Oracle OTBI vs OBIA lets compare

what are the differences between OTBI and OBIA. I will discuss these in this article.

OTBI stands for Oracle Transactional Buisness Intelligence.

OBIA stands for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications.

Let’s start with OBIA. OBIA is the pre-packaged BI Apps that Oracle has provided for several years. It is the data warehouse based solution. It is based on the universal data warehouse design with different prebuilt adapters that can connect to various source application to bring the data into the data warehouse. It allows we to conslidate the data from various sources and bring them together. It provides a library of metrics that help we measure wer business. It also provides a set of predefined reports and dashboards. OBIA works for multiple sources, including E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JDE, SAP, and Fusion Applications.

OTBI is different. First of all, it is a real time BI. There is no data warehouse or ETL process for OTBI. Second, it is for Fusion Apps only. OTBI is leveraging the advanced technologies from both BI platform and ADF to enable the online BI queries agains the Fusion Applications database directly. In addition, in some area, such as Financial, we can also connect to the Essbase cubes. Unlike OBIA, OTBI does not have a lot of prebuilt dashboards and reports. The reason is that for some advanced analysis, the data need to be prepared. We cannot get eveything we can get from the OBIA data warehouse in OTBI.

Both OTBI and OBIA are available from the same metadata repository. Some of the repository objects are shared between OTBI and OBIA. It was designed to allow we have the following configurations:

OTBI Only
OBIA only
OTBI and OBIA coexist

If we implement oracle Fusion Apps, we can enable OTBI. We can use the BI EE Answer to access the prebuild metadata and metrics those are built against the Fusion Apps. We may not get the full powerful prebuild dashboard and repost and prebuilt navigation workflow. However, we can start experiencing what the BI EE based reports look like. We can start bring the data out from wer OLTP system. We can provide training to the users to get familiar with the subject areas, some of which are shared with OBIA.

If we enjoy OTBI and want to further get OBIA with a data warehouse based solution. We can implement OBIA later. Some of the OTBI reports maybe switched to run against OBIA. Some of OTBI reports can continue connecting to Fusion Apps directly. They can coexist in a single BI server and a single BI answer client.

OTBI which is transactional business intelligence focused more on the ability to better manage your operations – What’s Happening now!

While OBIA is more focused more making strategic decisions or providing strategic insight to the business. This is questions like what happened? What will happen? Or better, what should happen.

The target users are also different for OTBI and OBIA. Users with more operational responsibilities are envisioned as the target for OTBI while more managerial and executive users are targeted for OBIA.

In short OTBI and OBIA are complementary to each other rather than competing with each other. Still I believe there is still overlap in some areas.

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The OTBI Fusion offers pre-built analytical contents for following oracle application modules

• Oracle Financials

• Oracle Supply Chain Management

• Oracle Procurement and Spend

• Oracle Project Portfolio Management

• Oracle Human Capital Management

• Oracle Customer Relationship Management

I believe the combination of OTBI, OBIA and Advanced Analytics can answers to all business questions from operational to analytical arena.