SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

The solution can be deployed on-premise and in cloud environments. We are using Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS for cloud services.

Our main use case for the use of this solution is for reporting.

The solution has given us multi-systems and databases that have been very good for us.

The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good.

The solution can improve by having more analytical features.

I have been using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for approximately nine years.

The stability of the solution has been good.

I have found the scalability to be good.

I rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight out of ten.

SAP BusinessObjects can be used for operational reporting. It is an enterprise solution and a suite of products. 

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. 

The integration could be improved. The SAP suite has some integration problems and it has some huge development needs. For example, when you use Power BI, if you publish a dataset to the web, there is no issue in seeing the data with the report. The data and report are integrated automatically. Or when you use QlikView, when you publish the QVD file, the report is integrated with QVD. Also, with Tableau, when you publish the data, it's in the hyper database, in the memory, and the dashboard with data is integrated seamlessly. In the SAP side, it's not easy. There are lots of business layers. 

There are also some performance issues in the SAP BusinessObjects suite. They should focus on the technologies. 

As far as additional features, SAP needs a BI analytics solution. I mean, a fully integrated BI analytics suite. 

We are partners and every step of the way, SAP asks us for money. If you want to see the products, the PDFs, if you want to learn the product, online training, etc., everything has a cost on the SAP site. Because of this, partners try to get to know the products on their own. SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality. In that way, the operation is not easy on the SAP side. As a suggestion, they should focus on customers first instead of money. 

I have been using SAP BusinessObjects for 20 years. 

I rate SAP BusinessObjects a six out of ten. 

To those looking into implementing this solution, in the SAP side, there are modules. You should focus on one of the modules. There's HR, FI, SDMM, et cetera. Also, there are BI modules, and there are lots of products on the BI side: BW, Hana, SAP BusinessObjects. There is also a cloud side of SAP. So, they are time consuming. You should focus on one of them before jumping to the second one. 

In general, we use BusinessObjects for extensive reports. BusinessObjects reports have several pages. Our users prefer BusinessObjects over Microsoft Excel because Excel is limited in its data files and all that. 

We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools. 

It is limited for us because SAP is shifting toward the cloud, and we can't use a cloud solution for SAP BusinessObjects. SAP introduced a product called PlusTimes one or two years ago and another one that I believe was called Automatic BI. This tool is more powerful than BusinessObjects and other tools because it's provided in the cloud.

I've been working with BusinessObjects for about eight years.

BusinessObjects is scalable, allowing us to work with many pages. 

We are thinking about switching to Power BI. I think we will no longer use SAP BusinessObjects after one or two years.

I rate SAP BusinessObjects seven out of 10. However, I can't recommend BusinessObjects because its usage is limited, and it can't provide a new solution for end-users.

Our primary use case for this solution is business enterprise reporting. 

The most valuable SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform feature are metadata service layers. To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user. The end user can then use this data to create a report, dashboard, or whatever else.

It also has scheduling and can generate BI content for you. 

Their WebGUI presentation layer could be improved. They are still a little bit behind, for example, Tableau and QlikView.

I have been using this solution for about nine years. 

The features SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform provides are fairly stable. I only noticed one data error in the past.

Of course, the platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is fairly scalable. You can either scale it up or create a cluster. They do have load balance and we have a cluster for important stuff. However, we use it relatively lightly, so we never have performance issues when we needed to scale up or scale out. Mostly, we have to scale up to give it enough RAM.

Currently, we have a couple hundred people using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform at our institution. 

The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform we use are not too advanced so we haven't had much need to contact tech support. When we run into an issue, we can usually solve it through community answers. We have had some SAP technical support come in a few times and every time we met with them we had a good experience. We have a fairly good relationship with their tech support. 

Just before switching to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, we were using QlikView. 

The initial setup was was not bad, but it was relatively complex. It did take some time to get it to work for us. 

I don't have the exact number, but SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is not too cheap. 

My advice is to try to truly understand the system. It is fairly complicated. To get this system to work, you need a systems engineer and an architect in addition to a lot of other people who understand what's going on behind the scenes. 

The solution has been extremely stable. We haven't had any issues so far.

The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all.

Technical support, overall, has been very good and we've been happy with their level of service.

The basic components of the solution could be improved.

The UI could be updated a bit.

I can't think of any features that are currently missing from the product at this time.

We've been using the solution for about seven years at this point. It's been a while. We have a lot of experience with it.

We've found the stability of the solution to be very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

Plenty of users in our organization actually use the solution.

Technical support for the most part has been very good. We've had a positive experience and we are quite satisfied with the level of support they provide to us.

I don't recall the company using a previous solution. As far as I know, the company has only ever really used SAP.

We've found the initial setup to be pretty straightforward. It's not so complex. A company shouldn't have any trouble with the implementation process.

We didn't need any assistance with the integration process. It's a process that I manage as an integration manager.

We pay our licensing fees on a monthly basis. I can't speak to how much they are. I don't recall there being any extra costs above the licensing itself.

We are customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with the organization.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it as a perfect ten. It's been great. For the most part, we have been happy with the product.

We use it for reporting.

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.

Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. 

It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved.

I have been using this solution for around seven years.

We have around 200 users of this solution.

They are helpful and quite professional. Sometimes, they don't respond faster, and sometimes, they say that it needs to be upgraded to the next version, which is something that I don't like.

Its installation was straightforward.

I did the installation.

Its price is fair.

For data visualization, I would recommend Power BI and Tableau. For the report format, I would recommend SAP BusinessObjects.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The reporting is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The WebIntelligence Solution is the name of the reporting solution and it is very powerful. 

The solution offers very good features for broadcasting information or scheduling reports. You can schedule everything and make it very easy to disseminate by sending emails with a PDF or Excel. It's very quick and powerful.  

The solution's user security is extremely effective. You can profile very well. All the users and all the functionality is protected and that includes information and data segregation.

The documentation provided is very, very good. There's so much available, that if you ever run into any issues and need a workaround, you have it right there to guide you.

The solution offers good user management.

The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not so user friendly.

SAP's current strategy consists in keeping the reporting part On premise and delegating the Analytics part to the Cloud. You are therefore involved in a hybrid scenario.

The complete environment setup is pretty complex.

To carry out a real project that presents erp / business data on "Cloud Story Telling" you need more specialist actors who manage issues such as: Analytics and Data architecture, Data source identification, System Compatibility, Connectivity and Security.

These aspects are certainly also required on other vendor BI solutions.

On the SAP front, we are certainly trying to improve and complete the On Premise / Cloud integration, with the latest version SAP BO 4.3.

I've been working with the solution for twenty years now. It's been a very long time. I started using it around 1998.

The solution is very stable, and, on the off chance you have a problem, SAP is very quick to help. There are lots of workarounds if you do run into issues.

You can scale this solution if you need to. It's easy enough to do so.

One of the great things about SAP is the information that is available. When you have a problem, SAP is very quick to give you an answer or solution. You can also Google a lot of workarounds. There's so much documentation online that it's really easy to troubleshoot. That's because if anyone has a problem, SAP notes it and finds a solution which they post.

The initial setup is not straightforward. It's pretty complex.

The installation configuring environment is not so easy to work with. Also, the connection of the SAP Analytics Cloud is very complex.  It's not very easy to configure the environment.

The time I need to configure and install the solution is about one week for the BusinessIntelligence Platform solution, On premise. Another week is required for the connectivity aspect and settings of the Cloud (Analytics).

We are working with an older version also well as the latest version of the solution. 

I would recommend this product to other organizations. It's a stable and powerful enterprise solution. Everything from the broadcasting to the scheduling, to the user management and the reporting, is very powerful. 90% of customers end up asking for a solid and consistent reporting solution. In these cases, I definitely suggest SAP Business Objects Platform.

That said, the dashboard isn't the best with this product.  It should be noted that SAP is working on their dashboards offerings in Cloud environment.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I call it a big boys toy due to costs involved for full, not large, scale deployments. Due to SAP gobling up a multitude of products over the year, the integration issues have mostly all been resolved now and its mature platform whereby all the others are still playing catchup.

It gives you end to end view. You can build a dashboard or report and see full lineage even into etl and wrangling layers. Saving is made when you dont have to waste time integrating with a mirade of other tool sets.

Ive yet to find a bi tool that can match SAP’s offering, and Ive implemented all of them.

Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution.

More than five years.

It is a solid product.

I did not encounter issues with scalability of the solution. 

The tech support is very good.

My career has been filled with greenfield projects it bi rehab whereby I would replace a mess with SAP BO

The initial setup was easy because I specialize in implementation.

I usually get called in as a specialist

No redoing if set up right, and thats usually issue with SAP BO deployments I get called in to mature.

Have a big wallet if you want to be serious

Read gartner to your own detriment

I advise someone considering this solution: Go big or go home!