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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 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

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Nathan Patrick Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • The product is a great central platform for BI needs.
  • User can be setup to have access to specific data elements.
  • Reports and documents can be published and pushed out to each user.
  • The software can be distributed via a central server rather than maintain software on each user's computer.
  • The software typically requires training to use and is not very intuitive.
  • The security setup is difficult to learn and understand.
  • There have been some compatibility issues when connecting to the latest non-SAP data sources.
  • Updating and upgrading the software is not easy.
Microsoft/Caradigm Amalga
Tableau
Qlikview
iDashboards
Microstrategy

SAP offered the most complete package. We were looking for a platform that gave us ETL tools, reporting, dashboards, and security.
We may end up switching to Microsoft's BI stack as we use a Microsoft's PDW appliance which is not fully compatible with SAP BusinessObjects.
  • We use the product to measure performance. High performance equates to higher reimbursements rates in our industry.
  • Cleaner, more reliable data.
  • The product is used as our primary BI platform.
  • We use Crystal Reports for end user reporting.
  • SAP Dashboards for our monthly performance improvement dashboards.
  • Web intelligence for ad-hoc data reports and exploration.
  • Data services is used to move data from our production system to our data warehouse.
We did not previously own a BI solution.
  • Implemented in-house
The product requires hardware that is spec'd a bit higher than the vendor's recommendation.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
Great training with hand-on labs.
SAP's training is excellent, though it is expensive.
The product is not easy to use without training. I'd recommend that anyone who implements BusinessObjects receive training on each component.
No
We have not found SAP's support to be particularly useful.
The support system is difficult to use.
AJ Senff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Highly flexible reporting environment. Easy to write your own reports.
  • Business Objects was fair at Budgeting. It allowed a lot of flexibility in creating a budget that meets the customized needs of any organization, but along with that it can be clunky and a little difficult to use. I would say the reporting ability was much better than the budgeting capability.
  • Another aspect that this product does well is that it allows endless ways to consolidate different business units, departments, sites, etc. You can roll up a region, district, certain departments, etc. easily. This was a major advantage to my role overseeing 30+ hospital sites.
  • SRC had a delay in information until the month's operations officially closed and the data was fed into the system. Other products that I have used allow you to see activity throughout the month. Knowing that it isn’t final, you can still get a sense of how revenues/expenses are stacking up for the month, etc. In addition, other operational metrics, like Average Daily Census, Admissions, etc. should be able to be tracked daily, rather than having to wait until the month is over.
I enjoyed this program and felt it met the needs of my role and my organization.
  • NA
200
Across the board - IT, operational, financial, clinical
1
One main person provided support for SRC. This was not enough, mainly just because of questions about writing reports, where a certain report was, etc.
  • To report on financial and operational results.
  • Used for budgeting evaluation and projecting financial results.
  • Used for daily/weekly tracking of pertinent operational metrics.
No
NA
  • Don't know
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
This is more a function of the training I received from the systems experts in my organization, not training from Business Objects/SAP. The training was rushed, without an agenda, and didn’t meet my needs as a user.
I would not recommend using the product without some sort of training. It is important to learn the coding language to write reports in this product.
I did not use customer support.
Not Sure
I could train users to use the Business Warehouse within an hour or two. Also very easy to create reports and send web links to view the report. Exporting to Excel/Word/etc. was very simple and had good formatting.
Very long reports in SRC would take a long time to run (several minutes). However, shorter reports could be run quickly.
  • Business Warehouse
  • Business Explorer
  • SAP
Unsure. I did not integrate.
  • SalesForce.com
NA
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • I would score an 8 if reporting on a relational database - performance is good and the product works well.
  • Features and options are good. It can cater to many different use cases, depending on end-user requirements.
  • The suite contains multiple tools - OLAP, Explorer, Dashboards. It's highly versatile with a great variety of tool-sets. It doesn't force people to do things one way using a single tool.
  • However, continuing problems in reporting against an OLAP database reduce the overall score to a 6.
  • BW / Business Objects integration: SAP has more work to do here. Version 4.0 has removed major obstacles in stability, but we still have a lot of performance issues. The Business Objects features have been limited by the BW background. I would give this a score of 5 overall.
  • SAP is pushing an in-memory database solution - HANA. SAP resources are focused on moving BW to HANA database. I believe BO performance will improve significantly as a result of this. We want to re-evaluate our data warehousing strategy, middle of next year. We are going on two paths currently. We want to take a step back and re-evaluate if SAP has a better solution.
  • Dashboard tool sub-standard relative to Tableau. Takes weeks to get working vs. days in Tableau to build.
  • Mobile compatibility is far ahead in Tableau.
  • From the admin perspective, Business Objects is not fine tuned out of the box.
  • Rolling out support packages is not disciplined -sometimes every 2 weeks, sometimes every 2 months.
  • No good alerting and monitoring systems.
  • No handshake to BW - e.g. send something on a trigger basis from another system to Business Objects.
  • Sales - helps track revenue, shipments, pay commissions to reps.
  • Operations - usability of tool is good - one common repository for every body to see reports. This really is a one-stop-shop for reporting.
  • Inter-operability of analysis views.
We will likely make this decision at the end of next year. We have 2 paths. We have to determine how we consolidate our various data warehouses, and what are the enterprise promoted tools. Most of the operations reports are in the WebI ad-hoc reporting tool, and we don't have any complaints about them.
300
Operations Finance Sales
2
One is a DBA, the other is SAP Basis person.
  • Operations: We use Business Objects to create operational reports on manufacturing processes. We pull data from SAP ERP into BW and then report on that data.
  • Finance: We bring in data from SAP ERP to BW and report using the native BW reporting tool called BusinessExporer (BEx). This has all GL information, and we use a profitability analysis tool called CO-PA (cost and profitability analysis) to track revenue, and sales goals.
  • Sales:we pull data from all systems - SAP ERP, Salesforce.com, SAP CRM - and bring the data intoto BW, for where we report on it using Business Objects. We use Business Objects to build pipeline reports, revenue reports, shipment reports. and also to track the revenue quarter to quarter. We have another system called Adexa Collaborative Demand Planning (CDP) - for trend analysis and forecasts.
  • We are not using Salesforce as revenue system. Everything related to revenue has to come from SAP. Primary report that SAP is looking for is revenue. We collect all data from transactional systems into BW.
We were using the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) for reporting, visualization etc.
Originally, Business Objects was implemented before I joined. When we had issues with Business Objects Version 3, we evaluated: 1) Tableau - This is a great product, really rich/appealing, and good mobile finctionality, but the price and the ETL functionality were issues. Allso performance of Tableau against OLAP data was not that good. It was much better against relational databases. 2) SQL BI - This had most of the features looking for. We have started to use SQL BI tools - not in production, we are stilltesting. We are not using with OLAP - we bring data from BW and store in a SQL data mart, stage, transform if required, model, then report. - Finance still using old SAP BW tools. - Operations is using BO 4.0 - Another group using Business Objects 3.1, and is going to try out SQL BI tools We also evaluated another product called Greenplum (acquired by EMC). This has no front end to it, and is essentially a data warehouse.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Implemented in-house
  • Professional services company
For both 3.1 and 4.0 implementation was a combination of us and SAP Professional Services. Tool implementation is overall pretty easy. In addition to SAP, we hired another consulting company to help audit and troubleshoot. They didn't find anything wrong with what we were doing - although we were experiencing some issues.
  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
I haven't used it or got feedback from the end user. Content looks to be pretty detailed. Focused on SQL but not BW.
We learned through on the job training as administrators. End users learn through documentation, online training and classroom training that we put on. We put on a class whenever we roll out a new report.
Yes
Seeing how difficult the tool is to keep up and running, our CIO decided to do this.
Initial level of support is normal. Used to respond quickly, now less so. Quality seems to be degrading a little. Level of expertise - sometimes it takes months to get to the right level of information, sometimes it can be fairly quick. On average it's pretty fast compared to other SAP tools. Business Objects support is better than that for other SAP products.
If end users are trained enough, this tool is pretty slick. People can create reports without too much trouble. Training is a very important component to use the tool. Most training is pretty straightforward. Classroom training comprises 3-4 sessions or two weeks of orientation.
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
Highly contingent on source database.
  • SAP Business Warehouse
  • SQL relational database tool called Planview
Data from SAP CRM, etc, into BW.
  • SAP ERP directly
SAP has given a few direct integration points for specific use cases. This helps us to avoid ETL processes.
It's tough.They are very bureaucratic - there's no one person to go to who can directly help us .We have a service coordinator - every meeting has 10 people. No dedicated technical account manager.
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