracle’s data and analytics cloud ecosystem ranges from data management and integration in Autonomous Data Warehouse, through AI Services,  right through to auto-generated podcasts in Oracle Day-by-Day.

It must be said that novel discoveries were hard to come by in the data – pretty much everybody already knows that humans are still burning too much fossil fuel, and that at the planetary scale we need to do much better. There are bright spots though – the cluster of countries in the high-income group managed to reduce co2 emissions while increasing GDP growth from 2005 to 2015 (sadly though this is not the case for most groupings and it was pre-COVID). Interestingly, the data also shows that countries with a higher proportion of women in government may tend to emit less co2 per capita, and that some African countries put the G20 countries in the shade with their energy mix and use of renewables. (All of this is shown in the video.)

Finally, Oracle’s short video for the bake-off begins with a simple data story (using isotype visual forms) showing the benefits of Oracle’s own recycling program. For Oracle being sustainable and taking care of the environment is a key commitment, in fact Oracle earned a gold medal in the 2022 EcoVadis CSR Assessment putting it in the top 5% of responding companies for supplier sustainability.

Click here to see the Oracle Analytics 2022 Gartner ABI Bake-off Video. We hope you find it interesting – it’s an important topic for sure.