SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis. I found the SAP suite of products powerful. They scale well for enterprise use, i.e., thousands of recipients of the output of the products as dashboards and/or reports.

It gets people off Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and sharing the same reports/dashboards, so departments receive the same figures for KPIs and company performance.

This stopped the waste of time in management meetings, whereby people would spend a lot of time explaining different performance results (different Excel spreadsheets) so they could analyze results and plan to act on the results.

More thorough testing of Service Packs before release.

I have used Webi, Universe Designer, and Dashboards for 12 years. I’ve used Lumira for one year.

We had stability issues, mainly with the integration of the SAP BI products with SAP’s EIM products (Data Services, Information Steward). We had some instability when applying patches and new releases.

There was poor quality of the testing of new functionality introduced in new releases.

We have not really had scalability issues. The readiness of the products for the enterprise was a strong point.

Patchy. Depending on the product with the issue (eg WebI or Information Steward) the responses can be good (WebI) or awful (Information Steward).

Technical support was hit and miss. Sometimes it was good. Other times it was awful. Especially when the problem raised was hard for them to reproduce. They often ask the same questions over and over.

We didn’t have a previous solution. We have pretty much been an SAP BI shop for a long time.

Setup was quite complex due to the number of environments being used (Dev/SIT/UAT/Prod) and the integration between BI and EIM products. It is even harder now that we use SAP HANA.

Implemented in-house.

Make sure you factor in plenty of time for regression testing as the way SAP release Service packs these days there is good (new functionality) and bad (lack of thorough testing) news.

Over the years, we have reviewed other BI products, such as IBM Cognos and Tableau. Some of them are also in use along with the SAP BI products.

Check the number of intended users and which part of BI you are intending to introduce (reporting, analytics, etc.).

Check out the free trial periods and see if there are options to use cloud computing versus installing it in your own data center.

• Data integration
• 64-bit architecture

I would like to see the capability to directly access social media data.

I have been using it for 14 years.

We have encountered so many issues when the architecture and design was fragile.

Technical support is 10/10.

I previously used Microsoft DTS. Microsoft BI products are ideal for small-scale businesses. whereas SAP BusinessObjects is suitable for enterprise-level implementation.

If you have the skills and time, initial setup will be easy.

I worked for both vendor teams and in-house teams. I have been involved in the implementation of complex BI solutions on the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform in major USA and Canadian companies across different industries.

For successful implementation, you need a technical expert who has specialized in the area of Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) with in-depth knowledge of the data warehouse lifecycle processes (DWH design and ETL development) and extensive hands-on experience with both the SAP Enterprise Information Management (SAP Data Services) technology stack and the SAP BusinessObjects reporting products stack (IDT, Universe, Web Intelligence, Designer, Dashboards).

The manager should be from the in-house (for decision making) team and the technical experts should be from the outside (vendors and consultants).

SAP has different kinds of licensing for mid-size to large enterprises.

If you want to implement SAP Analytical applications, you need skilled resources with clear requirements.

Semantic Layer (Universes), ease of use

New Undelete of Public objects..

New Dashboard of overall environment

Java Applet still relying on the quirkiness of Java VM, and potential version mis-matches.

10+ Years

With proper planning and understanding of the application landscape the deployment is fairly straight forward. Better to do a new install if you have multiple updates and patches...better to build from scratch vs remodel

Highly scalable, new configuration wizard with 4.1 version assists in scaling correctly.

Fair

Fair to Poor..Business Objects sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of SAP

No

Depends on the deployment. Can be very complex in a 100% fail over/fault tolerant/load balanced scenario.

I deploy for clients.

No

Use a consulting firm with expertise in deployment.

SAP Business Objects Data Services is user friendly and easy to learn. It is easy to connect to SAP ECC or SAP BW, and does not require any additional plugins like for the other ETL tools.

Our organization uses SAP BI tools, and Qlikview for building reports for our doctors and other teams. It has helped us to build an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). It helps the BI teams to build reports over this warehouse.

It needs some improvement in its performance. It handles our data great as we do not process much data daily, but we are going to process huge amounts of data. I don't think it can handle well when compared to other ETL tools. I would like to see its data handling improved.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I think this product is best if we are not loading huge data. Also for its easy to use and learn.

Ability for the user to easily schedule the reports and managing them is a big plus. Most of BOBJ tools are also data source agnostic which makes them versatile across all environments.

WebIntelligence, Analysis for Office, and SAP Lumira were designed for businesses. So the adoption rate by the is very high. Quick intuitive analysis of data, and in just a few clicks WebI and Lumira can Merge Dimensions from different sources.

• Lot of Automation of routine reports. Analysts can now focus on analysis rather than pulling in reports from multiple places.
• Scheduling of the reports makes sure we are not duplicating work across all regions for the same report.
• Brings in standardization.
• Self-Service BI or DIY-BI
• Reports are easily available on Mobile devices

• Reusability of the reports and tables from between the different tools
• Improvements needed in charting
• Direct and easy integrations to easily bring in data from other applications across all the tools like Salesforce, reading RSS streams etc. and not just other databases
• Big data source support across all tools.
• Bringing Predictive Analysis to the main stream

I've been using it for 12+ years, and all the other products since their inception.

We had no major issues.

We had no major issues.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

First level support is generally is good for basic issues. Second level support is informative when it comes to bigger issues.

The BOBJ solution was so ingrained within the organization, and powerful that there was no necessity to change.

It was smooth.

Did both cases. Even if you have an external vendor, make sure you who have an experienced lead in-house who knows how the organization works to guide the implementation team.

ROI is absolute.

SAP has flexible licensing when negotiated correctly.

When deploying SAP BW and BOBJ together, get an experienced practitioner who can educate and implement keeping the business users in mind, not just the deadline and processes of IT.

There are a lot of limitation in SAP BW especially for scheduling, which can limit the full utilization of BOBJ, but there is a solution for it all if you think out of the box.

Autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports.

The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal.

This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration.

No issues.

No issues.

Technical support is excellent.

No.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users. Currently, 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.

We evaluated Cognos and OBIEE.

It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.

In my position, it's very important to define data models in order to develop a solution that provide end users with the ability to freely analyze data. That's why the Information Design tool of Business Objects is the most valuable feature. But I also use the Web Intelligence feature for testing my personal data models.

For a recent project, I used the BI Workspace module of Business Objects. I found it to be very helpful in providing specific home pages for different user groups. Thanks to this module, I can define a home page for a particular audience.

I encountered an issue with security. When I promoted the association between the CMC security profile and the Security Universe profile as I took our application from dev to test to production, I noticed that the associations were lost. This forced me to newly associate all over again.

I've used Business Objects for four years for various projects.

I've had no issues with deployment.

Yes, sometimes the services didn't work well, generating a decreasing of performance.

I've had no issues with scalability.

In my experience, customer service it good.

In my experience, technical support is good.

Yes, I used other solutions, but I chose Business Objects because it's easy to use.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.