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.
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Popular Features
- Drill-down analysis (45)9.090%
- Multi-User Support (named login) (46)9.090%
- Customizable dashboards (45)8.181%
- Report Formatting Templates (45)7.777%
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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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- No setup fee
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
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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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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 Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) and 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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Reviews and Ratings
(842)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-7 of 7)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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).
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.
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.
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is being used to host reports created in Lumira and Analysis for Office, to enable the creation, storage, and sharing of data and reports. Our most comfortable state is having someone centrally refreshing reports, saving them to a share point and then sending the link to their organization, so the BI Platform has a big opportunity for productivity savings and a better UX! It's being used globally across all areas of Business Planning and some accounting.
- The fact that you are able to work offline on creating reports and then, within the local client, be able to upload it to the BI Platform and continue editing from the local client, while connected to the BI Platform
- Separation of end user (BI Launchpad) and management/administration (Central Management Console) access points
- Interoperability with other SAP products (e.g. Lumira, FIORI, AA)
- The "FIORI-fied" BI Launchpad still has limited functionality which causes us not to leverage it. It is important to have a consistent UI look and feel for our users but we cannot sacrifice functionality. Therefore we don't have users access the BI Launchpad, we just link them from FIORI, directly to the reports.
- We've found it very hard to find answers to very simple questions (e.g. what is the best approach for security model, bearing in mind the size of our organization). Both directly with SAP and via third-party contractors, we have struggled to find answers quickly, and sometimes at all...
- As with all SAP products, they constantly change their recommendation. One minute, the BI Platform is the way forward and we should invest everything into this, and then the next it is SAP Analytics Cloud, and BI Platform will become obsolete.
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.
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
November 04, 2014
SAP Business Objects: Easy-to-Deploy Great Looking Management-Level and Routine Enterprise-Wide Reporting
It is being used by the Financial Reporting team to write and burst operating metric reports to chief decision makers who do not want to "touch" the ERP Accounting system. It is used primarily for all producers in the organization and used by the Managing Director team. Addresses issues of usability and ease of use in getting key metrics quickly into decision makers' hands.
- It leverages existing data stores well to pull into SAP BO universes.
- It bursts reports via email in the form of PDF or Webi files very well.
- It is easy to build new reports from the ground up with extensive functionality within the report.
- Would be nice to more easily combine databases from disparate sources together into one universe.
- I wish there were more pre-built graphs and charts.
- Personalization parameters to filter reports to certain groups of users could be improved upon; kind of cludgy in our version.