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 …
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform
Overview
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.
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Top Rated
2020
Popular Features
View all 28 features- Multi-User Support (named login) (44)8.888%
- Customizable dashboards (44)8.585%
- Report Formatting Templates (44)8.383%
- Pixel Perfect reports (43)8.282%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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Gaurav Pandey - PMP,ITIL,CSM
SAP Application Manager
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Pricing
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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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
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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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- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 |
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 (BI) Platform.
Reviewers rate Report Versioning and Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) highest, with a score of 9.8.
The most common users of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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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
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
90%
9.0
90%
9.0
94%
9.4
86.66666666666666%
8.7
92.5%
9.3
90%
9.0
85%
8.5
- We have seen significant ROI, 9-12 months
- As per license model you can plan your deployment model to justify ROI
- Tool being in industry for quite long, customer adoption and adaptability brings ROI
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.
1550
SAP Concur, S4 HANA, FICO
700
Function and domain knowledge on SAP modules. Technical skills for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence analytics. Good Administration skills for code pipeline deployment
- Add more business users
- Self service BI
- Self service BI analytics
- SAP BW and Bex integration
- Microsoft Office SAP integration
- Innovative dashboard
- Collaborate with business users
No
- Implementation support
Good implementation support and user community
Just love the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence analytics, will continue to explore it further with latest service pack features
- Implemented in-house
Yes
Agile framework was used, we planned the deployment in different waves, prioritize the phases.
Change management was minimal
Document well change management to be well prepared
- Not much challenges faced
- Seamless installation and backup
- Online training
- in-person training
Make it more competitive compared to competitors
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface
Yes - we have added extensive custom code
We have played a lot with SAP BO SDK
BO SDK gives you full control on metadata
Yes
Benefits you get from premium support, access to the latest patches and service packs
Yes
Yes
I've connected with SAP labs and co-workers. I was part of SAP architect team, easy to relate the upcoming landscape. SAP Innovation, collaboration is one of the best in the industry which makes SAP to be in leaders space for so long.
- SAP BI BO User Interface
- Strongly integrated with Microsoft office products
- Easily collaborate with the users, share the output in various formats
- Scheduling engine is one of the best in the industry
- SOA Service Oriented Architecture
- Waterfall architecture, need quick turn around time
- Need to move towards agile methodology
Yes
Awesome SAP BI mobile interface. Easy to implement and get it operational in short span of time
- Power BI
- Tableau
We query SAP BW/Bex query to pull data in Tableau and Power BI for few of user groups.
- SAP HANA with Power BI integration is seamless
SAP HANA, BW, Bex query integration with external tool is seamless
- Single Signon
- API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
- ETL tools
RestAPI is awesome
Please go ahead with full confidence, integration is easy
Pricing
Keep on the good job
Yes
Yes, LCM tool is awesome. Tool is much mature than what it used to be in past BO5.x series
- Get latest features offered by service packs
- Resolved bugs in existing service packs
- Lots of tool competitor features available in latest service packs
- Upskill team with the latest service packs
- User friendly business features
No
No
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.
Microsoft/Caradigm Amalga
Tableau
Qlikview
iDashboards
Microstrategy
SAP offered the most complete package. We were looking for a platform that gave us ETL tools, reporting, dashboards, and security.
Tableau
Qlikview
iDashboards
Microstrategy
SAP offered the most complete package. We were looking for a platform that gave us ETL tools, reporting, dashboards, and security.
- We use the product to measure performance. High performance equates to higher reimbursements rates in our industry.
- Cleaner, more reliable data.
- The product is used as our primary BI platform.
- We use Crystal Reports for end user reporting.
- SAP Dashboards for our monthly performance improvement dashboards.
- Web intelligence for ad-hoc data reports and exploration.
- Data services is used to move data from our production system to our data warehouse.
We did not previously own a BI solution.
- Implemented in-house
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
The product is not easy to use without training. I'd recommend that anyone who implements BusinessObjects receive training on each component.
No
We have not found SAP's support to be particularly useful.
December 21, 2012
Problems reporting against an OLAP database.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- I would score an 8 if reporting on a relational database - performance is good and the product works well.
- Features and options are good. It can cater to many different use cases, depending on end-user requirements.
- The suite contains multiple tools - OLAP, Explorer, Dashboards. It's highly versatile with a great variety of tool-sets. It doesn't force people to do things one way using a single tool.
- However, continuing problems in reporting against an OLAP database reduce the overall score to a 6.
- BW / Business Objects integration: SAP has more work to do here. Version 4.0 has removed major obstacles in stability, but we still have a lot of performance issues. The Business Objects features have been limited by the BW background. I would give this a score of 5 overall.
- SAP is pushing an in-memory database solution - HANA. SAP resources are focused on moving BW to HANA database. I believe BO performance will improve significantly as a result of this. We want to re-evaluate our data warehousing strategy, middle of next year. We are going on two paths currently. We want to take a step back and re-evaluate if SAP has a better solution.
- Dashboard tool sub-standard relative to Tableau. Takes weeks to get working vs. days in Tableau to build.
- Mobile compatibility is far ahead in Tableau.
- From the admin perspective, Business Objects is not fine tuned out of the box.
- Rolling out support packages is not disciplined -sometimes every 2 weeks, sometimes every 2 months.
- No good alerting and monitoring systems.
- No handshake to BW - e.g. send something on a trigger basis from another system to Business Objects.
- Sales - helps track revenue, shipments, pay commissions to reps.
- Operations - usability of tool is good - one common repository for every body to see reports. This really is a one-stop-shop for reporting.
- Inter-operability of analysis views.
300
Operations
Finance
Sales
2
One is a DBA, the other is SAP Basis person.
- Operations: We use Business Objects to create operational reports on manufacturing processes. We pull data from SAP ERP into BW and then report on that data.
- Finance: We bring in data from SAP ERP to BW and report using the native BW reporting tool called BusinessExporer (BEx). This has all GL information, and we use a profitability analysis tool called CO-PA (cost and profitability analysis) to track revenue, and sales goals.
- Sales:we pull data from all systems - SAP ERP, Salesforce.com, SAP CRM - and bring the data intoto BW, for where we report on it using Business Objects. We use Business Objects to build pipeline reports, revenue reports, shipment reports. and also to track the revenue quarter to quarter. We have another system called Adexa Collaborative Demand Planning (CDP) - for trend analysis and forecasts.
- We are not using Salesforce as revenue system. Everything related to revenue has to come from SAP. Primary report that SAP is looking for is revenue. We collect all data from transactional systems into BW.
We were using the SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) for reporting, visualization etc.
Originally, Business Objects was implemented before I joined.
When we had issues with Business Objects Version 3, we evaluated:
1) Tableau - This is a great product, really rich/appealing, and good mobile finctionality, but the price and the ETL functionality were issues. Allso performance of Tableau against OLAP data was not that good. It was much better against relational databases.
2) SQL BI - This had most of the features looking for. We have started to use SQL BI tools - not in production, we are stilltesting. We are not using with OLAP - we bring data from BW and store in a SQL data mart, stage, transform if required, model, then report.
- Finance still using old SAP BW tools.
- Operations is using BO 4.0
- Another group using Business Objects 3.1, and is going to try out SQL BI tools
We also evaluated another product called Greenplum (acquired by EMC). This has no front end to it, and is essentially a data warehouse.
- Vendor implemented
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
- Online training
- In-person training
- Self-taught
We learned through on the job training as administrators.
End users learn through documentation, online training and classroom training that we put on. We put on a class whenever we roll out a new report.
Yes
Seeing how difficult the tool is to keep up and running, our CIO decided to do this.
- SAP Business Warehouse
- SQL relational database tool called Planview
Data from SAP CRM, etc, into BW.
- SAP ERP directly
SAP has given a few direct integration points for specific use cases. This helps us to avoid ETL processes.