SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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