Likelihood to Recommend The proper management of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards requires an expert on the team to manage and build reports. If an organization does not have the proper expertise on board to build and deploy reports it will fail. Data analytics, dropping into excel, and broadcasting of information are major bonuses for the use of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards.
Read full review C9 is a good and economical solution for what it does. If evaluating them today, I would want to clearly understand their product roadmap and their ability to execute against it.
Read full review Pros This software is easy to initially learn, and very powerful in producing reusable reports. It is much faster than my company's internal manual queries. The ability to build off of a saved query and share queries to other users is a great positive. My favorite part is that you can run queries in the background and it does not interfere with your current work or slow your computer down. Read full review It gives you the ability to see where your pipeline was in the past and compare to how it is now. You can set queries that will allow you to show at risk deals, committed deals, etc. This gives much better visibility for management to coach. Read full review Cons The installation can be very complex and time-consuming, it requires a lot of planning and foresight as to what role the software will play in the organization. The software has a relatively large learning curve that takes dedicated users months to get comfortable with, the UI is a bit intimidating for new users. SAP could organize their help better, it can be difficult to find dependable solutions to issues via their website and support channels. Read full review We had uptime issues, weird error messages, sluggish performance, and bad data. I hope that some of this can be attributed to growing pains as the company was relatively new when we signed our initial contract. It was not dependable enough to trust the data and to count on accessing the app when we needed it. It actually was unavailable at EOQ one time. I also did not care for the lack of real-time pipeline information. If someone was doing a pipeline review, there was no instant gratification i.e. to see changes in pipeline occur as an AE made a change to an opportunity. You couldn’t do any configuration at all. Even if you just wanted to change a field or add a filter, you had to go through their services team. It was a recognized challenge and I saw roadmap addressing it. The query tool is a little hard to use and we have found that queries are very slow and lock up. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The institution has decided to move in a different direction, and will be using MSBI for reporting. I have been very happy with the Business Objects suite of tools, and will continue to use them heavily until we make the transition.
Read full review C9 is now part of the sales management culture here at IPC. There is no longer any guesswork about the funnel or the forecast. C9 does something that SFDC does not...it increases significantly the value of the information in SFDC by unlocking the meta data that we all need to run the business
Read full review Usability From a server and client side perspective. the Business Intelligence Platform provides a foundation for all aspects of content development, distribution, analysis, collaboration and self service. Ease of use from targeted content delivery through controlled accessibility. Content exporting in the format of the users choice. Scheduling for internal or external delivery. Public and private folders for secure content access when requied. Web based for viewing on the users device of choice without the need to download additional applications.
Read full review From a sales manager’s perspective it was fairly easy to use the base
functionality (just viewing current pipeline) and much harder to look at
analytics (pipeline changes over time). C9 made this easier by allowing sales ops to publish views to sales managers. The query tool was harder to use than it had to be. For example, there were no out of the box relationships set up between
Salesforce.com tables (e.g. accounts to opportunities), so I had to create those relationships myself.
Read full review Reliability and Availability When we implemented 3.1, we had a tough time managing the system: It took almost a year to stabilize. With 4.0, we want to roll out to more users, and are holding back because of fears about the performance issue
Read full review In 2 years we have only had 1 uptime issue for around 45 min.
Read full review Performance Overall, the tool (Web Intelligence 4.2) is fast and solid. One issue is a dependability on JAVA for a full feature report creation/edit capabilities (as opposed to limited HTML option). Second, planned end of JAVA support by major browsers (Chrome is already not supporting JAVA applet).
Read full review We have experienced sluggish performance. We have found that queries are very slow and lock up.
Read full review Support Rating SAP has released various versions of SAP BO BI. starting from 3.1 and going to 4.0,4.1,4.2 and latest being 4.3. SAP provides support to these new versions. As new versions keep on coming, support for the very old software goes out of scope from SAP. it is when the different organization plans to get their BO content migrated from a lower version to a newer version. The newer version had definitely added functionality and features which ease the work of users.
Read full review C9 cares about their customers and responds quickly. However, the ticketing system could be better and there is no easy way to track the status of your requests.
Read full review In-Person Training SAP authorized training is best, Please go ahead with it. Even lot of online training options/videos available for self learning
Read full review Good assistance on set up and detailed training
Read full review Online Training I haven't used it or got feedback from the end user. Content looks to be pretty detailed. Focused on SQL but not BW.
Read full review Online information and training was done reasonably well compared to other vendors, but would benefit from being more polished and rounded out.
Read full review Implementation Rating Hire specialists and experienced staff. Mix some beginners so that everyone is not a leader but a learner too. Plan well; architect well; break down implementation in small steps and move towards larger steps. Create a centralized and authorized SAP Business Objects implementation team.
Read full review Very simple implementation. They basically set up the imports and then they configure the tool per customer requests. I wish there had been more consultation during the implementation, but it wasn’t bad given the effort expended. We ended up re-implementing after about a year and a half.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We selected SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) based on price. It can stack up against others in terms of price and honestly, that's about it.
Salesforce Commerce does a hell of a better job at handling it. However, in the space of Business Intelligence, SAP can do more, and that's why at the end we went with it
Read full review Zoho CRM is less up to speed and much more out of date. The support at InsideSales.com Predictive Pipeline have been very helpful during the initial roll out face. Overall I was very happy!
Read full review Scalability SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform supports SOA Service Oriented Architecture. You can start/restart/enable/disable all the servers. You can seamless do load balancing and clustering. It supports all leading application and web server. Supports LDAP SSO integration. People who can work on excel with training they can work on SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence, dashboard, Lumira, Information design tool product suite. Tool is very user friendly and easy to learn and implement
Read full review Return on Investment By generating and distributing reports in a timely manner, we were able to save millions of dollars for the company which otherwise would not have been visible. Almost realtime dashboard, saved the company a huge amount by showing the outages and kept the company from buying a tool to do just that. It showed the customers who were not paying the bills and were missing in the system due to some loophole. This was visible by doing reporting on the theft usage of electricity. Read full review The product provides a single source for pipeline and forecast data and has scaled well with our organization. We have grown from 10 sales reps to 100 reps and we really needed a tool to to manage data and do roll-ups etc. It's also important to provide senior management visibility into the pipeline, and the tool works well for this. Read full review ScreenShots InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued) Screenshots