Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review Microsoft SQL Server is a great RDBMS and meets all of our requirements. If you need a stable DB platform to support your line of a business application you'll be well served. Licensing costs are far cheaper, more portable and a lot more user friendly than Oracle. Product support and security patches from Microsoft are strong.
Read full review Pros It tracks bin locations for parts which can be really helpful. SAP Business Warehouse tells you who has a part checked out so you can find it. It shows current parts shortages so buyers are flagged to get parts on order based on current demand. Read full review Easy to configure and use with Visual Studio and Dot Net Easy integration with MSBI to perform data analysis Data Security Easy to understand and use Very easy to export database and tables in the form of SQL query or a script Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The import/export process can be tricky to follow with lots of steps and could be better for importing flat files Obtaining help from Microsoft is cumbersome and often other internet sources are better and quicker The documentation is not great and again it's generally better to obtain help elsewhere if needed Read full review Likelihood to Renew We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
Read full review Usability SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Its does not have outages.
Read full review Performance SSAS data cubes may some time slow down your Excel reports.
Read full review Support Rating We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
Read full review In-Person Training It was good
Read full review Online Training very hands on and detailed training
Read full review Implementation Rating Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review [Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used
MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Read full review Scalability SQL server does handle growing demands of a mid sized company.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting. Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports. Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives. Read full review ScreenShots