SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

The solution has been extremely stable. We haven't had any issues so far.

The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all.

Technical support, overall, has been very good and we've been happy with their level of service.

The basic components of the solution could be improved.

The UI could be updated a bit.

I can't think of any features that are currently missing from the product at this time.

We've been using the solution for about seven years at this point. It's been a while. We have a lot of experience with it.

We've found the stability of the solution to be very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

Plenty of users in our organization actually use the solution.

Technical support for the most part has been very good. We've had a positive experience and we are quite satisfied with the level of support they provide to us.

I don't recall the company using a previous solution. As far as I know, the company has only ever really used SAP.

We've found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward. It's not so complex. A company shouldn't have any trouble with the implementation process.

We didn't need any assistance with the integration process. It's a process that I manage as an integration manager.

We pay our licensing fees on a monthly basis. I can't speak to how much they are. I don't recall there being any extra costs above the licensing itself.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the organization.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it as a perfect ten. It's been great. For the most part, we have been happy with the product.

We use it for reporting.

It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly-complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools.

Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA.

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.

I have been using this solution for around seven years.

We have around 200 users of this solution.

They are helpful and quite professional. Sometimes, they don't respond faster, and sometimes, they say that it needs to be upgraded to the next version, which is something that I don't like.

Its installation was straightforward.

I did the installation.

Its price is fair.

For data visualization, I would recommend Power BI and Tableau. For the report format, I would recommend SAP BusinessObjects.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The reporting is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The WebIntelligence Solution is the name of the reporting solution and it is very powerful. 

The solution offers very good features for broadcasting information or scheduling reports. You can schedule everything and make it very easy to disseminate by sending emails with a PDF or Excel. It's very quick and powerful.  

The solution's user security is extremely effective. You can profile very well. All the users and all the functionality is protected and that includes information and data segregation.

The documentation provided is very, very good. There's so much available, that if you ever run into any issues and need a workaround, you have it right there to guide you.

The solution offers good user management.

The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not so user friendly.

SAP's current strategy consists in keeping the reporting part On premise and delegating the Analytics part to the Cloud. You are therefore involved in a hybrid scenario.

The complete environment setup is pretty complex.

To carry out a real project that presents erp / business data on "Cloud Story Telling" you need more specialist actors who manage issues such as: Analytics and Data architecture, Data source identification, System Compatibility, Connectivity and Security.

These aspects are certainly also required on other vendor BI solutions.

On the SAP front, we are certainly trying to improve and complete the On Premise / Cloud integration, with the latest version SAP BO 4.3.

I've been working with the solution for twenty years now. It's been a very long time. I started using it around 1998.

The solution is very stable, and, on the off chance you have a problem, SAP is very quick to help. There are lots of workarounds if you do run into issues.

You can scale this solution if you need to. It's easy enough to do so.

One of the great things about SAP is the information that is available. When you have a problem, SAP is very quick to give you an answer or solution. You can also Google a lot of workarounds. There's so much documentation online that it's really easy to troubleshoot. That's because if anyone has a problem, SAP notes it and finds a solution which they post.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's pretty complex.

The installation configuring environment is not so easy to work with. Also, the connection of the SAP Analytics Cloud is very complex.  It's not very easy to configure the environment.

The time I need to configure and install the solution is about one week for the BusinessIntelligence Platform solution, On premise. Another week is required for the connectivity aspect and settings of the Cloud (Analytics).

We are working with an older version also well as the latest version of the solution. 

I would recommend this product to other organizations. It's a stable and powerful enterprise solution. Everything from the broadcasting to the scheduling, to the user management and the reporting, is very powerful. 90% of customers end up asking for a solid and consistent reporting solution. In these cases, I definitely suggest SAP Business Objects Platform.

That said, the dashboard isn't the best with this product.  It should be noted that SAP is working on their dashboards offerings in Cloud environment.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I have several use cases, generally in more complex environments. These are typically corporate, requiring functionality such as strong data security, bursting, metadata-based support, scalability, fault tolerance, load balancing, support for high volume, breadth of functionality in one set of products, etc. 

It has been used in Retail, Construction, Banks, and Insurance organisations.

It works well for organisations where a structured, common, and more disciplined view of larger, more complex information is required. This is generally with more complex and multiple source systems with larger volumes of information.

This solution provides much greater and faster access to information for a wide mixture of users. It supports and promotes a common view of information across the organisation. It also removes dependence on spreadsheets and technical resource for report generation.

It supports a wide range of types of users. It is particularly effective for information consumers. Ad Hoc information access and simpler self-service are well supported. Once we had the foundation in place, we also found we could provide most reports in under an hour for smaller company environments. Because of change control, the latter rarely happens in corporate environments but the effort involved was reduced.

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. It also provides a structured data security model whereby a single report provides dedicated results to a given usage, such as a branch or department-based. For instance, the same report will provide a branch-specific result depending on the user's branch and can be common to multiple branches.

Similarly, bursting enables provision of tailored static reporting to specific users or user groups that also includes data security.

This solution is complex to configure and administer. It is even more so, I believe, than it should be, even with such a complex product. As an example it has many server processes (typically 15+). In Windows these are not services rather they are individual processes managed via a single service called the SIA. Each server process can be separately configured and performs a specific set of functions

It uses Java constructions for specific customisations such as default reporting formats and using SSL for burst email reports. This requires a broad set of skills to set-up.

It is rather cryptic in its error handling when there are issues that require trawling through a number of voluminous log files that are accessed from the server.

I have been using this solution for more than ten years.

Reliability dropped in 2017-2018 with a major release but indications are that this has been addressed.

Very scalable across thousands (if not 10,000+) users and large data volumes.

Average. Technical support from SAP is mediocre. The local support is decent.

I've used many different BI solutions. The choice was the customer's. 

See earlier comments but a vanilla install is not too complex.  The moment it is not vanilla it becomes quite complex. The SAP website for software management, downloads, licenses etc makes the Da Vinci Code look simple.

Mix of contractors and vendor. The vendor is skillful though overworked resources.

No Idea

Cost to setup and run is high as it is complex but then again one also gets a highly functional product. SAP do have a small business pricing so, at least, the licensing is not too expensive.

The most comparable product is MicroStrategy, which is frankly a better technical product but has not been as commercially successful outside of large sites.

I am a great believe in choosing a commercially successful product rather than technical best of breed as there is nothing worse than having an 'orphan' product. That being a product that is poorly supported, does not have a development path and limited availability of expertise. Business Objects is a commercially successful product and despite SAP's poor management of the product is likely to continue to be so.

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!

The primary use case for SAP BusinessObjects has been to provide users static dashboards and reports with a fixed trend where the analysis part is predefined in terms of a fixed set of visualizations.

We use it to identify critical KPIs to senior management, which automatically get circulated every morning.

We started receiving benefits from SAP BusinessObjects the first week we used it. 

It will give you better performance if your warehouse is also on SAP Business Warehouse. It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards. For example, BusinessObjects Design Studio provides custom templates where you can create your own templates. You can also create your own custom charts. There are CSS formats which you can take in, then you can create your own color coding. Thus, a lot is possible. 

From a developer's point of view, it has definitely provided a lot of flexibility.

The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint.

It depends a lot on how BusinessObjects has been installed and configured, because there are a lot of services which run in the background. For example, if I have not done the proper sizing at implementation in terms of allocating the right resources in terms of memory and RAM for the different services within BO to run, any analytic documents which are built on BO can get impacted in terms of their performance. Therefore, stability is good provided your sizing and configuration has been done properly.

Scalability is good. Once it is set up in the mid-layer, multiple users can access it. Then, the product can grow into an enterprise-wide deployment.

The technical support for general issues gives us a good response, but for certain critical issues, it can takes four weeks to obtain a response. It will initially go to an SAP support team, and if they are not able to resolve the issues, then they will route the call to SAP in Germany. The German development team usually takes a bit more lead time to come back on those issues.

We were not using a previous solution.

The initial setup was not that complex as SAP has all the documentation in place. However, initially, we went for suboptimal sizing, which in the first few months led to performance issues. We had to reconfigure, do the proper sizing, and give the right memory requirements to meet our performance expectations.

Management reporting and also some ad-hoc reporting.

During the first of the 10 years we used it, it was a very valuable reporting product. It really is the only product we have for reporting out of the data warehouse that we have. It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources.

SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that.

In addition, we would definitely like to be able, through the tool, to show more metadata, and access a data dictionary directly from the tool.

Also, a user should see data lineage, because we have found out that the abstraction being done in the Universes is sometimes too much for the more specific kind of users. They want to see the origin of the data.

Stability is perfect.

Scalability is also very good.

We have not used technical support directly. We have a local specialist that we go to. It's easier.

The company implemented BusinessObjects 10 years ago. At that time, it was the best product on the market. A lot of things have changed in 10 years.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, if we're talking about a reporting tool, is the ease of use for the end-user as well as integration with other tools, like data dictionaries and data catalogs. That would make the underlying data more visible to the end-user. And, of course, price is important.

Look at who will be your end-user group. Who is going to use the tool?

I would rate this solution at seven out of 10. Seen from the administrative and compliance point of view, it's an excellent tool for an enterprise. But I can't give it any more than that because the user interface for the average user is not very intuitive. You need too much training before you're able to use the tool effectively.

It's used for business reporting and it performs well.

It allows hundreds of end-users to be able to access business reports and make business decisions based upon them.

It provides good centralized management, and it performs well against our day-to-day solution.

The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either.

We find it's stable, very little down time, good level of performance.

It's scalable simply by adding extra servers, application servers, so the scalability is good.

Our technical support is through a value added reseller.

We've been using Business Objects for a long time. The last time we did an upgrade from a client version to a browser-based version.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are the features of the product, that it is a good fit with our environment, and price will be a part of the consideration.

It was complex because we were upgrading from a previous version with a different architecture.

I would rate it about nine out of 10 because it performs well.

Do a trial. Fully investigate all the ins and outs of the license as well.