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 …
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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Popular Features
- Drill-down analysis (45)9.090%
- Multi-User Support (named login) (46)9.090%
- Customizable dashboards (45)8.181%
- Report Formatting Templates (45)7.777%
Pricing
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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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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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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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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
- Microsoft BI (MSBI)
- Tableau Desktop
- MicroStrategy
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 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.
Reviewers rate Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) and 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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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
(1-19 of 19)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
December 14, 2021
SAP Business Objects is a must have for your organisations Reporting and Analysis needs
SAP Bi reporting tool is our companies primary software for Reporting and Analysis. I use it heavily daily and have done it for over a decade. It's highly nimble and allows me to connect to various data sources that have been set up. I can connect and report on Financial values from our Accounting System to our Point of Sale data that holds key sales and product information. Our Account system does not hold detailed product level information but is good for P&L Reporting by Centre and Divisional level. For stock level and margin data, we use Business Objects to build custom reports and conduct various analyses from the required data source.
- 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
December 09, 2020
SAP Business Objects: Review by a Grumpy Old Customer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP Business Objects has been a primary BI/Reporting solution for the City of Chicago for the past 14 years. It is being used by all city departments to report off practically all city databases. Available to all city employees via Web Intelligence module, it provides simple AdHoc capabilities, as well as advanced options for power users and developers.
- 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).
December 25, 2019
A good tool for a business analyst
I used SAP BO BI in my previous job as an energy market analyst. It is a good supplement to embedded with Excel tools such as VBA, Pivot Tables, etc. Because of that, it is fairly flexible to extend its ability in analysis and calculation. However, since I moved to be a data scientist, I have barely used this tool.
- Nice, interactive visualizations.
- Suitable for ad-hoc analysis.
- Costly.
- Limited tools.
It is being used across the whole organization to make data-informed decisions. Human resources, Finance and various schools use BusinessObjects for their daily activities and also do the ad-hoc reporting.
- 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.
January 16, 2018
A solution that will grow with the company
The SAP BO BI has been used for several years within the company in the areas of production planning and reporting, budgeting, market data analysis. The main source data comprise in-house data (ordering system, production plan, production performance) and external data (market data, dealer/distributor data]) and social media data. The main tasks of the solution are in a regular reporting as well as ad-hoc analytics. Examples of business problems are production reporting, trend analysis, competition analysis. The platform is used in a multinational environment of a large production firm.
- Very good scalability and a real must if you have an SAP as the main ERP system in the production across several factories.
- Very good vertical integration with other SAP tools and even other main ERP solutions.
- A good choice for a publicly traded company, where a robust auditable system is a prerequisite for getting transparency into internal.
- Mobility - in the version currently in use it is complicated to build responsive mobile reports
- We have integrated the reports on SAP HANA data, and SAP BO did not deliver the required results - the solution had to be replaced by SAP BO Design Studio, purchased additionally.
- Pricing - this is not a technical feature, but for companies with only a handful of analysts, this could be an insuperable problem.
August 31, 2017
Is SAP BusinessObjects Good for your company?
Business Objects is currently being used across the whole organisation. It helps users to get instant information for what they are looking for. It helps them to get financial data on the go, maintain all the vendor and dealer information, automate the data, and schedule the reports to the vendors/dealers directly. It's easy to use it for ad-hock queries, easy for understanding the company DB, etc. It's one of the best tools for the company to evaluate data and getting the right information.
- It can get the right set of information in the format you want out of the whole organisation wide data.
- It can allow you to automate the data to be shared with internal and external vendors.
- It allows dashboards, analytics and graphical representation of data for better understanding.
- The Lumira tool needs to be stabilised.
- Scheduling of dashboards and analysis need to be simplified.
September 16, 2016
How Business Objects reporting saved the company millions of dallars
In my previous experience working with a utility company for seven years, we used Business Objects to do reporting. The reporting was on customers who did not pay in a timely manner. The reports helped the company approach the customer before they ran into default. Such implications and many other reports helped the company see the issue beforehand and fix it before they even faced the issue. I could say that it was used for a sort of manual predictive analysis.
- Ease of Reporting - The reporting interface is so easy and adaptable that any users will be able to learn it and start using it for their own ad-hoc reporting purposes.
- Universe - lets you gather data from disparate sources and lets you perform reporting as it is just one source.
- Scheduling and distribution of reports is so much easier and you do not have to have all the users log on to see the reports. They can be emailed directly to them.
- The input parameters in the webi report can be improved.
- The promotion management tool is not that great. It can be improved quite a bit. It does not provide apt details of failures.
- In the scheduling options, it would be nice to schedule something and not send the report out when it is empty.
June 10, 2016
Awesome tool for reporting and dashboards.........
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SAP Business Objects is used by our entire organization. It helps resolve complex reporting issues. We use this tool for ad-hoc reporting, sales analytics reporting and supply chain reporting. It also helps us manage a large group of user base in an enterprise environment. It does support creation of reports for all the sales hierarchy from sales rep to management.
- Connecting to multiple sources irrespective of whether it is SAP or non SAP.
- IT, HR, Finance and Sales reporting.
- New intutive look to develop reports, charts and static and dynamic dashboards.
- Customer support, I think for any tool based issue I face on a daily bases often times requires a ticket to be opened for SAP which sometimes takes forever for resolution.
- The process of educating developers when a new feature(s) have been introduced should be made easy.
- Time for a resolution from SAP should be faster.
May 25, 2016
Best Reporting tool in the BI Market
Currently SAP Business Objects is being used across organization by different teams like Engineering, Offering, Sales, Marketing and Product Teams.
I have developed multiple canned and ad-hoc reports as per business needs. Basically this serves the purpose of reporting provisioning, billing and usage information of the different offerings Citrix has.
I have developed multiple canned and ad-hoc reports as per business needs. Basically this serves the purpose of reporting provisioning, billing and usage information of the different offerings Citrix has.
- Easy to build and debug reports both with OLTP and OLAP data.
- Multiple features like merging, fetching data from multiple sources and data security are integrated in BO.
- Easy to share the reports with users by scheduling and publication like features and also it comes with a nice portal, Infoview.
- SAP BO should have application connectors for applications like Marketo
- Switching database schemas for the same table should be there.
In my prior organization, SAP Business Objects was the organization's company-wide Business Intelligence platform delivering reporting, ad-hoc reporting, and visualizations to the business. It brought with it a unified approach to delivery, and rapid development while also putting self-serve reporting in the hands of the business users taking full advantage of the universe architecture in 4.1.
- First and foremost the business presentation layer is top-notch (previously called universes, now called business layers). This architecture provides an object oriented development layer for use across the platform including WebIntelligence, Lumira, Dashboard Designer, and Crystal Reports (Enterprise).
- Crystal Reports is still a standard among reporting tools, and the next evolution into enterprise is on the right track. Crystal Reports has always been the defacto standard in enterprise reporting and the enterprise version brings with it better integration with Business Objects.
- The launch pad provides a great delivery mechanism to business users. Security is very granular and easy to maintain, and providing users with their own document space allows each user to maintain their own work spaces.
- Web Intelligence is a great ad-hoc tool. Users coming from Excel will have enough familiarities to be able to transition easily. It really unlocks a world of opportunities for the normal business user to do analysis and reporting in a controlled manner.
- Integration with Microsoft Office is great with the newer collaboration of Power Query. The organization was able to move away from cube driven analysis and into self serve dimensional analysis utilizing universes with Excel.
- To stay relevant, SAP is going to need to introduce a self-serve dashboard tool to compete with the likes of Tableau and other emerging companies.
- Dashboard Design is SAP's weakest area, in particular Dashboard Designer (formerly XCelsius). This product is very dated and feels like legacy.
- The development tool integration into the platform as a whole is lacking. Each tool seems to have a different way for connecting and interacting with data and feels a bit broken and non-cohesive.
- Predictive Analytics could benefit from some attention. Explorer is a decent discovery tool but would benefit from the next generation of whatever it will become and bring better predictive analysis.
March 12, 2016
My experience with SAP BO
As an IT consult and working for a consulting firm, we typically consult other organizations on SAP and inmost cases we help them to implement and deploy SAP. Sometimes clients do not have a lot of experience with SAP products especially with SAP Business Objects. So our job is to provide support and guide them to better understand the language of SAP.
- SAP Business Objects reduces total cost of ownership (TCO0 which gives advantage to a better performance and scalability.
- BI platform.
- Data exploration.
- It can cost a lot of money to implement SAP business objects.
- It can be a little hard to understand the software and the way SAP business objects works.
- You will need to have plenty of servers to make SAP Business Objects work.
February 11, 2016
sap
It is being used across our company for customer SLA reporting and as a method of invoicing. We also use it for internal analytics.
- Ease of use. Allows non technical end users to be self-sufficient in regards to ad-hoc reporting .
- Visual aid creation. Allows a more varied approach to presentations.
- Exporting formats. A variety of formats allows for a wider assortment of uses.
- Difficult to implement
- Difficult to create rights for various users
- Need more format types for exporting.
September 15, 2015
Business Objects SRC - Excel on Steroids
Our company is very diverse and Business Objects SRC has been able to satisfy all the budgeting and planning needs across the board. Regardless of the data to be reported on or the planning cycle and even the level of planning detail, we have not found anything that Business Objects SRC cannot do.
- Ad hoc reporting
- Planning using trending and seasonality spreads
- High level to very detailed analysis
- One negative is being limited by the version of Excel that Business Objects SRC uses. On occasion a report or a query is maxed do to the row/column limitations.
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.
February 25, 2015
The New SAP BusinessObjects RESTful SDK: What It Means to You
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use BusinessObjects to deliver reports on a schedule basis to management as well as provide adhoc and drill through reporting to staff to help make accurate decisions. The ability to join data between different data sources without users having to touch the data is an important features. We collect data from several legacy systems including databases that were linked throuh MS SQL Server and SOAP Web services through a single Universe to provide a single view of the business to users.
- Designed for Crystal, Web Intelligence and the BI Platform, the RESTful SDK (RSDK) is the next-generation application programming interface (API) for manipulating and interacting with reporting content residing on your BusinessObjects server.
- For starters, it means no more jar files. Or, if you are a .Net developer, merge modules and or .dll files. The RSDK is based on a lightweight, refreshing platform that literally requires no installation. All it requires is knowledge of a handful of URLs and configuring your BOE server for web services (which is already configured by default).
- With the newest versions Windows AD Single Sign on is configurable with your custom application with much less time and effort.
- In classic Java/.Net SDK programming, as a programmer you would interact with an object model. But with the Retful SDK consisting a vast array of API calls, there are many waus to call the application that may or may not get your application the expected result. There needs to be more examplesof actual javascript based calls.
- Prior to BOE 4.0 SP6 there as little parity with the JAVA/.NET SDK so an upgrade to BOE 4.1 is necessary to get the majority of functionality available.
- We have built our own SAML, OAuth, Active Directory, SiteMinder and Ping Identity Connects through to BusinessObjects. I would expect these will be come part of the API in the future.
December 18, 2014
BO go or no-go
We use Business Objects for our enterprise reporting needs, various departments get their canned reports daily/weekly. They are able to run ad-hoc jobs. Business Objects addresses the need for massive report distribution and quick easy solutions to end users.
- Robust and sophisticated and can get the easy and quick answer to the business
- User friendly
- Easy scheduling and distribution of reports
- The SQL engine can be re-engineered , sometimes it will be over-head on database to fetch simple answer.
- Can be more powerful querying tool with lite/web versions with analytic reporting features
September 12, 2014
A Quick Summary of Business Objects
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Business Objects is being used as a reporting tool for both IT and business teams. It's relied upon to query a number of data sources including Oracle databases, datamarts, and EDW data stores. Reports are primarily created and maintained by a combination of IT and business teams. Business objects provides the ability for quick adhoc reporting and scheduling of routine reports.
- Quick ad hoc reporting of standardized information from the same datasource
- Easy drag and drop interface for new users to get acclimated to existing datasources without having to know the intricate join logic
- Web based interface allows users to easily share and distribute reports they create
- Scheduling allows users to setup a report to run for any time and frequency they prefer with little maintenance.
- Hard to keep track of changes to reports and report recovery
- Frequent version upgrades require businesses to update their infrastructure and reports
- Diminishing support from SAP for the Business Objects suite
October 17, 2013
Business Objects 4.0 Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- This is a complete reporting tool, it provides ad-hoc reporting capabilities for the users.
- It does not store huge amounts of data. We cannot create datamarts but we can use them for reporting.
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.