Fivetran announced the Open Data Infrastructure (ODI) Data Access Benchmark, an industry benchmark that evaluates how enterprise software vendors enable or restrict access to customer data. The benchmark brings new transparency to the technical and commercial barriers shaping how organizations use data for analytics, operations, and AI.
Quick Intel
ODI Data Access Benchmark evaluates vendors across Coverage, Performance, and Egress Charges.
Incomplete APIs, throttling, and egress fees restrict data access for AI at scale.
Benchmark provides standardized framework for evaluating data access across enterprise platforms.
Ratings based on publicly documented capabilities with consistent methodology.
No vendor can pay for or influence their score.
Fivetran plans to expand benchmark to include additional vendors over time.
As organizations move AI into production, many are discovering a critical bottleneck: their own software vendors restrict access to the data needed to power AI workloads. Incomplete APIs limit access to core data objects, throughput restrictions slow replication at scale, and pricing models such as egress fees increase the cost of moving data. These constraints don't just create friction, they actively limit how quickly and effectively organizations can deploy analytics and AI in production.
The ODI Data Access Benchmark evaluates vendors across three dimensions based on publicly documented capabilities:
Coverage: Whether core data objects are programmatically accessible.
Performance: Whether vendors support high-throughput replication, including change data capture (CDC).
Egress Charges: Whether data can be replicated without additional fees or restrictive terms.
Together, these factors determine whether data can be reliably used for analytics, operations, and AI applications. The ODI Data Access Benchmark establishes a standard for evaluating how enterprise vendors enable or restrict access to customer data, bringing greater transparency to how data access is structured across the industry. It helps organizations assess whether their data infrastructure can support AI at scale.
The ODI Scorecard is published by Fivetran, a data movement platform that integrates with many of the vendors evaluated. As a platform operating across hundreds of enterprise applications, Fivetran has direct visibility into how differences in data access models impact customers in practice. Ratings are determined by Fivetran using publicly available documentation and reflect generally available capabilities only. No vendor has paid for or influenced their score, and the evaluation framework is applied consistently across all vendors, including those Fivetran integrates with commercially. Ratings are reviewed and updated on a rolling basis as new information becomes available.
Conclusion
As George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran, stated: "What we're seeing is a shift where access to data is becoming more restricted, both technically and commercially. Oftentimes, those constraints show up as hidden costs or dependencies that push companies toward specific walled-garden ecosystems. As AI becomes more central to how companies operate, organizations need an open data infrastructure that gives them the flexibility to access, move, and use their data without lock-in."
Fivetran is calling on software vendors to provide complete, high-performance, and cost-effective data access, and on organizations to evaluate whether their systems can meet the demands of the AI era. The company plans to expand the benchmark over time to include additional vendors and data sources.
About Fivetran
Fivetran is the data foundation for AI. The Fivetran platform moves, manages, and transforms data from every system a business runs on into a secure, reliable foundation engineered to evolve, with the flexibility to work across clouds, engines, and tools. With Fivetran, analytics, operations, and AI run on data you trust and control. Leading organizations like LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon, and OpenAI rely on Fivetran to turn data into a competitive advantage.
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