We performed a comparison between SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and SAS Visual Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Legacy BI Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's most valuable features are it has a great presentation layer. We can develop the presentation layer with drag-and-drop capabilities. For end-users and for our interns in the company can create reports and do their data analysis processes or works by using the objects that we created on the presentation layer by themselves."
"The features which the solution has been awesome. The way the data is fetched from the database, and the queries are executed, is unique using the Universe of Business Objects. That makes it unique and we could not find another solution that functions in a similar way. It's has a great way of receiving and executing queries."
"The most important feature of BusinessObjects is its integration with the SAP ERP system. If an organization is using SAP as its ERP system, and they want to do business intelligence, reporting, or analysis, SAP BusinessObjects is the only tool that I see doing that quite efficiently. That's because of the fact it is tightly integrated, and it gives a good user experience in terms of faster reporting. Its integration is the feature that I have found most valuable, but there are also other factors."
"The reports are most valuable. If it is a single-source universe, based on only one database, the performance, and the reporting tool is user-friendly, and users are very familiar with the tool and are comfortable using it."
"The solution is stable."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution."
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"We've found the product to be stable and reliable."
"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."
"The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me."
"Visual Analytics is very easy to use. I use Visual Analytics for all the typical use cases except text mining. I used it to analyze data and monitor statistics, not text mining. I also use it for data visualization as well as creating interactive dashboards and infographics."
"Great for handling complex data models."
"It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way."
"The technical support services are good."
"It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective."
"The interface could be slicker and more user-friendly."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform should be made easier for the end-users and the performance could be improved."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"When we implemented BusinessObjects, the setup was straightforward. After SAP bought BusinessObjects, it gradually became more and more stepwise. There are too many steps, and they take too much time."
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"I haven't come across any missing features."
"In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool."
"There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else."
"SAS Visual Analytics could be more user-friendly."
"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."
"The reason we haven't rolled it out across the board is due to the fact that the licensing is so expensive."
"It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView."
"The licensing ends up being more expensive than other options."
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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 2nd in Legacy BI Tools with 26 reviews while SAS Visual Analytics is ranked 3rd in Data Visualization with 14 reviews. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8, while SAS Visual Analytics is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Integrates very well with SAP ERP, allows you to scale up or down anytime, and is absolutely trustworthy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAS Visual Analytics writes "Easy to learn and use with good scalability potential". SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and Alteryx, whereas SAS Visual Analytics is most compared with Tableau, Microsoft BI, Databricks, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Amazon QuickSight. See our SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. SAS Visual Analytics report.
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Thank you everyone for your very helpful comments and expertise! We own BOBJ Lumira and will be researching more about Predictive Analytics features that it claims to offer. We will be doing more thorough analysis of business requirements and prototypes to make the decision.
Even though I am not an expert (and really know very little ) in SAS and SAP BOBJ, I wanted to give you a reply.
From my experience, if you are big on SAP BOBJ an BW, I would keep that and complement with an analytics db, built for the purpose of predictive models.
It is difficult to have one solution that will satisfy everyone, or a single product that excels at everything.
To replace BOBJ/BW with a new solution would be a very risky project, time and cost consuming, lots of expectations. Moreover, there will be enemies around trying to boicot the project. I would foster a new initiative to build an analytical repository, with the best tools to support a business initiative, and the results from that repository I would bring to your BI/Reporting solution (BOBJ).
Hope my comments are of any help to you.
Best regards
Marco
I agree with Director461.
Elisabete Miranda
Comparing SAS VA to SAP BOBJ is like apples and oranges, these products are from different categories, although there is indeed some overlap. SAP BOBJ is a classic enterprise BI platform whereas SAS VA is a specialty product for advanced analytics and data visualization. The products are actually complimentary, much like traditional SAS which often co-exists with enterprise BI tools.
So it all depends on your requirements as well as user expertise. If you need reporting, OLAP and dashboarding then you need SAP BOBJ or a similar platform like MicroStrategy (which we use). If you’re targeting professional data analysts that need to conduct sophisticated modeling and build fancy visualizations then you need SAS VA.
That is correct, SAS offers statistical and predictive analytics, more tuned for individual data scientist as a desktop user.
BOBJ on the other hand is well tuned for ad hoc and operational reporting, geared for IT to design and publish such reports for business users to consume.
Tool selection is very dependent on your business requirements and the audience. If your business users are not statistical function savvy and do not see value yet to make business decisions based on predictive and statistical models, SAS may not be the right tool for now.
Tool adoption is key for the success of a BI implementation.
Good luck and let me know if you need deeper understanding on tool selection.
Krish.
"We are considering SAS VA on top of HADOOP YARN platform. "
I think that would be an interesting combination. I hear HADOOP all the
time in the BI world. I have some experience in Cassandra but not HADOOP.
"What does SAS VA offer that BOBJ would not, and how can we build a
business case around SAS VA specifically?"
SAS is the market leader in BI market and specifically strong in analytic
area as you have already stated. The second area I would look at is the
data model which is the bridge between data store and analytic tools: how
efficient to construct flexible data models to plug to the algorithms,
third the performance of data retrieval which is significantly important in
production stage.
"Based on what I read so far, SAS VA offers a lot more capability in terms
of statistical analytics, predictive analytics and optimization – something
that BOBJ does not appear to have. Does that seem to be the main
differentiating factor?"
I don't have experience in SAS VA, therefore I cannot comment on it. IMHO,
algorithms are easy to add to a product suite, what makes the major factor
is how smooth and easy to flow data to the algorithms (data model).
Another part I would look at is the presentation layer, how easy report can
be created and intuitive to the business user to create report by
themselves.
I believe SAP VA have their own data storage, the comparison of data
storage should be consider as well such as scale out, efficiency... etc.
Regards,
Ray
People going to SAS must ask themselves first do they have any data scientists to implement the software. It is a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for statistics for good reasons but to utilise its capacities you must have the appropriate staff to implement it.
You cannot compare SAS to BOBJ in reality as they are diiferent Tools. Indeed SAP now have their own statistic software called SAP Predictive Analysis which now competes directly against SAS. This Tool which came from the KXEN purchase, whilst not as mature as SAS at present offers quicker modelling capabitilities meaning it will be easy apply the solution and you do not have to have the specific thoroughbread data scientists in house.
As you are already a SAP Customer you should contact them for further information.
SAP BW are HADOOPS are of course extremely different beasts
Hi
SAS VA is a data discovery tool where business users can primarily do lightweight data mining activites on their own with the help of IT. Be sure that you have placed it right. It s counterpart in the BO world is Lumira which doesnt belong to BO BI Suite, thus paid extra.
We made a data discovery tool evaluation last year, Spotfire came to my mind at first as a DD tool with broad data mining capabilities. Have you evaluated it?
Can the tool seemlessly integrate to your hadoop Platform and perform well?
What are the data mining capabilities needed, who is going to to that business or IT/BI?
What are the front end capabilities, can the (business )users create reasonable dashboards on their own and publish them?
POC passed?
Those are the questions came to my mind
thanks,
Emre