SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs. SAP Lumira Discovery

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.

Infographics derived from specific data sources appears to be well suited for development using Lumira. The development of executive level dashboards was less appropriate from my perspective. The software does not provide sufficient demonstration or samples for the users to learn from in my opinion.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• SAP has built in features you would expect from a data visualization package, like easy import from other SAP systems.
• SAP has most of the typical charts that you would expect in order to visualize your data.
• SAP allows you to have multiple charts on one visualization for your data.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Even though the process of creating visualizations of data is now greatly improved, it could still be a lot better as users become accustomed to this kind of tool and bring forward edge cases the developers did not anticipate.
• It would be awesome to have a cross platform tool that works on more than just Windows.
• Some options for specific graphs feel limiting.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

SAP Lumira is very good self service analytical tool with powerful capabilities. However need to look into other SAP products in BI space, like SAP SAC. SAP Lumira is more used for custom and complex analytical need in business intelligence area. Also SAP Lumira is going out of maintenance in coming future replaced by SAP SAC.

Incentivized

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

Lumira is a desktop application runs in its own JVM. It installs its own java runtime libraries to avoid any core java version conflicts. The availability of the application is completely relies on individual machine hardware configuration. On a decent desktop, it performs well and always launches in either 32 or 64 bit environment based on the hosts system's OS

Incentivized

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).

The performance is linear with amount of data that is being explored. We have done some benchmarks acquiring 10million data cells without having any performance problems. We need to make proper adjustments to jvm run time properties to start with higher heap size and other parameters that optimizes the run time performance

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It does not have many bugs or issues since not a lot of new features are being added. The customer support for SAP Lumira Discovery is good and anyone considering this as a self-service tool would be happy. It integrates well in the SAP BI suite of products and the overall experience is positive.

Incentivized

SAP authorized training is best, Please go ahead with it. Even lot of online training options/videos available for self learning

Incentivized

We did not take in-person training

Incentivized

I haven't used it or got feedback from the end user.

Content looks to be pretty detailed. Focused on SQL but not BW.

Most of the user guides are pretty comprehensive and very easy to understand. The product itself is designed to be self-serve tool, did not need much of the end-user training. Most of the training we had is to how to read the data, how to explore the data, how to acquire the data etc.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Installing the desktop software on end-user machines is always challenging. The machine specifications are the biggest factor when running Lumira and be able to handle large datasets during data exploration. This often demands beefy machines at least for power-users. Although Lumira software licensing is not a big problem but managing partner's extensions and keeping track of their individual licenses may be an issue. If there is a way to bundle the more popular extensions such as vSQL or vOLAP should be bundled in core product and offer them as part of Lumira license instead of a separate license which causer operational burden.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Even though SAP Analytics Cloud is considered to be better in aspects such as data connectivity or analytics, we decided to choose Lumira as it was easier to understand, learn and use. As our business is not really that big and does not require the inclusion of large amounts of data, Lumira was overall the safest and most comfortable option. Also, some members in our team had previous knowledge so it was easier to adapt

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Enterprise wide implementation is a challenge with data security and trustedness. No easy installation can be done across the enterprise. no upgrade paths also available from SAP. They have so much of experience with desktop implementation, there it could be a controlled environment with a capital budget. These may be resolved in the upcoming releases

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We could obtain original data from vast and detailed corporate and personal data sources.
• We could share visual analysis results with stakeholders via the cloud, and it could also be viewed on a tablet.
• It is very flexible and accurate to use. It can be used for forecasting sales, resource planning, and scheduling.