SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
Overview
Recent Reviews
Awards
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Popular Features
View all 28 featuresPixel Perfect reports (42)
9.1
91%
Customizable dashboards (43)
8.7
87%
Report Formatting Templates (43)
8.3
83%
Multi-User Support (named login) (43)
8.1
81%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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Pricing
View all pricingEntry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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Features Scorecard
BI Standard Reporting
8.7
87%
Ad-hoc Reporting
8.8
88%
Report Output and Scheduling
9.3
93%
Data Discovery and Visualization
8.9
89%
Access Control and Security
8.8
88%
Mobile Capabilities
9.3
93%
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
9.0
90%
Product Details
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform?
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 (BI) Platform Features
- Supported: Reporting and analysis
- Supported: Data visualization and analytics applications
- Supported: Office integration
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Competitors
- Microsoft BI (MSBI)
- Tableau Desktop
- MicroStrategy
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform 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 |
Comparisons
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform?
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.
What are SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform's top competitors?
Microsoft BI (MSBI) and Tableau Desktop are common alternatives for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform.
What is SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform's best feature?
Reviewers rate Delivery to Remote Servers highest, with a score of 9.5.
Who uses SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform?
The most common users of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees) and the Information Technology & Services industry.
Reviews and Ratings
 (783)
Reviews
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December 20, 2021
SAP BusinesssObjects Business Intelligence Review by Saurabh Raheja
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
December 14, 2021
SAP Business Objects is a must have for your organisations Reporting and Analysis needs
- 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.
September 20, 2021
Business Insights at Your Fingertips
I'd say they are on a par with each other. AppD definitely provides very technical insights, whereas BI provides better business reports.
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.
April 22, 2021
SAP BO and I: A love story
December 09, 2020
SAP Business Objects: Review by a Grumpy Old Customer
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.
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.
December 01, 2020
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform Review
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.
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.
January 28, 2020
SAP BI Review
December 25, 2019
A good tool for a business analyst
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.
December 14, 2019
SAP offers a sufficient tool with their BI Platform
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.
December 10, 2019
Possibly the best reporting tool you can have.
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.
October 30, 2019
Get over the set-up hump and you are in the clear!
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
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.
October 25, 2019
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform - The corporate on-premise solution from SAP
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.
September 18, 2019
On-Demand Reporting Made Easy
Crystal Reports has the most features that we need for our custom and purpose built reports.
April 02, 2019
Why SAP? Why?
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.
February 23, 2019
SAP BO - Top rated BI system in a multinational organization
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.
February 13, 2019
SAP Business Objects is a complex but valuable tool.
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.
January 29, 2019
SAP Business Objects to Empower the Enterprise Data Consumption
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.
It is unlike any other platform.
November 19, 2018
SAP Quality Engineer Review
SAP BusinessObjects is the only system of its kind that I've tried.