Great SAP data analytics product
SAP Business Objects and Business Intelligence is one of the flagship products of SAP. I remember the BW days and then the acquisition of …
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.
Recent Reviews
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
- Drill-down analysis (45)9.090%
- Multi-User Support (named login) (46)8.989%
- Customizable dashboards (45)8.181%
- Report Formatting Templates (45)7.777%
Pricing
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
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
22 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…
Features
Return to navigation
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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
- Microsoft BI (MSBI)
- Tableau Desktop
- MicroStrategy
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Apple 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 Application | No |
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).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(843)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 40)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
July 27, 2022
Great SAP data analytics product
SAP Business Objects and Business Intelligence is one of the flagship products of SAP. I remember the BW days and then the acquisition of BO and eventually the rollout of the new SAP data analytics platform i.e. BI. The product is good for large data volumes, month-end closings, analytical analysis, generating 360-degree reports, handling workload, managing process chain, etc. However more the data, more the memory needed.
- Analytics
- Continuous refresh of reports
- Easy customizations using ABAP
- Memory requirements
- Hardware requirements
- Continuous operational support
January 10, 2022
SAP BO - Great for Operational Reporting
SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio is used to create reports for different business users as per their requirement. The logic is built on the backend through SQL. Business Objects is used to schedule the report at a fixed frequency as well as to provide the same to business users for an Adhoc use.
- Scheduling of Reports
- Formatting the report as per business requirements
- Good user interface for users and developers
- Not able to paste multiple values without semi-colon while filtering the data. Adding semi-colon makes the functionality difficult to use.
- User interface can be improved
- It is costly
- The performance of the report decreases if complex logic/functions are added
December 21, 2021
SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
the product is used to manage applications and dashboards created for various organizations which use the corporate data warehouse along with SAP
- visualize data
- enable interactions
- real-time connectivity
- browser crashes sometimes
December 20, 2021
SAP BusinesssObjects Business Intelligence Review by Saurabh Raheja
SAP BO BI Platform can be used for reporting purposes. There are reporting tools available within this suite e.g. Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, etc. These reporting tools help us to develop reports on top of the data available in the database. We can build interactive and beautiful visualizations which help the organization in decision makings. Getting hold of meaningful data in the vast scope of backend data and displaying that in form of interactive reports and visualization help the organization in planning, decision making, and overall growth of the organization. These are the scope of the use case of the SAP BI BO Platform. One can even schedule the reports to get the reports delivered to their email, BI Inbox at any frequency like daily, weekly, monthly, and so on and so forth.
- Maintaining users and user groups in CMC.
- Scheduling Web Reports through CMC to get reports delivered to emails at any given frequency.
- Maintaining roles and securities for different users, users group and BO servers
- Regarding improvement, there is very little scope now as it has already grown up so well from BO BI 3.1 to BO BI 4.0, then BO BI 4.1, then BO BI 4.2 and now the latest is BO BI 4.3
- One improvement I can think of is that it can go on the cloud. For example, a physical box may not be required for the installation of SAP BI BO.
December 14, 2021
SAP Business Objects is a must have for your organisations Reporting and Analysis needs
SAP Bi reporting tool is our companies primary software for Reporting and Analysis. I use it heavily daily and have done it for over a decade. It's highly nimble and allows me to connect to various data sources that have been set up. I can connect and report on Financial values from our Accounting System to our Point of Sale data that holds key sales and product information. Our Account system does not hold detailed product level information but is good for P&L Reporting by Centre and Divisional level. For stock level and margin data, we use Business Objects to build custom reports and conduct various analyses from the required data source.
- Connects to various data sources
- Excellent for building adhoc reports and doing analysis on the fly
- The scheduling and publication functions are great time savers and allow us to manage many regular and recurring reports.
- At the moment we are experiencing some performance issues, but this may be down to our own companies network/infrastructure and not the BI tool
- The older Client version I thought was more stable than the 4.2 web-based version. But this again could be down to the companies network/infrastructure
SAP Business Object Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is used widely in our company across departments like Finance, Planning and Sales. Due to the different software solutions have been implemented in different business units, a tool should be available to combine different data sources to produce management and operational reports. Currently this tool is SAP BI in our organization.
- It has a good capability of combining a variety of different data sources like ODBC, Excel, SQL Server, text, etc.
- Design is relatively straightforward and is flexible enough to let different functions be used in different scopes (whole report, section of a report, etc) to create parts, combining data from different sources.
- There are different design interfaces like HTML, applet and rich client which may be handy in different circumstances.
- Scheduling of the report updates help you organize timing of your report activities.
- Although limited, comparison of the updated report with its previous data is a good feature.
- Adding complex functions and calculations may significantly slow down the reports.
- Comparison of the report data histories could be extended. Currently you can only compare your report with only previous run but not with any older versions.
- Web, applet and rich clients UI's do not always have the same design functions available, for example.
- You may find yourself unable to export multiple reports at the same time in web interface where you can do it in the rich client interface.
- More flexibility in report design could be helpful such as copying report sections between different reports, multi select and modifications of sub reports, etc.
- Drilldown could be improved . For example, a feature to export drilldown structure to Excel or faster drilldown would help a lot.
April 22, 2021
SAP BO and I: A love story
SAP is currently used by a single department but for data that is pulled business-wide. We integrate the date of various departments and create reports in order to find out any casuality issues across the business as well as to determine if changes in one area are having the desired effect across the business. It addresses an issue we had with data being difficult to link together across large areas of the business to see if the data held by one department could be used to make savings in another.
- Ingest data from multiple areas of the business and use them to generate easy to understand reports.
- Report scheduling is simple and efficient allowing the team to run reports at a variety of different times to suit the stakeholder's needs.
- The metalayer takes away some of the complexities of other programs, allowing the end user to interact with the program in a clean and efficient way.
- We have had some difficulty linking up with data in some of our web portals. This has caused a large amount of development time, and support has been less than its usual helpful self in this regard.
- Older versions had functions which have now been removed, or replaced with less effecient functions. For example the HTML output option.
- Some configuration issues have arisen when we have attempted to configure API'S. Some require a JDBC connection, which was slightly more difficult than expected.
December 09, 2020
SAP Business Objects: Review by a Grumpy Old Customer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP Business Objects has been a primary BI/Reporting solution for the City of Chicago for the past 14 years. It is being used by all city departments to report off practically all city databases. Available to all city employees via Web Intelligence module, it provides simple AdHoc capabilities, as well as advanced options for power users and developers.
- Simplicity. It is very easy for a non technical user to create and format a report in Web Intelligence. This is especially true with the new 4.1 release.
- Report distribution. Several options available, such as FTP, File Location, BO Inbox and Email. Each is very intuitive and simple to use without any confusing, very technical options (ex. Oracle's OBIEE).
- Scheduling. This is a very important feature that is being used a lot here at the city (over 700 scheduled reports run every night). Very robust scheduling engine that can be easily configured and adjusted by the administrator if needed.
- Service Pack/Fix Pack reliability. Each SP/FP fixes certain bugs, but unfortunately sometimes messes up other features (problematic upgrade from TOMCAT 5 to 7) which can be very frustrating. That is why we carefully test every one of them in our DEV environment before promoting it to Production/
- JAVA vulnerability. It appears SAP is slow with latest JAVA client (needed for Web Intelligence report creation/edit) support. This creates issues when users update their JAVA release to the latest version, which is not yet supported by SAP resulting in error messages.
- Internal reporting on Business Objects environment. You can report against user activity (from the audit tables), but there is no build in tool/capability to report on BO content, users, security environment which is very helpful for the administrators. Third party expensive tools are needed (APOS).
December 01, 2020
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Review
We have currently deployed SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform in our company for Analytics reporting on SAP Concur Modules. We also deploy SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform for our customer to address their business needs and provide cognitive analytical solution
- SOA Service Oriented architecture
- Architecture scaling and deployment can be managed easily, clustering nodes and servers to give scalability
- User friendly administration modules
- User friendly reporting modules like Web Intelligence, SAP Lumira, SAC
- Strong semantic layer supporting multi-source database
- Waterfall model design is used
- Need to compete with Agile architecture and design
- Quick turn time like Modern BI agile tools
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP BO BI is widely used in my organization since it is a tool that does not require an understanding of coding and provides a good supplement to support tools such as Excel and pivot tables. It is a good tool for a business analyst to do reporting and data visualization.
- Nice visualization.
- Nice reporting.
- Integrated system.
- Required java.
- Based on Adobe.
- Stability.
December 14, 2019
SAP offers a sufficient tool with their BI Platform
SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform was used for analytical reporting within the Strategy, Marketing, Operations, and Finance departments. It is used like a front-end tool to data ware systems in the back-end to query data and make analysis. It has a built-in reporting display mechanism but we have been using it for generally extracting data. Even though the report displays are getting
better and better every day, Excel, MS Power BI reports are better.
- Data extraction.
- Connection to the SAP universe via a good front-end.
- Should be cheaper.
- It is not easy to learn.
October 30, 2019
Get over the set-up hump and you are in the clear!
When working in pharma marketing there are a lot of different platforms that produce massive amounts of data from many different locations, SAP Business Objects BI Platform acts as the centralized hub for the synthesis of all of that information and spits out easy to digest reports containing insights that can be shared with all levels of the business.
- Real-time business intelligence.
- Data consumption is super simple.
- Integrations with Microsoft office.
- The price is high.
- Initial implementation could be easier.
- Customer support wasn't what we expected and could use some work.
October 28, 2019
BI Platform Review
Used throughout the enterprise. Crystal reports are used to dump data into other home-grown solutions.
- Easy access to fully developed reports
- Ability to schedule report output to different destination types.
- Platform administration.
- Stability. Servers go down, memory leaks.
- Support is better than five years ago, but still doesn't measure up.
April 02, 2019
Why SAP? Why?
SAP BI was used for our office to gauge manufacturing and product analytics. It was supposed to solve the problem we had with our business portion of our software. However after deployment, we quickly found out it was not so easy. It was used in manufacturing and parts management.
- It has a great way of displaying information.
- It's affordable.
- It can scale well provided you have good support.
- The interface looks like it's something out of 1999.
- Customer support is horrible and honestly it's a lottery any time you call.
- The system crashes constantly.
February 23, 2019
SAP BO - Top rated BI system in a multinational organization
I have used BusinessObjects for over 2.5 years now. It is great tool for scripting and developing reports. It has easy drag and drop options to select what variable you want in your final report. If you have large number of facilities and have data stored in multiple universes, it allows you to create a combined query and get final report from multiple universes. You can send your scripts to other individuals within your team. For any recurring reports, you can schedule them and they run whenever you've set them to run. It has some amazing quick filters that can be used while writing your script that allows you get tailored results.
- 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.
- There is a learning curve to understand how to use the queries/objects and decide which data to pull, so there is training required.
- Some of the "result objects" also do not pull data but that is likely due to our internal data, not Business objects itself.
- The tool's license are expensive but you get what you pay for. SAP's business tool licenses in general have never been cheap but that ensures you get proper product support whenever needed.
February 13, 2019
SAP Business Objects is a complex but valuable tool.
SAP Business Objects platform is currently in use by two departments across our enterprise with a total of about 200 people. These departments take requests from businesses across the enterprise and work with them to generate reports based off of criteria that the business decides. The whole organization benefits from Business Objects.
- It is a very flexible platform with many different add-ons that provide lots of different functionality.
- If configured and installed correctly it can be a very robust and dependable platform for the business.
- It has the ability to handle almost all types of data sources you can throw at it.
- 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.
I use it to gather data from our SAP Warehouse to report out our financial information and high and low performing/selling products. It allows us to gather that data and put it into Excel where we can then use other tools to create visualizations of the data in our monthly, quarterly and yearly reports.
- Allows significant customization and filtering of the data when creating reports.
- Is an easy, relatively user-friendly way of accessing the data.
- No SQL or other programming languages needed for queries.
- The interface is old and unintuitive. The tooltips are helpful but for someone new to it there is little help in where to begin and what to do
- This may be our systems but it is slow when querying our data.
- For some reason when exporting the data, if I choose reports it never exports ALL the data so I am not sure what function that option is supposed to provide.
November 19, 2018
SAP Quality Engineer Review
SAP BusinessObjects is currently being used by several departments within my company. In the case of my department (Quality), it is used to produce purchase order reports based on the material or supplier being investigated.
- PO Reports by Supplier and Material
- Stock Overview reports
- Processing of POs
- Needs to work on the user interface. It is not particularly user friendly
- No support on Mac computers
April 03, 2018
Business Objects for Self-Service and AdHoc reporting
SAP BI Platform is used for front end reporting at our organization. It is used across entire organization. BusinessObjects' set of tools are connecting with several data sources like SAP BW, AWS, Oracle, SAP HANA etc.
- Easy, user friendly set of tools specially WebI.
- Different set of applications to support different reporting needs such as WebI, Crystal etc.
- SAP BI platform can connect to several different data sources.
- Try to combine Crystal reports for Enterprise and Crystal Reports 2013.
- Analysis for Office can be more standardized. It faces issues with different versions of Excel and operating systems.
- Some user friendly dash boarding tool can be introduced.
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is being used by our supply chain group as well as our sales team primarily, but other management teams also access some modules of SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform in order to support Supply Chain and Sales groups. It is a long way and still on-going process, but we had to first consolidate all business workflows into SAP first which took several years globally. Then next was to implement the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform in North America first to ensure the bugs are worked out before deploying it across the globe over Citrix for all teams to use globally but our data and application remain centralized in North America.
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is powerful and the reports are excellent, as long as your organization is dedicated to consolidate all processes into SAP.
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, when installed centralized and published via remote access tool like Citrix, can be accessed anywhere while data is secure at central location.
- For a BI tool SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is much more user-friendly than offerings from Oracle.
- Dashboard access for leadership is excellent and updates are continually improving the product.
- Implementation of SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform requires large capital investment.
- User training tools provided by SAP for SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is lacking interactive content. Improved user training material with version updates would be very helpful for implementation and continuous education.
- Managing version upgrades and hotfixes for SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform with more control to users to have time to plan for upgrades.
June 11, 2016
SAP BIP what is it and what can it do?
The SAP Business Intelligence Platform is an enterprise solution for the distribution, and analysis of business decision making content. We have it deployed on premise and in the cloud as our primary reporting business analytical tool. It managed through the product development life cycle (Development,Test and Production). Web based access is provided from any location secured by Active Directory Single Sign On.
- Online report development [for] a query. Business Objects uses a Symantec layer to turn the complex underlying data to user identifiable objects for business queries. This makes it a good choice for self service environments.
- Is has robust built in security that is can be customized and granular down to the object level. It also has integrated security modules that [can be] utilized with third party security interfaces.
- The base platform can be scaled horizontally and vertically to meet growing demand on Windows or Linux.
- A suite of developer tools are also incorporated with the base platform to provide the use of the right tool for the required task.
- The Platform Search tool can be troublesome to establish in a clustered deployment.
- Issues that are repaired in on release, should not resurface in a future release. This is rare but annoying when it occurs.
- Some of the developer tools require more documentation that what is provided.
June 10, 2016
Awesome tool for reporting and dashboards.........
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP Business Objects is used by our entire organization. It helps resolve complex reporting issues. We use this tool for ad-hoc reporting, sales analytics reporting and supply chain reporting. It also helps us manage a large group of user base in an enterprise environment. It does support creation of reports for all the sales hierarchy from sales rep to management.
- Connecting to multiple sources irrespective of whether it is SAP or non SAP.
- IT, HR, Finance and Sales reporting.
- New intutive look to develop reports, charts and static and dynamic dashboards.
- Customer support, I think for any tool based issue I face on a daily bases often times requires a ticket to be opened for SAP which sometimes takes forever for resolution.
- The process of educating developers when a new feature(s) have been introduced should be made easy.
- Time for a resolution from SAP should be faster.
March 12, 2016
My experience with SAP BO
As an IT consult and working for a consulting firm, we typically consult other organizations on SAP and inmost cases we help them to implement and deploy SAP. Sometimes clients do not have a lot of experience with SAP products especially with SAP Business Objects. So our job is to provide support and guide them to better understand the language of SAP.
- SAP Business Objects reduces total cost of ownership (TCO0 which gives advantage to a better performance and scalability.
- BI platform.
- Data exploration.
- It can cost a lot of money to implement SAP business objects.
- It can be a little hard to understand the software and the way SAP business objects works.
- You will need to have plenty of servers to make SAP Business Objects work.
February 22, 2016
Know why customers go for Business Objects
SAP Business Objects is used by data stewards in following departments: Marketing, Finance, Business Development, Corporate etc. It is used across the whole organization. It provides data for functional and operational decision systems.
- Various tools to implement end to end BI, for example: ETL, Reporting, Dashboarding
- Good connectivity with CRM, ECC and other SAP systems etc
- Data Security, Visually intuitive, Ease of use
- Webi, Rich Client, SAP Dashboard, Crystal Reports reporting tool to cover needs of a variety of users
- SAP should provide free software and licenses for students
- SAP Extractors are designed by third party, so no support for those
- Reporting with no semantec layer
March 10, 2015
SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 for use in Ambulatory Healthcare
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.