AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3) vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

• IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

AtScale is the leading provider of intelligent data virtualization for big data analytical workloads, empowering citizen data scientists to accelerate and scale their business’ data analytics and science capabilities and ultimately build insight-driven 

AtScale connects people to live disparate data without the need to move or extract it, leveraging existing investments in big data platforms, applications and tools. AtScale creates automated data engineering using a single set of semantics so consumers can query live data (either on premise or in the cloud) in seconds without having to understand how or where it is stored—providing security, governance and predictability in data usage and storage costs.

Benefits:

No data movement: AtScale is agnostic to data platforms and data location, whether on-premises or in the cloud, in a data lake or a data warehouse.

Automatic “smart” aggregate creation: AtSacle’s intelligent aggregates adapt to the data model and how it is used, automating the data engineering tasks required to support those activities and reducing time spent from weeks to hours.

Use your existing BI and AI tools: AtScale provides access to live, atomic-level data without the user needing to understand where or how to access the data, so you can keep using your tools of choice.

No more extracts or shadow IT: AtScale eliminates the need for extracts with a single, consistent, governed view of live data, regardless of which BI and AI tools are used.

Data-as-a-service: AtScale allows metadata to be created once, with centrally defined business rules and calculations, exposing data assets as a service.

Data platform portability: Models built in AtScale are portable, with no need to recreate them for different platforms. AtScale can easily be repointed to new data platforms, making migration seamless to business users.

Faster time-to-insight: AtScale reduces time-to-insight from weeks and months to minutes and hours. AtScale virtual models can be created and deployed in no time, with no ETL or data engineering.

Future-proof your data architecture: AtScale alleviates the complexities of data platform and analytics tool integration, making cloud, hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud data architectures a reality without compromising performance, security, agility or existing governance and security policies.

Features:

Design CanvasTM: AtScale’s Design Canvas visually and intuitively connects to any data platform, allowing you to create virtual multidimensional cubes without ETL.

Autonomous Data Engineering: Just-in-time query optimization that anticipates the needs of the data consumer.

Universal Semantic LayerTM: A workspace with a Design Canvas for your data consumers to define business meaning and get a single-source-of-truth.

Security & Data Governance: Centralized security policy to decentralize access using the tenants of Zero Trust.

Virtual Cube Catalog: A gateway to data that is easily discoverable and frictionless—and available to use every day, en masse.

AtScale connects people to live disparate data without the need to move or extract it, leveraging existing investments in big data platforms, applications and tools. AtScale creates automated data engineering using a single set of semantics so consumers can query live data (either on premise or in the cloud) in seconds without having to understand how or where it is stored—providing security, governance and predictability in data usage and storage costs.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a versatile and flexible solution for reporting and dashboards, focusing on analytics and ad hoc reporting. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The solution includes tools such as Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, SAP Lumira, and Analytical Cloud and is primarily used for comprehensive business intelligence reporting.

The most valuable features include excellent reporting features, good technical support, scalability, and the ability to translate database data into business language. The solution has helped organizations by providing analytics, monitoring KPIs, and making important decisions as a financial business.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Key Features

• Central management: Access all your BI from a single, central launchpad that can be customized to meet user-specific needs. The launchpad provides business users with access to all their BI tools, reports, notifications, and applications in a single place. This includes the ability to launch SAP Analytics Cloud.
  
  
• Data visualization and analytics: Create powerful visualizations, dashboards, and applications to assess risk, improve efficiency, identify opportunities, and enable users to analyze developments and data. Business insights can be shared with colleagues across enterprises.
  
  
• Integration with Microsoft Office: Integrate with SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA to power real-time analytics. For large-scale data analysis, you can integrate with Microsoft Excel to discover in-depth business insights and forecasts. Data analytics information can also be embedded into Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
  
  
• Cloud support: Extend and expand your BI on the cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud connects your BI to the cloud and offers enterprise planning and advanced analytics from a single online solution.

Reviews from Real Users

SAP BusinessObjects BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its user-friendly dashboard, its impressive reporting and analytic features, and its ability to integrate with multiple solutions.

A managing partner at a tech services company writes, "One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."

An associate manager at a consultancy notes, "It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."

A manager of data analytics and interfaces at a healthcare company says, "It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. It has great visualization.