From OBIA to Fusion Data Intelligence: Enterprise Application Analytics Reinvention

Over the years, many of us working in the Oracle analytics space have helped customers implement Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) - a powerful solution in its time, offering prebuilt analytics across ERP, HCM and more. If you ever spent hours managing DAC, tweaking ETL mappings, or retrofitting OBIA customisations after a patch - you’ll understand why Fusion Data Intelligence feels like Oracle finally got analytics right.But let’s be honest: it had its fair share of complexity, rigidity, and technical debt.
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Fast-forward to today and we’ve entered a new era with Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI) - a reimagined, cloud-native analytics platform designed from the ground up for the Fusion SaaS landscape. And if you’ve ever battled with OBIA’s extensibility, upgrade cycles or data latency, FDI is likely to feel like a breath of fresh air.

This post is the first in a short series unpacking what FDI actually is, how it compares with its predecessors, and what it means for Fusion customers today.

Oracle's recent growth

Over the past 2–3 years, Oracle has consistently grown its cloud business, with total revenue rising from $40.5 billion in FY2022 to $57.4 billion in FY2025, driven largely by strong momentum in Fusion Cloud Applications, NetSuite, and OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).

While Oracle doesn’t match the scale of hyperscalers like AWS or Microsoft Azure in infrastructure alone, its distinct advantage lies in its full-stack strategy - uniquely offering enterprise SaaS, infrastructure, and the database layer under one roof. This vertically integrated model means Oracle can optimise performance, security, and cost across its stack, especially for Fusion workloads. Competitors like SAP and Workday lead in applications but lack native cloud infrastructure; AWS and Azure dominate infrastructure but rely on third-party SaaS partners.

​Oracle, by contrast, continues to blur the lines between application and platform, using technologies like Autonomous Database, OCI Gen2, and now Fusion Data Intelligence to deliver insights that are deeply embedded, secure, and performant - all within its own ecosystem.

These figures aren’t just impressive - they’re a strong signal that Oracle’s SaaS portfolio is achieving scale and maturity, particularly in core enterprise functions like Finance, HR, and Operations. Fusion ERP alone has grown from $0.9B to $1.0B in quarterly revenue, underscoring widespread enterprise adoption.

From Adoption to Insight: The Next Frontier

​As organisations continue investing in Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, the expectation isn’t just automation - it’s intelligence. Businesses aren’t content with simply moving transactional processes to the cloud; they want to understand the return on those investments, monitor performance in real time, and use their data to make faster, smarter decisions.
This is where Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI) steps in.
Just as Oracle’s adoption of Fusion SaaS pillars is accelerating, so too is the demand for embedded, governed, cross-functional insights that empower users in the flow of work. With SaaS platforms becoming the new systems of record, the analytics layer must evolve in lockstep - and be natively integrated, secure, and scalable.
FDI is that evolution.

Why FDI Matters Now More Than Ever

• Data gravity has shifted - core operational data now lives in Fusion Cloud ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX.
• Decision-makers want answers in context - not in a separate BI tool, but embedded inside the applications they use every day.
• Cloud-native analytics isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a business requirement for agility, accountability, and optimisation.

​FDI bridges this critical gap by turning raw operational data into actionable intelligence - all while aligning with the Fusion application security model, lifecycle, and extensibility standards.

SaaS Pillar	Q4 FY2025 Revenue	YoY Growth
Fusion Cloud ERP	$1.0B	+22%
Netsuite Cloud ERP	$1.0B	+18%
Total Cloud Applications (SaaS)	$3.7B	+12%

Looking Back: OBIA Was Revolutionary — But the World Has Moved On

​When it launched, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) was genuinely ahead of its time. Prebuilt subject areas, KPI dashboards, and ETL pipelines for ERP, HCM, SCM, and CRM systems allowed organisations to fast-track enterprise reporting without starting from scratch. OBIA gave business users actionable insights over operational systems, and it helped many enterprises move beyond siloed spreadsheets into a more governed BI model.

But OBIA came with constraints that, over time, became significant limitations:

• Customisations were fragile: Even minor changes to the ETL or data model could break during upgrades, making custom development expensive and hard to maintain.
• Siloed architectures: Each functional pillar (e.g. Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JDE) had its own data model and ETL codebase, with no unified customer or product view.
• Upgrade pain: OBIA upgrades were major projects in themselves - often requiring reimplementation or heavy retrofitting for customised solutions.
• Customer-managed infrastructure: Customers had to provision, maintain, and tune on-premises environments — including DAC, Informatica, BI Server, and database platforms - with all the associated complexity and cost.
• Slow to evolve: The on-prem model struggled to keep up with rapidly changing business requirements and the rise of cloud-based enterprise applications.

The Modern Alternative: Fusion Data Intelligence

With Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI), Oracle has reimagined what enterprise application analytics should look like in the cloud era.

• Extensibility is core, not an afterthought: FDI is metadata-driven and designed to be extended - securely, scalable, and without breaking with every update.
• Unified cross-pillar model: Instead of siloed data marts, FDI provides a 360-degree customer, employee, and transaction view across Fusion ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX — built on a shared semantic model.
• Evergreen analytics: As Fusion Apps evolve, so too does FDI — delivered as a SaaS analytics layer that evolves in sync with Oracle’s application roadmap.
• Oracle-managed infrastructure: FDI is provisioned, patched, secured, and optimised by Oracle - no DAC, no Informatica, no infrastructure headaches.
• AI and machine learning embedded: Insights aren’t just historical - FDI includes predictive models, anomaly detection, and natural language queries right out of the box

From OBIA to OAX to FAW to FDI: An Analytics Evolution

FDI didn’t appear out of nowhere - it’s the result of five years of iterative development across multiple product identities. It began as Oracle Analytics for Applications (OAX), introduced around 2019 as a cloud-based successor to OBIA. OAX was designed to deliver prebuilt analytics for Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, leveraging Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Oracle Analytics Cloud. In 2020, OAX was rebranded as Fusion Analytics Warehouse (FAW), marking a shift toward a more unified, extensible platform. FAW introduced modular “pillars” aligned with business domains--ERP, HCM, SCM, and CX—each offering curated data models, semantic layers, and prebuilt KPIs. Over the next few years, Oracle expanded these pillars with hundreds of subject areas and embedded machine learning for predictive insights.

In 2024, FAW was renamed Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI). This rebranding emphasized its broader mission: not just warehousing analytics, but enabling intelligent decision-making across the enterprise. FDI retained the core architecture—Autonomous Data Warehouse, Oracle Analytics Cloud, and managed pipelines—but added enhanced extensibility, data sharing capabilities, and a more intuitive console for governance and customisation.

In short, where OBIA was revolutionary for the on-prem era, FDI is purpose-built for the cloud-native enterprise. It meets today’s expectations for agility, integration, governance, and intelligence - without the baggage of yesterday’s architecture.

Looking Ahead

​This post was just the beginning. Over the next few instalments, we’ll dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of Fusion Data Intelligence - from how it handles extensibility and embedded insights, to what it means for Fusion customers trying to move beyond dashboards and into decision intelligence.

FDI represents more than just a new analytics tool - it’s a shift in how Oracle customers can extract value from their SaaS investments. If you’ve ever found yourself battling data silos, struggling with upgrades, or explaining to stakeholders why reporting still takes days, this series is for you. Stay tuned.