SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Reviews

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.

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.

SAP BI is more compatible with SAP Business Warehouse (of course - same SAP). It has a direct connection to SAP BW while the other software might need some queries adjustments to enable this direct connection.

It has a larger capacity in loading huge amount of data and does better calculations. So if you need a lot of calculations with SAP BW data, the program is the best.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Crystal Reports has the most features that we need for our custom and purpose built reports.

An upgrade to SAP BW/4HANA could be considered to get better performance. But if performance is not a huge problem, SAP BusinessObjects BI is a good solution on-premise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MySQL is great but we found that SAP user interface was cleaner and more efficient. Tying the various areas of data together was much more straightforward.

SAP BusinessObjects is the only system of its kind that I've tried.

It is unlike any other platform.

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.

Some organizations use Spotfire which is far more advanced in terms of its analytical capabilities vs. Lumira/PA etc. but the sharing/storage side of the BI Platform is far superior and much better managed. The ability to create user groups, access levels etc. on BI Platform helps to keep the platform secure.

On a different company level, we have been using the MS PowerBI platform, a package with a great usability - quickly deployable and easy to use from the beginning. Used the Azure cloud option (needless to say that in a paid version). The main difference would be a scale of usage, however. The Power BI visualizations were really easy to use which is the main difference ...

ThoughtSpot is superior for query speed and simplicity but is inferior in merged-dimension query setup and execution. BOBJ is superior to Tableau in that the universes simplify the queries for the end-user, however, it's inferior in visualizations. decisionpoint is a dashboard tool with potential but is still new. However, decisionpoint is superior in building dashboards on limited technical resources and varying database platforms.

When we did the implementation in 2005, BusinessObjects was by far the most advanced transactional level analytical query engine that was available.

I have worked on different BI tools in the market and could not find any other tool that was better and more powerful than SAP BusinessObjects.