OTBI and Fusion Analytics complement each other to provide analytics for all your needs

Is Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) being replaced by Oracle Fusion Analytics Warehouse (FAW)? We're asked this question frequently. So, let's get right to it: the short answer is a resounding no. Let's explore why this answer is important, how the two offerings relate to each other, and why OTBI still very much matters in the era of FAW.

This is a common question, and understandable - newly developed software often replaces long-standing solutions. Often, but not always. In this case, OTBI and FAW were born of a shared concept: analytics on the data in Oracle Fusion Applications. They're in no way competing products, redundant products, or even different flavors of the same product line. They're two wholly separate products that come together to complete a powerful analytics solution. They each solve different problems and address the needs of different users in the same space. FAW has been designed from the ground up to work with and complement OTBI and to further extend OTBI to address other enterprise requirements.

So, how do they differ?

OTBI provides real-time analytics reporting for vertical pillars such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), human capital management (HCM), and advertising and customer experience (CX). OTBI is embedded natively into Oracle Cloud Applications (you don't install it separately), and it inherits security settings already configured in your Oracle Cloud Applications environment. This makes OTBI available to provide real-time reporting from day one. 

Anything you enter through a transactional application is available to you immediately. Organizing data into logical groupings of tables related to a particular subject or application context, or  "subject areas," OTBI is designed to answer the day-to-day questions about how best to run your business, making it the first choice of managers and directors. It doesn't have the self-service capabilities of FAW, and its scope is purposely limited to the data already in your Oracle Cloud Applications environment. You don't use OTBI to join data from external databases to answer hypothetical questions. Because OTBI is focused on operational reporting, it helps you analyze your data in real-time to make better decisions each day.

FAW, in contrast, is a turnkey offering designed to provide a broad overview of vast stores of data from throughout your organization and to provide executives with deep historical trend analysis. It also has the ability to analyze data from any data source with available connectors, or the data that's made available to it. FAW comes with more than 50 prebuilt libraries and 8 dashboards for exploring key performance indicators (KPIs) and presenting them in visual ways that help you compare, contrast, scrutinize, and yes, hypothesize. Together, OTBI and FAW combine to deliver a powerful solution for extracting the best value from your data.

What is their practical usage?

One of the ways to best illustrate the complementary features of OTBI and FAW is quite simple: you can easily access OTBI functionality from within FAW and, moreover, you can take advantage of the extensibility native to FAW, creating new KPIs, cards, and decks in FAW based on data pulled from OTBI, and performing advanced data analytics on them. Likewise, from your OTBI interface, you can access FAW and Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) functionality with merely a few mouse clicks. The interoperability of these offerings makes it easier to view your data in reports, dashboards, cards, and decks, providing great convenience and powerful trend analysis. But the differing perspectives provided by each offering is indicative of their purposeful design aimed at meeting the needs of specific users.

C-level executives can take a comprehensive view of the corporation and quickly drill down to address specific trends, see historical context, and review forecasting. HR leaders can analyze top talent retention statistics and identify downward trends in worker satisfaction before they become a serious problem. Sales leaders can assess the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns to guide future strategies. ERP managers can track the impact of newly added systems on the company's bottom line. And all of the aforementioned capabilities are provided on an easily comprehensible visual dashboard at the touch of a button.

So, the next time someone asks you whether FAW is just the new version of OTBI, feel free to enlighten them. Both OTBI and FAW will continue working together to make a dynamic team. They're each designed for different types of users and have a different scope and role in your organization. Use OTBI to generate daily real-time reports on your business transactions and statements. Use FAW to delve deeper into that data to identify the next steps that you should take. 

To learn more about Fusion Analytics Warehouse, visit

https://www.oracle.com/business-analytics/fusion-erp-analytics/

https://www.oracle.com/business-analytics/fusion-hcm-analytics/