Item: SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence
Rating: 6
Author: Nathan Patrick Taylor

Pros and Cons

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.

Likelihood to Renew

5

We may end up switching to Microsoft's BI stack as we use a Microsoft's PDW appliance which is not fully compatible with SAP BusinessObjects.

Return on Investment

We use the product to measure performance. High performance equates to higher reimbursements rates in our industry.
Cleaner, more reliable data.

Likelihood to Recommend

Business Processes Supported

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.