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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs SAS Visual Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (6th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is designed for BI (Business Intelligence) Tools and holds a mindshare of 4.0%, down 5.5% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.7% mindshare, down 6.5% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Data Visualization
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user178362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 13, 2015
 

Featured Reviews

Sumeet  Zalpuri - PeerSpot reviewer
Fully integrated enterprise-level tool
The initial setup was not straightforward. Since it is a complete enterprise tool, it needs a certain level of expertise to set up the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. There are a lot of steps involved. You need to get the user accepted and you need to validate the data. So you need to understand the architecture of the application. I would rate the initial setup as moderate since it's not very easy or much difficult. For a small enterprise, the installation would take one day. You must ensure you are on a supported platform like Windows or Linux and if your database is not on the server but in a different zone of the network, you need to ensure connectivity. You must also ensure the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform supports your organization's browser. These are the major things that must be taken care of before the installation. Around 500 users are using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform in my company. We are a team of around eight technical people involved in the deployment and maintenance of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. If you run a SAP shop with ECC, the best solution is the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform because it's tightly integrated. You'll get lots of offers from SAP when it comes to licensing. So there's an advantage. But if you are not a SAP shop, the licensing becomes a hindrance. So if you have SAP as a source, then I recommend people to go with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform as it's a tool that works wonders. I have been working on POCs where we use SAP data for BI, which was a nightmare. So if you have ECC and SAP in the back end, go with the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. If you have any other tools in the back end, then try to negotiate and see the use case.
Renato Vazamin - PeerSpot reviewer
Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations
We had that solution installed previously in another solution, Selvaya, but I don't think we used it at the time. We are now using SAS Detect Investigation as a complementary solution, in which we have part of the process, use a gene, SAS collects information and identifies some business situations, and the business guys use Visual Analytics to explore the results of the process. We previously used the FICO platform, but we switched because FICO's pricing was not scalable. Bringing more data or workloads to the platform required a significant investment in order to scale. We needed to change because we have a lot of data to process every day. FICO was also a little more complicated than SAS Visual Analytics.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst."
"We find that we can scale it as needed."
"To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user."
"Way of creating reports."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all dashboards with self-service BI and are able to provide our business users with self-service BI. We are building a repository on top of our data warehouse and building all the dashboards and KPIs."
"The common metadata environment means that the entire organisation has the same definition of core measures rather than these being derived in spreadsheets or specific reports."
"The platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"Great for handling complex data models."
"I like SAS Visual Analytics for its ability to provide an initial understanding of data through exploration, even before deep analytics."
"The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed."
"The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me."
"The product is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."
"It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way."
"It's relatively simple to create basic dashboards and reports."
 

Cons

"The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use. They should improve this in the future."
"The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."
"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using."
"We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform should be made easier for the end-users and the performance could be improved."
"The calculation engine requires some improvement."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved."
"There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else."
"The product is expensive and needs the integration of more languages."
"There are certain shortcomings in the tool's support services, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The reason we haven't rolled it out across the board is due to the fact that the licensing is so expensive."
"Colours used on report objects"
"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."
"There is room for improvement in anti-money laundering prevention and operation monitoring, as well as operation monitoring surveillance."
"There is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting which can be intimidating."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are satisfied with the solution, but we are not satisfied with the licensing cost which SAP offers. They offer one lumpsum licensing which does everything. That is not the right strategy, because sometimes you don't have power users, they are only viewers, but we need to buy the full license for them. This is not something we want to continue with."
"Depending on your size, try to stick with SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge. Most people tend to overthink the licensing. Remember that one concurrent user means that one person can be performing a task at a given time. That does not mean that only one user can be on the system at a time, it means that only one person can be refreshing a report or designing a dashboard. There are tons of ways you can access your data or reports without consuming a license. I've seen cases where five concurrent licenses support thousands of users."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"It has an option of a Cloud Platform (SAP Analytics Cloud) which has a lower price than the on-premise platform, and you can buy individual licences per user.​"
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"I have always found SAP BI to be expensive. It is expensive even when you compare SAP BI Cloud with Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is probably around $9.99 per month, and the cheapest SAP BI is around $20, which is double. In terms of price, Power BI is definitely a lot better. If you have budget issues, you may want to go for Power BI."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
"Licensing is simple."
"The product is quite expensive."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"Visual Analytics is expensive for a small company like mine. You also need to deploy it on a server or cloud, so you pay for the license as well as the cost of the cloud or the server that you will deploy on."
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Comparison Review

it_user6663 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 25, 2013
SAP Business Objects vs. Microsoft BI
A quick look at the whole idea on another weblogs gives you a sense that all of them just talked about very brief things like report refresh feature in BO or cube feature in MS Analysis Service. I choose MS BI and I want to share my reasons and opinions on why I choose it and give you another quick…
 

Answers from the Community

it_user178362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 13, 2015
Jan 13, 2015
Hi, I suppose the effectiveness of the comparison also depends on the objective of it. As far as the tools the Sas VA is not in the same category as SAP/BO, which is more of a query and reporting OLap tool and although VA has some of such capabilities it has embedded additionally models with predictive intelligence. Both have space in the same organization as User profiles are different and c...
2 out of 17 answers
it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 6, 2015
Hi, SAS VA (visual analytics) is primarily a data exploration and data discovery tool. Since it is from the SAS family of products so yes it has good integration with the predictive and statistical analysis engine of SAS. In my opinion if you are a big SAP and BOBJ shop then lot of this functionality is possible using SAP Lumira (it has integration with R). Personally if your company is already invested in SAP, it does not make a lot of sense to go with another enterprise class software. Having said that if it is already decided that it needs to be bought then the key differentiator (as I know) in addition to predictive and statistical analysis is the visual analysis which is far superior than SAP and also the in-memory feature of the SAS LASR analytic server. That is probably the only difference (assuming you do not have HANA in your landscape). Hope this helps, Amit
it_user78834 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 6, 2015
in my opinion, SAS offers a much richer set of features that Business Objects offers. SAS requires advanced knowledge of SAS programming and domain of the tool, while BOBJ is more oriented to users less experts in IT. SAS allows, with its various modules, all ETL processes, advanced data analysis and reporting, while BOBJ is more oriented to reporting only, as far as I know. Elisabete
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...
What do you like most about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?
What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process.
What do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?
The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps w...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
Some capabilities are missing compared to Power BI, especially when working with spreadsheet types. Furthermore, Excel is more customizable compared to SAS Visual Analytics, which can be quite rigi...
 

Also Known As

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
SAS BI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. SAS Visual Analytics and other solutions. Updated: January 2022.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.