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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Overview

What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?

The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.

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Recent Reviews

Happy User

7 out of 10
July 21, 2022
I use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to broadcast reports to our customers. This is our analytical suite for reporting and monitoring our …
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SAP BI Review

6 out of 10
January 28, 2020
Incentivized
We are using SAP BI for analysis and reporting purposes. We use this within the insurance industry. We had some issues with a client …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 28 features
  • Drill-down analysis (45)
    9.0
    90%
  • Multi-User Support (named login) (46)
    8.9
    89%
  • Customizable dashboards (45)
    8.1
    81%
  • Report Formatting Templates (45)
    7.7
    77%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?

The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.

What is SAP Analytics Cloud?

The SAP Analytics Cloud solution brings together analytics and planning with integration to SAP applications and access to heterogenous data sources. As the analytics and planning solution within SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud supports trusted insights and integrated planning…

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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.7
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.2
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.7
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.3
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9.4
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.8
Avg 7.9

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

7.5
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence?

The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI) platform is a flexible, scalable information infrastructure that aims to help you more easily discover and share insights for better business decisions. According to the vendor, the integrated, unified infrastructure enables scalability from one to many tools and interfaces on premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Features

  • Supported: Reporting and analysis
  • Supported: Data visualization and analytics applications
  • Supported: Office integration

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Competitors

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsApple Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Windows: Server 2008 and 2012; Suse SLES 11 x86_64; Red Hat EL 5 and 6 x86_64; AIX 6.1 and 7.1 Power; Solaris 10 and 11 SPARC
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence Platform provides users with ad hoc queries, reporting, data visualizations, and analysis tools. Its integrated, unified infrastructure aims to offer scalability from one-to-many tools and interfaces on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid approach.

Microsoft BI (MSBI) and Tableau Desktop are common alternatives for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence.

Reviewers rate Single Sign-On (SSO) highest, with a score of 9.9.

The most common users of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(842)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 71)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Gaurav Pandey - PMP,ITIL,CSM | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP BI product was improved a lot in terms of performance as BW on HANA ( suite on HANA ) product however the product was optimized to run on the HANA database. Anyone new planning to go for BI should consider BW4HANA which is a new optimized product running on SAP's flagship HANA DB. This has excellent integration with FIORI and SAP cloud platform ( Analytics Cloud ).
July 21, 2022

Happy User

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP Business Objects is well suited for the scenarios where most of the logic is written on the backend (in some other application) and one can expose that data for the business users through Business Objects. It is easy to schedule the report, format the same and download the data for analysis. Some simple calculations can also be added on the BO side as needed It is not very appropriate for complex calculations/logic.
Saurabh Raheja | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A best-suited scenario which I experienced in the SAP BO BI platform was the scheduling of the web reports in any format, e.g. PDF, Excel, etc, and getting those delivered to BI Inbox, emails, DLs, etc. at any frequency e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, etc. This will help users to get hold of the latest data and get the output handy within their email whenever they need it. This is turn will help in important decision makings, planning, etc of the organizations. The less appropriate scenario that I faced was creating different user and user groups with respect to location, data involvement, etc. Managing the huge list of user and user groups and assigning appropriate roles, e.g. admin role, read-only role, etc can be a tedious task at one go.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is great if you have many data sources where you need to draw information from. We use it to pull data from the Accounting system universe and the Point of Sale Universe to combine customer, product, and P&L data where needed.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP BI platform provides a good solution to prepare reports spanning a variety of different data sources. Also it has a good number of functions and scope variables that let you introduce complex aggregation. However, it is important to design the universe very carefully and optimized since the reports can get too long to run, even too long to navigate between sub reports.
Ben Williams | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The software is fantastic at pulling data from a wide variety of sources, such as the cloud, servers and even desktops. We have used this to generate reports based on a wide data sample. Whilst we haven't attempted it with the software, it is probably less appropriate to use it for single data sources that have a consistent data set. It's not that I think it couldn't handle it, it's more that it may be overkill for such a straight forward task.
Dariusz Zyskowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Key question: who is the intended audience? Do you want your regular, non technical users to have report creation capabilities? If so, then BO is a way to go. Developers/Power Users can use other BO tools (Design Studio) to create elaborate, more advanced reports, graphs and dashboards.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is well suited for a business analyst who performs basic data analysis and data visualization and output into the report originally through Excel or without too deep understanding of coding or any other data science tool that allows them to perform the analysis in R or Python.
January 28, 2020

SAP BI Review

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP Business Object Business Intelligence (BI) Platform was used in the cases when we wanted to show data in something like a grid or table format. It can be easily understood because it provides summary-like pages along with filters that can help us directly fetch data.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you want to get some tools for business analysts, who are fairly familiar with Excel but easily get intimidated by code and programming, then this tool might be an ideal tool to leverage. However, if you just have a group of data scientists, the tool won’t be needed.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The main functionalities are data extraction, analysis, reporting, and displays. The newer versions seem to offer better usability, especially the cloud version, but my companies were using on-premise versions. Therefore, we didn't have the chance to use any newer functionalities.

I would suggest using the cloud versions because in time new reporting capabilities are introduced. This way after 3 years, users do not need to start using Excel for my reporting purposes.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
BusinessObjects BI can be used to combine data from different sources and report on the semantic objects, well suited for ad-hoc analysis for Business Analysts. It has both conventional reporting tools like webi, crystal reports as well as visualization tools like Dashboards tool.

Coming to ease of creating visualization dashboards, it is bit challenging to use Dashboard tools of BO compared to other tools in the market like Tableau.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I used it mostly for sales and financial reports. It has been adapted perfectly to all the needed sales and cost reports our controllers desired. Able to cross reference the info between different areas and get really useful analysis and KPI's.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used this system to pull inpatient data from various sources. It was nice to use SAP Business Objects BI Platform because they put such a high priority on data security. The privacy of the patient information was incredibly important which is why we went with the platform in the first place. It had to comply with specific HIPAA compliance items and it did the job.
Martin Lopez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is an on premise solution with a lot of history and allows you to solve all kinds of information exploitation needs for different types of users.
April 02, 2019

Why SAP? Why?

Michael Diaz-Suarez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
BI was used to manage our parts and machines. It can be used to manage your factory or systems to properly allocate items to select places. However the system does not respond well, and it can scale well provided you have an actual team knowledgeable in this field. Once you get it set up it works well, but of course, if you try and add new implementations, it can become hazardous to your business.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
One of the things I like about BusinessObjects is that, as a BI manager, I can help varying levels of users. For example, if I have a user that has no interest/technical skill, I can build up a universe, create an InfoSpace, and design some view sets. If the user is more advanced, maybe I just need to build the universe and let them play with the view sets. Users can insert themselves in the BI process where they feel comfortable.

I dislike that there has traditionally not been a good method of restoring a single item when a user accidentally over-engineers it or deletes it altogether. And until recently, there hasn't been any kind of versioning. If there is much customization of the environment, it takes a little more effort to upgrade an existing environment or stage a new one.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP Business Objects is well suited for mid to large enterprise environments. It can handle multiple data types from almost any different source. It can be overly complex and expensive for a small organization or an organization new to BI. Microsoft's Business Intelligence may be a more realistic option for some customers.
Tim Dorscher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is a graphical way of getting to the data housed in an SAP Warehouse. It allows users without specific database knowledge to access the data they require and manipulate it in other tools they may be more familiar with. It serves a function and it does that reasonably well. However, it is not the most intuitive platform for new users if that is your audience.
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