Item: SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence
Rating: 8
Author: Gaurav Pandey - PMP,ITIL,CSM

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAP Business Objects and Business Intelligence is one of the flagship products of SAP. I remember the BW days and then the acquisition of BO and eventually the rollout of the new SAP data analytics platform i.e. BI. The product is good for large data volumes, month-end closings, analytical analysis, generating 360-degree reports, handling workload, managing process chain, etc. However more the data, more the memory needed.

Pros and Cons

Analytics
Continuous refresh of reports
Easy customizations using ABAP

Memory requirements
Hardware requirements
Continuous operational support

Return on Investment

Smooth month end close
On time reports
Better business visibility

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft's Power BI has certainly gained a lot of attention and became a leader in Gartner's magic quadrant. This is certainly a good product for average data volume which can be handled in the cloud, however, SAP BI is capable of handling much more data with complex reporting requirements.

Key Insights

Do you think SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence again?

Other Software Used

1EDISource, Mainframe Modernization with AWS (Blu Age), uPerform

Usability

Any product is good or bad also depends on the person working on a person working on it. If you have a good SAP team, no doubt this product can add a lot of value to the enterprise.

Support Rating

A lot of times, even SAP struggles to provide solutions to infrastructure issues because it connects to multiple databases and the issue might not be at SAP's end.

Likelihood to Recommend

SAP BI product was improved a lot in terms of performance as BW on HANA ( suite on HANA ) product however the product was optimized to run on the HANA database. Anyone new planning to go for BI should consider BW4HANA which is a new optimized product running on SAP's flagship HANA DB. This has excellent integration with FIORI and SAP cloud platform ( Analytics Cloud ).

Great SAP data analytics product

Overall Satisfaction with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform