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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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19 people also want pricing

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 8.0

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 65)
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
Microsoft's Power BI has certainly gained a lot of attention and became a leader in Gartner's magic quadrant. This is certainly a good product for average data volume which can be handled in the cloud, however, SAP BI is capable of handling much more data with complex reporting requirements.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP Business Objects have better security model than Tableau. One can setup a lot of security permissions as compared to a tool like Tableau. Tableau is good for creating visualizations/dashboards but not very great for operational reporting. Scheduling features are much better in SAP Business Objects as compared to Tableau. Tableau definitely provides better dashboarding capabilities when compared to Business Objects. Tableau is also great when you want to interact and explore the data for analysis. They both are different BI solutions and serves different use cases.
Saurabh Raheja | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When we get the installation of the SAP BO BI Platform done on one of the BO servers, we get a whole of stacks of SAP BO BI suite tools installed. This is a package that has reporting tools inside it. For instance, web intelligence-rich clients, SAP Crystal reports, etc. We can get the development done by using these BO reporting tools. We selected the SAP BO BI Platform in our organization because of its less licensing cost and reporting tools being more user-friendly. This helps our organization in proper decision making, planning, and scheduling of web reports which helps in the growth of the organization
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Board
Board is a great ERP software. Business Objects is more nimble and flexible. Board is good if the Dash Boards and screens are relatively static and have selection/filter options. Business Objects is if you do lots of ad-hoc analysis and reporting on the fly.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As we have been using SAP ERP, having SAP BI was one of the key factors in our choice. Also design efficiency, variety of data sources' integration and document versioning gave better advantages to SAP BI over others. Also adding SAP BI during the SAP ERP rollout provided cost efficiency for the tool.
Dariusz Zyskowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We recently evaluated Oracle's OBIEE solution.

Strengths: very good dashboard creating tool and two separate ad hoc modules: one for simple reporting ("Analysis") and one for more advanced, "Pixel Perfect" reports ("BI Publisher). All available from the same place and web based (no client needed). Also, there is no separate license needed.

BO has a separate module (additional license) to create dashboards and only one reporting tool, that does have certain limitations when it comes to advanced report creation.

Weaknesses: hard to administer, as OBIEE is part of the entire Oracle deployment, so you would have to use multiple tools: EM and Web Logic consoles.

BO is administered via single console CMC (Central Management Console)

OBIEE's GUI looks like from the late 90's. Very congested and not very user friendly. BO Webi is just the opposite.
Dharmesh Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MicroStrategy Analytics and IBM Cognos Analytics is costlier compared to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform stacks. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform stacks is user friendly, easy to adapt, easy to train resources and get them productive. SOA architecture and platform scalability adds to it.

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Even though all these tools are very similar to each other, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform does have better integration with the database than other competitors such as Microsoft Power BI. On the side of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform you also have very a good data visualization ability that matches with its competitors.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAP BO BI is very similar to Microsoft Power BI. However, SAP BO BI is much stronger in terms of analytics and document management while Power bI is stronger in data visualization and big data integration. SAP BO BI is a great tool within its ally, which is performance analysis and organization monitoring.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
There is no special differentiation point. My companies were using SAP as their main ERP and therefore using the SAP BO BI for reporting and analysis purposes. Some reports were defined to be released periodically but these reports were needed for day to day information. We needed Excel and Power BI to make the data nicer to present.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Earlier, I used SAP BW's BEx tools for reporting, but it was challenging to format the report data and export to different formats. SAP BEx tools can access data from limited sources where as SAP BO can access data from most of the datasources which is why I prefer using BO over other products.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We tried Yellowfin BI but it did not work for our business model. It was nice and the user-experience was good but ultimate we sided with SAP Business Objects BI Platform because the visual reports that were produced were simple and easy to understand. We need that level of simplicity for our executive team and for our clients.
October 28, 2019

BI Platform Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Crystal was part of the platform prior to my tenure. Explorer has always had a limited use case. I helped drive the conversation for Visual Intelligence and by the time we acted, it turned into Lumira which can't hold a candle to Tableau or Power BI.
Martin Lopez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is an on premise solution that allows you to display information hosted on an SAP BW / 4 HANA server.
SAP Analytics Cloud is SAP's business intelligence solution that works in the cloud and is complemented by SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform.
Some features of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform are integrated with SAP Data Services, for example user authentication.
April 02, 2019

Why SAP? Why?

Michael Diaz-Suarez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sometimes configuration is challenging (unless you are also very familiar with setting up Java VMs). I like the meta-data layer design tool. I like that there are thick and thin versions of the tools users use. Users at this point try to build a report themselves rather than immediately asking me to do it (which is a small miracle). I did end up having to use a third-party tool to make me feel safe about backups and versioning (because at the time I started using BusinessObjects, there was no recycle bin or version management) but in general I'm happy with the product and am not looking for a replacement solution.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently have implementations of both Microsoft BI and SAP Business Objects so our enterprise has found reasons for both. Some users prefer BI over SAP and it depends on the department they are working for. SAP was chosen for the more complex tasks that require large data sets and its ability to help its users visualize the data and plan for the future.
Tim Dorscher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use the platform as it is all that is available to me. I have no ability to query the warehouse directly probably for good reason. I have been using PowerBI and I know it can connect to the warehouse and do the query and visualization in real time. However, our admins will not allow that and force SAP Business Objects on us. It makes the aggregating of the data phase more time consuming and you end up having to run three different platforms to create reports. At least in our case, SAP Business Objects is slow and it is prone to crashing during a query.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
That was the best alternative that could connect to our ERP instances. The availability of SAP Rapid Marts that could be leveraged to pull data models for specific SAP areas such as Sales tables, Production, Maintenance, and others was also a very important differentiation. Along with the ability to easily and consistently simplify the data models from SAP and combine with other datasets from other apps.
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