Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
N/A
SAP BW
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
SAP Business Warehouse, or SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse) is SAP's legacy data warehouse solution, now superseded by SAP BW/4HANA, and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which was launched in 2019.
SAP BW versions up to 7.4 have reached end of maintenance. SAP BW 7.5 support is extended to align with SAP Business Suite with NetWeaver components. For existing customers maintenance is scheduled to continue through 2027, with extended support available through 2030.
SAP business warehouse was chosen years ago along with our current ERP software. It currently doesn't stack up well against newer software such as IBM Cognos, or SAS Business Intelligence. The positive side, is that the software has been around for many years and it is easy to …
Pentaho is very well suited to perform data extraction & data mining from various cloud storage & transform that data using various available data models. However, the software struggles when it comes to visualizing the extracted data in an appealing manner & can be difficult for end-users to get an understanding of data tables created using those models.
SAP BW is best for: 1. Large enterprises 2. Enterprises with 3+ legacy systems with entrenched users (politically difficult to merge) 3. Enterprises with employees who can understand both the technical capabilities of SAP BW and the needs of the business users - ability to speak both languages, otherwise the program could be unwieldy and potentially underutilized (it's not particularly inexpensive) SAP BW is less appropriate for: 1. Small enterprises 2. Enterprises who have well established, same location, CRM and UFS - the integration of data analysis will be easier and less expensive with other solutions 3. HANA
I think the relative obscurity of the tool is a downside, not as many developers, consultants or peers you can tap into.
Lack of a solid user community held us back, looking at Power BI and Qlik, they have huge user communities that help each other out. Would have liked that here.
Smaller company means smaller sales force, and the lack of a local presence made it hard to only interact online with the account rep. Other companies have someone local who often stops by with pre-sales developers to just pitch in free of charge when they have time.
Support comes slow. This is not a limitation of the software itself but could be a symptom from the local office. Once we get support everything works along smoothly.
It is always important to review the instructions. This is not a system that does well initially with personalization without review of standard procedures. A log of time can be lost if the technicians and programmers working with the data are not following correct procedures.
I will use Pentaho until I find a better tool with a better, easier to use report designer client. For now, Pentaho has been the most powerful reporting tool for our clients because of its ability to connect to Odoo, integrate in Odoo (reports are accessible in Odoo) and the flexibility in report design and parameter integration
The Pentaho tools are designed so you can start playing around on your own. Of course, you will need guidance at some point, but the training teams are good at guiding new users, and the online documentation is usually pretty up-to-date.
Some of the tools, such as the Pentaho Data Integration tool and the Pentaho Server, are pretty self-explanatory. The other tools maybe are not so quickly and obvious to use, but again, with some documentation and some customer support, you can find your way around them.
They were responsive to our questions when we raised issues. They gave us workarounds when required. They were quite knowledgeable when it came to issue analysis and providing fixes. They were forthright in informing us if a bug was not due for release soon.
Course Taken: DI1000 Pentaho Data Integration Fundamentals Setup A week before your class started, the instructor will start sending out class material and lab setup instructions. This is helpful so that you understand how the environment is laid out and can start reviewing the content. Ultimately it saved about a 1/2 day trying to setup with 10 other people online which was great! The Course The 3-day course was laid out like many other technical classes with 15-30 minutes instruction and 15-60 minutes of lab exercises. The instructor was very knowledgeable with the functionality from version to version and answered questions as we went along. I was amazed at some of the functionality that was available that I was not using at the time and quickly implemented changes to many existing transformations and jobs. The novice users seemed to catch on quickly and more experienced users explained how some of the functionality was used in their home environments. Towards the end there was enough time so that we were able to ask very directed questions about our own environments. Overall, I really found the class to be informative and deliver enough information to be dangerous. My skills improved and I was able to design better and efficient transformations for the HIE. Course Description: https://training.pentaho.com/instructor-led-training/pentaho-data-integration-fundamentals-di1000
Get the right people in before starting implementation. Start small and build as you go approach is time consuming and involves lot of rework. Evangalize within the organization the capabilities and limitations equally so that correct delivery expectations are set. Set expectations with the Customer that the tool cannot replace proprietary software in terms of stability/usability and that timelines could change given the new ness of the product.
Since the Pentaho platform offers a range of broad functionality across data preparation and advanced analytics, it also can be easily integrated to support many data sources and machine-learning frameworks. Based on that fact, we selected Pentaho to be used in our internal department. It also supports many of our BI use cases as required by company management or the business user. Last but not least, the Pentaho license is cheaper than their competitor.
SAP Business Warehouse scores higher in data warehouse functionalities for integration to SAP ERP and other SAP solutions such as SAP CRM, SAP APO, and SAP SRM. Standard SAP data source extractors which are available in SAP ERP can be used immediately for full or delta replication into SAP Business Warehouse. System governance in SAP Business Warehouse is top-notch with change management support for migration between system landscape from the development system to production system.
Exporting of data and reports to Excel is very easy for the end user to interpret and manipulate.
Negatively, the speed at which BW retrieves data and reports is very slow and out of date.
Addition of daughter application HANA has helped this aging application stay afloat for a few more years. Overall it has been a great tool but it's showing its age very fast.
