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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

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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Recent Reviews

Happy User

7 out of 10
July 21, 2022
I use SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to broadcast reports to our customers. This is our analytical suite for reporting and monitoring our …
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SAP BI Review

6 out of 10
January 28, 2020
Incentivized
We are using SAP BI for analysis and reporting purposes. We use this within the insurance industry. We had some issues with a client …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 28 features
  • Drill-down analysis (45)
    9.0
    90%
  • Multi-User Support (named login) (46)
    8.9
    89%
  • Customizable dashboards (45)
    8.1
    81%
  • Report Formatting Templates (45)
    7.7
    77%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.

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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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.7
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.2
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.7
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.3
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9.4
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.8
Avg 8.0

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

7.5
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

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

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsApple 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 ApplicationNo

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 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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(842)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 71)
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July 21, 2022

Happy User

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Broadcasting reports on schedule
  • Showing data analytics that have drill down capabilities
  • Monitoring and managing custom report by user
  • Ease of use
  • Reports building can be a challenge unless your an excel wiz
  • Easier use of adding in other data sources
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Scheduling of Reports
  • Formatting the report as per business requirements
  • Good user interface for users and developers
  • Not able to paste multiple values without semi-colon while filtering the data. Adding semi-colon makes the functionality difficult to use.
  • User interface can be improved
  • It is costly
  • The performance of the report decreases if complex logic/functions are added
Saurabh Raheja | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Maintaining users and user groups in CMC.
  • Scheduling Web Reports through CMC to get reports delivered to emails at any given frequency.
  • Maintaining roles and securities for different users, users group and BO servers
  • Regarding improvement, there is very little scope now as it has already grown up so well from BO BI 3.1 to BO BI 4.0, then BO BI 4.1, then BO BI 4.2 and now the latest is BO BI 4.3
  • One improvement I can think of is that it can go on the cloud. For example, a physical box may not be required for the installation of SAP BI BO.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Connects to various data sources
  • Excellent for building adhoc reports and doing analysis on the fly
  • The scheduling and publication functions are great time savers and allow us to manage many regular and recurring reports.
  • At the moment we are experiencing some performance issues, but this may be down to our own companies network/infrastructure and not the BI tool
  • The older Client version I thought was more stable than the 4.2 web-based version. But this again could be down to the companies network/infrastructure
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It has a good capability of combining a variety of different data sources like ODBC, Excel, SQL Server, text, etc.
  • Design is relatively straightforward and is flexible enough to let different functions be used in different scopes (whole report, section of a report, etc) to create parts, combining data from different sources.
  • There are different design interfaces like HTML, applet and rich client which may be handy in different circumstances.
  • Scheduling of the report updates help you organize timing of your report activities.
  • Although limited, comparison of the updated report with its previous data is a good feature.
  • Adding complex functions and calculations may significantly slow down the reports.
  • Comparison of the report data histories could be extended. Currently you can only compare your report with only previous run but not with any older versions.
  • Web, applet and rich clients UI's do not always have the same design functions available, for example.
  • You may find yourself unable to export multiple reports at the same time in web interface where you can do it in the rich client interface.
  • More flexibility in report design could be helpful such as copying report sections between different reports, multi select and modifications of sub reports, etc.
  • Drilldown could be improved . For example, a feature to export drilldown structure to Excel or faster drilldown would help a lot.
Ben Williams | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ingest data from multiple areas of the business and use them to generate easy to understand reports.
  • Report scheduling is simple and efficient allowing the team to run reports at a variety of different times to suit the stakeholder's needs.
  • The metalayer takes away some of the complexities of other programs, allowing the end user to interact with the program in a clean and efficient way.
  • We have had some difficulty linking up with data in some of our web portals. This has caused a large amount of development time, and support has been less than its usual helpful self in this regard.
  • Older versions had functions which have now been removed, or replaced with less effecient functions. For example the HTML output option.
  • Some configuration issues have arisen when we have attempted to configure API'S. Some require a JDBC connection, which was slightly more difficult than expected.
Dariusz Zyskowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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).
Dharmesh Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
January 28, 2020

SAP BI Review

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It is easy to use and is easily understandable.
  • Lots of built-in functionality which makes things easier for developers.
  • Paid tool.
  • Connectivity should be better with the latest data sources.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easily adaptable for any level of user's technical ability to use reporting tools.
  • Ad-hoc reporting capabilities.
  • Impact analysis (data lineage) features are not available in the tool.
  • Administrators cannot perform bulk activities.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Crystal Reports allows you to get any report and in the layout you prefer.
  • Customisation to any area and to get any report you want.
  • Once learned, it's really easy to use and understand the logic.
  • Some more training time is needed to understand, but it's worth the time investment.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Real-time business intelligence.
  • Data consumption is super simple.
  • Integrations with Microsoft office.
  • The price is high.
  • Initial implementation could be easier.
  • Customer support wasn't what we expected and could use some work.
October 28, 2019

BI Platform Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Martin Lopez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
  • Operational reporting through the SAP Web Intelligence tool
  • Pixel-perfect reporting through SAP Crystal Reports
  • Visualizations with SAP Lumira
  • Avoid the need to use Java in certain functionalities.
  • Avoid reliance on Adobe Flash on certain features.
  • Improvement in the need for adaptations for mobile devices.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Fast, on demand reporting.
  • Rapid development of new business analysis.
  • It is low maintenance once configured and deployed to production.
  • Report scheduling and distribution.
  • Quicker methods to bulk load reports into the reporting pool.
April 02, 2019

Why SAP? Why?

Michael Diaz-Suarez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It has a great way of displaying information.
  • It's affordable.
  • It can scale well provided you have good support.
  • The interface looks like it's something out of 1999.
  • Customer support is horrible and honestly it's a lottery any time you call.
  • The system crashes constantly.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It is a very flexible platform with many different add-ons that provide lots of different functionality.
  • If configured and installed correctly it can be a very robust and dependable platform for the business.
  • It has the ability to handle almost all types of data sources you can throw at it.
  • The installation can be very complex and time-consuming, it requires a lot of planning and foresight as to what role the software will play in the organization.
  • The software has a relatively large learning curve that takes dedicated users months to get comfortable with, the UI is a bit intimidating for new users.
  • SAP could organize their help better, it can be difficult to find dependable solutions to issues via their website and support channels.
Tim Dorscher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Allows significant customization and filtering of the data when creating reports.
  • Is an easy, relatively user-friendly way of accessing the data.
  • No SQL or other programming languages needed for queries.
  • The interface is old and unintuitive. The tooltips are helpful but for someone new to it there is little help in where to begin and what to do
  • This may be our systems but it is slow when querying our data.
  • For some reason when exporting the data, if I choose reports it never exports ALL the data so I am not sure what function that option is supposed to provide.
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