SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

• Universe Designer - I use single interface for all the BI users who access/create ad hoc and canned report
• SDK - important because we architected and designed a BI Product for 200+ customers using SDK
• Lifecycle management tools - We keep releasing new versions of our product based on customer requirements/changes requests depending on product changes.
• Multi-source connectivity - Extended the same BI product to support analytics/reporting on other applications/sources from same portfolio.

It's provided us with best practice reports out of the box for various modules. 
As well as an interface for creating adhoc reports with more analytical capabilities. This now allows us to exporting/share data in various formats (Excel, PDFs etc.)

We do not have self-service BI tools which would enable SAP to compete with tools like Tableau and Qlikview. Reports/Dashboards on RDBMS cannot handle or scale the demands of the latest data analytics solutions.

I've used this solution for over 10 years.

For deployment, SAP Business Objects has lifecycle management tools. It comes with features such as revert changes and automatic backup which helped us.

We had no issues with the performance.

It wouldn't scale when we needed to handle over one terabyte of data.

Customer service was found to be satisfactory.

SAP Business Objects when compared to Linux/AIX/Sun-Solaris is complex to install on Windows due to version/patch issues, and we had to put in requests for patches. Business users who used Web Intelligence were able to find some Java script plug-ins that needed to be installed.

We communicate with a vendor team as part of all our evaluations and implementations. This provides clarifications, resolutions, and additional features but mostly it was implemented an in-house by team.

It is dependent on our customer needs/requirements, and specific version with specific features were available. We also evaluated Tableau for its technical features, as per business user requirements, pricing, and licensing for choosing the product and also based on outcome of the Proof of Concept.

Our company is in the healthcare industry and we are using BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for a lot of our data, such as eligibility, claims, premium, plan. We run all kinds of different reports for our customers and our brokers on how the claims and planners are performing and what is the utilization of different services throughout the claims.

The feature that allows pivot users to create the report dashboards and run them when they want with a lot of flexibility with the drill-downs is very useful. The drill-down features are very good because, in other solutions, such as Excel, you have to create separate pivot tables and a lot of other operations to do drill-downs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform tool does the drill-downs automatically. Overall the solution is user-friendly and has a lot of drag and drop features.

Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using.

I have been using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for a short period of time.

The solution has been stable in my usage. Our company has had SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for as long as I have been here, which is 20 years. I think we have had dashboards with it before. I did not know how it worked with the data universes and we did not have a lot of data in the universe. Using software for service we will upgrade when they upgrade. I have heard that when we move to version 4.3, the user interface looks entirely different and I do not know how that experience will go.

Our IT department does the data and the universe design. We have a universe designer who does it and it is their full-time job. Additionally, they do all the ETLs and many other operations within the company. My team is more focused on business analysts and is trying to learn the report-building side of the solution, designing the reports, and working with the interface. I have one person that does works with the designer to try to make the connections better and they have a good understanding of the data. The IT people do not understand the data, we understand the data. We are trying to learn how to write the reports and we only have five people in training. I have five users that I want to learn how to be involved in the process and create these reports.

I have previously used Tableau.

For anybody who does not have a BI solution and is thinking about implementation should look at them all before deciding. We have another vendor we have worked with, Cognos, and I have worked with Tableau and it is important to evaluate all of the solutions to see which one makes more sense for their use case. I downloaded a list of the top five and they all are pretty similar, I will not say they are the same because there are a lot of differences but they are all heading in the same direction of getting the information to the universe and pulling out the data.

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

I call it a big boys toy due to costs involved for full, not large, scale deployments. Due to SAP gobling up a multitude of products over the year, the integration issues have mostly all been resolved now and its mature platform whereby all the others are still playing catchup.

It gives you end to end view. You can build a dashboard or report and see full lineage even into etl and wrangling layers. Saving is made when you dont have to waste time integrating with a mirade of other tool sets.

Ive yet to find a bi tool that can match SAP’s offering, and Ive implemented all of them.

Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution.

More than five years.

It is a solid product.

I did not encounter issues with scalability of the solution. 

The tech support is very good.

My career has been filled with greenfield projects it bi rehab whereby I would replace a mess with SAP BO

The initial setup was easy because I specialize in implementation.

I usually get called in as a specialist

No redoing if set up right, and thats usually issue with SAP BO deployments I get called in to mature.

Have a big wallet if you want to be serious

Read gartner to your own detriment

I advise someone considering this solution: Go big or go home!

I use IDT and Web Intelligence the most to enable self service and ad-hoc reporting capabilities for our end users. When building a dashboard with defined KPIs, I'll use Design Studio as it gives a clean and uniform look.

The combination of IDT and Web Intelligence has taken some of the burden of report creation off of our central data team. The corporate team has the task of creating sound, reusable universes, and we give 'superusers' out in the business the ability to create their own Web Intelligence reports using these universes. in this way, the business is able to develop the reports they feel would be valuable, and if a different view/additional data is needed, the corporate team would fulfill that need.

IDT and Web Intelligence are pretty mature products, and have many features that make them adaptable. Design Studio in combination with SAP HANA as a source can be valuable although when using crosstabs, database calls become costly. I would expect this functionality to change to better utilize returned data sets in the future. Lumira is also a promising tool, but at this point still feels inferior to Tableau. SAP continues to pour money into this visualization solution, and claims that in the near future will be more feature rich than it's competitor.

I've used Business Objects for about four years, versions 3.1 and 4.1.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

We've had no stability issues.

The only issue that comes to mind with the toolset is the scalability of Design Studio when using crosstabs as I stated before. When defining a dataset for a crosstab, you are locked in to that 'view' of the dataset and are unable to create a second view of the data with different dimensions from the same source - you must call the database again to accomplish this.

Customer support is responsive, the SAP help forums also have an extensive amount of knowledge and help if your organization does not have a support agreement with SAP.

Our organization also uses Tableau in some instances when we need to query several data sources/views for one dashboard because of performance. However we usually try to use Business Objects because of the synergy we find with SAP systems as a data source as well as the data security options available in SAP HANA.

I was not involved in the technical set up of the tools.

We used this product for years with Teradata as the datasource, but much can be gained by using SAP HANA as the source if possible - not only in performance but also in data security and not requiring a universe for a few of the tools.

The planning and dashboarding features have been useful. Additionally, the fixed-format reports are good.

The solution is not good for self-services, they can improve in this area.

We are in the beginning stages of the implementation and once we roll it out to end-users then we will see further improvement areas.

In SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform we use Lumira Designer, or the earlier version is Design Studio, where we create management dashboards. We feel that the tool is very complex in terms of implementing the dashboard. Lots of coding and performance issues. We require particular skillsets and resources, regular users cannot understand it. The management dashboards should be easy to configure. The only option right now is Lumira Designer, but it is complex to implement. Maintaining and supporting it takes time, and something should be done to improve the experience.

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

The solution is stable.

I have found the solution to be scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution in our company.

We did not find any major support areas that needed the support from SAP. The majority of the application support our team managed fine and we did not suffer any hardware issues. Our issues were resolved. 

The installation was a medium difficulty level because we do not have complex scenarios in our use case. There are some complex portions but there were no roadblocks that prevented us from continuing.

The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value.

Our organization prefers one visualization tool, that's why SAP will be in our roadmap.

I think companies prefer self-service. BSAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform seems a little typical tool in terms of self-service. We recommend other solutions, such as Microsoft BI, because they can do a lot more functions.

The features that are most valuable are report and dashboard development, universe layer, ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources, ability to develop robust semantic layer, ability to combine different data sources and data federation.

Provides a platform for developing reporting that can be used by end users, which will give relevant, consistent and correct results. Also, ability to combine data, I created a report based on SAP data from BW and combined it with data from SQL server to be able to report on the data in a way that would not have been possible to do except with manual steps. The solution I built replaced a manual process that would take 3 weeks and provided an automated solution. We were able to get the critical analysis in a small fraction of time and able to run the business better as a result.

Can be a little buggy. As with any system you need to do the work to set up the foundation; nothing is as easy as you install it and all your problems are solved.

I have been using this solution for 12 years.

No issues with deployment.

Sometimes encounter some bugs. SAP seems to have taken the approach of letting the users test the product lately.

No - the system is very scalable.

Customer service was average.

Technical support was average.

I've developed many solutions to replace solutions using Access and Excel.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I've done implementations myself.

I'm not sure, as I've been part of projects as a part of the larger organization. In general, it could be very high or very low. I know that BOBJ is costly - so you would need projects to justify the cost.

Not sure haven't been involved in this aspect.

No.

Definitely cost justify it. If you have a lot of manual processes involved in getting the reporting that you need, then this product will definitely help. You can cut out all the manual steps.

The SAP BusinessObjects product suite is made of different products. This review refers to the Web Intelligence product.

The user friendliness of the interface enables non-IT-literate persons to create their own queries without need SQL knowledge, and that has been the case a very long time. (I started to use BO in 1990.)

It gives power to the user, who can create his/her own queries without needing IT services, therefore leading to savings. However, it must be noted that the semantic layer (Universe) must be built carefully by IT staff with the full collaboration from beginning to end of future key users in order to be intuitive and user friendly. The training given to the user community and the documentation is also extremely important, so that the users know what objects they can combine together.

Since I started using BO, the desktop version gave way to the web version. The beginning of the web version (Web Intelligence) was a little bit chaotic, with some key functionalities present in the desktop version forgotten in the web version (like custom groupings, double scaling...) However, these functionalities are finally back. I think SAP should listen more and better to its customers.

I have 25+ years experience of working with SAP BusinessObjects, combining SAP and non-SAP data in BO and I also have started to use QlikView and roll it out in our organization. I hold the function of BI director now and develop an entire reporting strategy for a multinational organization.

I encountered stability issues. The beginning of the web version was very chaotic. It look a long time for Web Intelligence to open, refresh and so on. We regret that versions that are initially released do not seem to be well finished (a lot of bugs), and that a lot of patching is necessary to get to a stable version (our experience for BOXIR3, BI4 and so on).

I did not encounter any scalability issues. It is easy to deploy (weblink). But in order to be able to use the query panel, users must ensure that the Java component is installed.

Technical support is quite OK.

Initial setup is straightforward.

I cannot give any advice on this, as I am not involved at all in this issue, but depending on the licensing model used, this product can be quite expensive.

We considered Oracle Discoverer, MS BI, but BO was chosen for its flexibility of usage.

The reporting tool is easy to use and implement. Overall, you should consider how this tool is going to be implemented in your organization, and what added value it will bring to your organisation (e.g., do you have a lot of people doing a lot of reports in Excel). Finally, a decision whether or not to use BusinessObjects Web Intelligence should not be taken on its own but rather as a part of how information is managed in the organization.

I'm currently using the solution for a client. We use it for general reporting in the bank.

The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution.

Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix. 

If you want to make a change in one part of it, you cannot track the change. They need something to help track changes. That would make it better. 

I've been using the solution for over ten years.

I don't use it to do any system administration. Therefore, it's hard to really gauge the scalability.

I don't know how many people use it currently. I'm on the client-side. I'm only in one department, and I don't know who else is using it or where in the company.

From SAP, I honestly have never used technical support. I usually have enough knowledge to figure out any adjustment that's needed. I have not used support in over ten years. It's been a long time. I can't provide good feedback.

I didn't install it, however, it's not simple as just using a cloud group. You have to install it and provide services. I'm using the onsite version. It is, I'd say, relatively complex.

I'd rate the solution a three out of five in terms of the ease of setup.

I don't deal with the licensing. I can't speak to the costs. 

I know it has a reputation for being expensive. The thing is, it ensures that you do have continuity. It's also easy to use, whereas other tools that people build on their own don't offer that. You can control everything much easier and make it much more user-friendly for non-SAP users.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.