SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

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!

The primary use case for SAP BusinessObjects has been to provide users static dashboards and reports with a fixed trend where the analysis part is predefined in terms of a fixed set of visualizations.

We use it to identify critical KPIs to senior management, which automatically get circulated every morning.

We started receiving benefits from SAP BusinessObjects the first week we used it. 

It will give you better performance if your warehouse is also on SAP Business Warehouse. It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards. For example, BusinessObjects Design Studio provides custom templates where you can create your own templates. You can also create your own custom charts. There are CSS formats which you can take in, then you can create your own color coding. Thus, a lot is possible. 

From a developer's point of view, it has definitely provided a lot of flexibility.

The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint.

It depends a lot on how BusinessObjects has been installed and configured, because there are a lot of services which run in the background. For example, if I have not done the proper sizing at implementation in terms of allocating the right resources in terms of memory and RAM for the different services within BO to run, any analytic documents which are built on BO can get impacted in terms of their performance. Therefore, stability is good provided your sizing and configuration has been done properly.

Scalability is good. Once it is set up in the mid-layer, multiple users can access it. Then, the product can grow into an enterprise-wide deployment.

The technical support for general issues gives us a good response, but for certain critical issues, it can takes four weeks to obtain a response. It will initially go to an SAP support team, and if they are not able to resolve the issues, then they will route the call to SAP in Germany. The German development team usually takes a bit more lead time to come back on those issues.

We were not using a previous solution.

The initial setup was not that complex as SAP has all the documentation in place. However, initially, we went for suboptimal sizing, which in the first few months led to performance issues. We had to reconfigure, do the proper sizing, and give the right memory requirements to meet our performance expectations.

Management reporting and also some ad-hoc reporting.

During the first of the 10 years we used it, it was a very valuable reporting product. It really is the only product we have for reporting out of the data warehouse that we have. It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources.

SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that.

In addition, we would definitely like to be able, through the tool, to show more metadata, and access a data dictionary directly from the tool.

Also, a user should see data lineage, because we have found out that the abstraction being done in the Universes is sometimes too much for the more specific kind of users. They want to see the origin of the data.

Stability is perfect.

Scalability is also very good.

We have not used technical support directly. We have a local specialist that we go to. It's easier.

The company implemented BusinessObjects 10 years ago. At that time, it was the best product on the market. A lot of things have changed in 10 years.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, if we're talking about a reporting tool, is the ease of use for the end-user as well as integration with other tools, like data dictionaries and data catalogs. That would make the underlying data more visible to the end-user. And, of course, price is important.

Look at who will be your end-user group. Who is going to use the tool?

I would rate this solution at seven out of 10. Seen from the administrative and compliance point of view, it's an excellent tool for an enterprise. But I can't give it any more than that because the user interface for the average user is not very intuitive. You need too much training before you're able to use the tool effectively.

It's used for business reporting and it performs well.

It allows hundreds of end-users to be able to access business reports and make business decisions based upon them.

It provides good centralized management, and it performs well against our day-to-day solution.

The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either.

We find it's stable, very little down time, good level of performance.

It's scalable simply by adding extra servers, application servers, so the scalability is good.

Our technical support is through a value added reseller.

We've been using Business Objects for a long time. The last time we did an upgrade from a client version to a browser-based version.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are the features of the product, that it is a good fit with our environment, and price will be a part of the consideration.

It was complex because we were upgrading from a previous version with a different architecture.

I would rate it about nine out of 10 because it performs well.

Do a trial. Fully investigate all the ins and outs of the license as well.

We mainly use SAP BO to do operation and financial reporting. More than 100 reports were created on it. User can easily access all reports through the BO web link (portal).

Because our ERP system is SAP ECC, and SAP BW is the data warehouse, BO is the best choice to integrate with either SAP ECC or SAP BW.

Good, powerful functions in the table format report compared with Microsoft Power BI. It can process big volumes of data fast.

It should have a better integration with Excel. Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts.

In the past, customers - both internal and external - were crying for data towards the end or the beginning of month, for month-end reporting. Through the use of Business Intelligence reporting and scheduling features, these reports are generated and automatically sent to them according to a schedule. This has freed up countless hours spent performing the same tasks, month over month. 

It also enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run.

Depends on the use case. The reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst.

When it comes to visualizations and discovery, SAP Explorer lets the user deep-dive into the data from a visual standpoint.

The biggest area for improvement would be the dashboarding capabilities due to the recent change from Xcelsius to Dashboard Designer. This has created a gigantic ripple in many companies because the skill sets required are drastically different.

Minor at most. As with any application that presents data within a business, stability is critical to the success of the application and it's validity. Building failovers and redundancies around major functions, like accessing reports, data connectivity, and user security, ensures system stability. However, even with the most perfect system and its redundancies, any business intelligence application can run into issues if the data is bad.

Not really. The SAP Business Intelligence platform is a global solution that can be scaled both vertically and horizontally, based on company needs. 

SAP tech support is good. However, I prefer the use of the partners and communities like ASUG or SAPinsider to provide the support we need.

We previously used SQL Server Reporting Services because it was included with Microsoft Server and it was free. The reason we switched was because SSRS lacked the ability to do what we needed without involving IT.

I always recommend using a partner or consultant to deploy SAP BI. Not because it's difficult to install, that part is actually pretty easy, but to properly configure and customize application services and toolsets.

Depending on your size, try to stick with SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge. Most people tend to overthink the licensing. Remember that one concurrent user means that one person can be performing a task at a given time. That does not mean that only one user can be on the system at a time, it means that only one person can be refreshing a report or designing a dashboard. There are tons of ways you can access your data or reports without consuming a license. I've seen cases where five concurrent licenses support thousands of users.

I reviewed a whole bunch of them, everything under the sun.

Get a partner or consultant to help you configure and customize your deployment. And remember that there's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server.

Autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports.

The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal.

This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration.

No issues.

No issues.

Technical support is excellent.

No.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users. Currently, it has an option of a Cloud Platform (SAP Analytics Cloud) which has a lower price than the on-premise platform, and you can buy individual licences per user.

We evaluated Cognos and OBIEE.

It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.