SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

We are only using the dashboards and promoting the self-service BI features. the usage is limited just to visualization. We integrated dashboards for monitoring KPIs. sending SMS' is used based on threshold in few dashboards. Otherwise, it's more used for visualization and not data mining because it requires some licenses that we didn't buy.

Currently we are working with the Web Intelligence on premise but we don't have a lot of features. We would like to get some more features related to predictive analytics. We are just using dashboards and monitoring KPIs on top of our data warehouse.

The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all repositories needed and 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.

Sometimes, when monitoring our network or monitoring the KPIs, if we have something drop lower than a threshold, an email or an SMS will go out. We are using these features, but we are not using predictive modeling, clustering, or data mining. We don't have those.

In terms of what could be improved, it would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did (I manage Oracle, as well), because I like that feature with Oracle.

I would like them to implement analytics the same as Oracle does and have the machine learning model within their Web Intelligence.

I have been using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform since 2005.

It is a very stable solution and it works well.

It doesn't work in memory, only on the server side. We are not taking this benefit, but it's very stable and it's answering the need.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's scalability is based on the need and it's not scalable based on Alfa's needs, which I believe, from a data warehouse perspective, the data is around 12 terabytes. We are not talking about petabytes.

We have 25 end users using it.

We have users from the customer experience department, the marketing department, from customer service, from finance, from budgeting, and we have the chief also working on it.

I am not so satisfied with the technical support because I am opening cases but it's taking too much time.

We previously tried to work on Power BI and on Microsoft SharePoint. But with Power BI, there are a lot of limitations. Its visualization is very good, but you have a lot of limitations, and it uses a lot of memory. It does not provide efficiency and scalability when we are talking about a high volume of data. When you are talking about simple reports, it's very good and its visualization is great, but sometimes business users are in need of answering complex questions, so here SAP was better for me.

The initial setup was not that straightforward, but we were able to manage.

We have a lot of server process and configuration, plus the agents and everything. So from an administrative perspective, it is complex, but we were able to manage because of our technical expertise.

Because we did it internally, I believe it took us two to three months.

We got the environment ready, then the repository, it was packaged by phases and by project.

We launched an RFP related to an enterprise data warehouse, then we split this RFP in phases, with data integration, data modeling and then the BI. During the BI part, we used an implementation strategy to try to implement it.

We have an on-premise license. We have one license for an admin and we have a license for our users, enough for 27 user licenses. We pay on a yearly basis. We are selling support, but as I said, we are using only the Web Intelligence and the dashboards. We didn't buy the other models or feature. We don't have the predictive analytics or the SAP HANA. We don't have any of that.

The servers and the preparation to go on the servers are costs beyond the licensing fees.

We checked Oracle. It used to be OBIEE back then, and in 2010 and 2005 it was not as good as today. Now, Oracle has worked a lot on their product, especially with Oracle Analytic Server. But back then, when we made the decision, it was Oracle OBIEE and it was very limited. It had bad dashboards, they were not appealing to the end users.

SAP is a stable solution, but you need to have multi-experts to be able to maintain it.

The biggest console that we implemented is using SAP as a self-service BI. It is an incentive for business users and different stakeholders, to be able to use the self-service BI and answer their questions instantly. This is conditioning that we as IT are using the right models, the right repository, and requiring all the data for them.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight.

The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is useful for all kinds of analytics, reporting, and alerting.

The features which the solution has been awesome. The way the data is fetched from the database, and the queries are executed, is unique using the Universe of Business Objects. That makes it unique and we could not find another solution that functions in a similar way. It's has a great way of receiving and executing queries.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution.

I have been using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for approximately 20 years.

The stability of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform depends on your infrastructure. However, the solution itself is very stable reliable.

There are other solutions that can be implemented alongside SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform to make it more scalable, but in our environment, it's not used in that way.

We have approximately 500 to 1,000 users using this solution. We are working on this self-service BI strategy and therefore the number of users will be increased in the future.

We sometimes receive technical bugs, especially with the new releases, and some patches are required. We then speak to BusinessObjects SAP support for assistance.

The initial setup of the solution is simple and the documentation provided was straightforward. It was not a difficult task.

The first time we used it when SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was when it was not an SAP solution, it was owned by Business Strategies, we brought in consultants to deploy. Later we have created our own team who can manage the implementation.

We have one person who does the administration and upgrades of the solution.

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.

We are on an annual subscription to use this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others.

We are using an on-premise version which is good but the cloud version is more up-to-date.

I rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight out of ten.

I would say universe designer as I have used or looked at other vendor tools and they don't even come close. Semantic layer is their main heart of SAP Business Objects.

Not one tool can satisfy everyone, and this tool is no different but in my opinion the ad hoc capabilities using Web intelligence over universe is very productive as users can self serve themselves

The Dashboard tool Current Xcelsius is not so user and developer friendly and is very bad compared to other vendor products. It has been wonderful but they have to integrate it with the Big Data economy system to sustain it.

This particular version six years, but I have been using Business Objects before SAP acquired for over 16 years ago.

We had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no stability issues.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

8/10

8/10

It has been wonderful but they have to integrate it with the Big Data economy system to sustain it.

It's straightforward.

In house with a little help from professional services.

Pricing and licensing is competitive with other solutions.

Keep an eye upgrade and converting cost especially with deprecated tools like desk and it's reports, make consolidation of reports and universes and other objects early on .advise you to do user inbox,personal doc spring and fall clean up to make future upgrades easier

We use this SAP solution for designing reports. This is a purely analytic application for designing reports to cater to higher management and specific business use cases.

There are features within Business Objects that can be leveraged to scale out, and scale up. All SAP products are scalable these days. 

Some configurations related to business objects are a little tricky. Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex. There's not enough documentation available on the net. 

We've been using this solution for almost 10 years. 

Stability can be affected by configurations related to business objects which tend to be somewhat complex. It's not a very widely used product and that in itself is a problem.

The solution is scalable. There are features that can be leveraged to scale. 

The customer support is pretty good. 

The installation can take anywhere from three to five days. The solution has installers that are directly available for download from the SAP download center. There are certain prerequisites that have to be carried out on the server. The host has to be prepared, there's a runtime environment and a database that needs to be pre-installed. We use two to three admin people per deployment. 

The ROI depends on whether there's a significant volume. If there's not enough volume there might not be a return. 

The SAP model for licensing is quite complex and they generally don't deal with service providers.

There are mixed reviews on this product from our customers. You won't find as many companies use it as you'd find with HANA. It's not widely used. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

We use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for reporting, dashboards, and broadcasting.

What I find useful in SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is that it has a lot of flexibilities. It's where you can develop so many reports, and it's able to connect to multiple source systems.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to be improved performance-wise. The look and feel of this application also needs improvement.

The scalability of this application has to be improved, and its setup should also be more simplified.

Technical support for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform also needs to be improved.

We've been using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform in our company for six years.

The application is now stable, but there are still some things they have to improve on the hardware side.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is scalable, but the scalability of the servers and other parts is complex. SAP has made scalability complex. It's not so easy, and it's not so quick, while in other solutions, we can increase the scalability of the servers very easily and very fast, e.g. in Microsoft, but in SAP, it's complex and it takes more time.

Technical support for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is okay, but it depends on the priority level. For example, if you raise a ticket that's high priority, then they'll respond to that ticket, but if you raise a medium priority ticket, they don't respond at all. Technical support needs to be improved in that sense.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has a complex setup, and could still be simplified, especially if you want to increase your capacity, which could be difficult in the SAP side.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application, e.g. compared to Power BI. The analytics cloud is complex to set up. It's very hard. It takes a lot of time to complete the setup, because there are so many prerequisites to set it up before your analytics cloud. It's complex and it's expensive.

We've evaluated Analytics Cloud and Power BI.

Just recently, we moved SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform over to the cloud. Before, it was on our home site, but recently, e.g. just two days ago, we moved it to the cloud.

We've been using three different products: SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Analytics Cloud though not fully on it yet, and Power BI.

I would rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform a seven out of ten.

You cannot compare SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform with Power BI, but WebI, or SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence, is there. Power BI is more powerful compared to WebI, because there are a lot of flexibilities, and you can use them in a simpler way, e.g. these are also possible in WebI, but it's more complex, especially during the setup.

SAP BI product is basically for analytics. If your management wants to see the complete business's structure, what is going on in terms of business, what you are doing, everything you can have gathered by SAP BI. Management does not want to check entries. They want the ledgers. They want the numbers. The numbers and ledgers can be focused on via the analytics tool. We are using this type of functionality to gather management or partners' requirements.

SAP BI includes the SAP Portfolio. It's not a different product, it's a part of the same segment. Whenever you use SAP there is functionality to check the reporting part. That is SAP BI. It is an internal process.

The product has been stable.

We find that we can scale it as needed.

SAP is quite good in terms of manufacturing, in terms of retail, in terms of oil and gas sectors because the functionality is very user-friendly and the continuity of business with this ETL application is quite good.

The solution is constantly upgraded and updated.

In terms of setting up the solution, it's easy.

We'd like to have SAP notes better incorporated.

There is a lot of patching.

It could be a lighter solution.

We've been using SAP for the last 17 years or so. We've been using SAP BI for ten or 11 years. 

We have found the product to be stable and reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. 

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

Not everyone in the company uses the product. SAP BI tool is used by only ten or 12 people, including the management layer - the CEO, CFO, COO, the VP of Supply Chain, and me. 

Technical support is good. There's no need for them to be better or faster than they already are. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex. 

A complete portfolio will take about six months. 

We have an in-house team that is well versed in SAP and could handle any setup requirements. 

The license is included with the SAP portfolio.

For the last 17 years, we were using on-prem. Last year, we upgraded our SAP into HANA. From that time we have been using the cloud and updating on the cloud. We don't have any database servers. We don't have any physical hardware in my organization. We are using a cloud solution now.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations. In order to grow, you really need some sort of analysis element to help guide you, and this solution fulfills that need.

I'd advise new users to use a single solution for all the functionality to make a user-friendly solution. If you are using multiple solutions you have to integrate all the solutions together. If multiple solutions are out there, everybody is facing challenges. It's much easier to just have one solution, one point of entry. It helps align with your business needs.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.