SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

I have several use cases, generally in more complex environments. These are typically corporate, requiring functionality such as strong data security, bursting, metadata-based support, scalability, fault tolerance, load balancing, support for high volume, breadth of functionality in one set of products, etc. 

It has been used in Retail, Construction, Banks, and Insurance organisations.

It works well for organisations where a structured, common, and more disciplined view of larger, more complex information is required. This is generally with more complex and multiple source systems with larger volumes of information.

This solution provides much greater and faster access to information for a wide mixture of users. It supports and promotes a common view of information across the organisation. It also removes dependence on spreadsheets and technical resource for report generation.

It supports a wide range of types of users. It is particularly effective for information consumers. Ad Hoc information access and simpler self-service are well supported. Once we had the foundation in place, we also found we could provide most reports in under an hour for smaller company environments. Because of change control, the latter rarely happens in corporate environments but the effort involved was reduced.

The common metadata environment means that the entire organisation has the same definition of core measures rather than these being derived in spreadsheets or specific reports. It also provides a structured data security model whereby a single report provides dedicated results to a given usage, such as a branch or department-based. For instance, the same report will provide a branch-specific result depending on the user's branch and can be common to multiple branches.

Similarly, bursting enables provision of tailored static reporting to specific users or user groups that also includes data security.

This solution is complex to configure and administer. It is even more so, I believe, than it should be, even with such a complex product. As an example it has many server processes (typically 15+). In Windows these are not services rather they are individual processes managed via a single service called the SIA. Each server process can be separately configured and performs a specific set of functions

It uses Java constructions for specific customisations such as default reporting formats and using SSL for burst email reports. This requires a broad set of skills to set-up.

It is rather cryptic in its error handling when there are issues that require trawling through a number of voluminous log files that are accessed from the server.

I have been using this solution for more than ten years.

Reliability dropped in 2017-2018 with a major release but indications are that this has been addressed.

Very scalable across thousands (if not 10,000+) users and large data volumes.

Average. Technical support from SAP is mediocre. The local support is decent.

I've used many different BI solutions. The choice was the customer's. 

See earlier comments but a vanilla install is not too complex.  The moment it is not vanilla it becomes quite complex. The SAP website for software management, downloads, licenses etc makes the Da Vinci Code look simple.

Mix of contractors and vendor. The vendor is skillful though overworked resources.

No Idea

Cost to setup and run is high as it is complex but then again one also gets a highly functional product. SAP do have a small business pricing so, at least, the licensing is not too expensive.

The most comparable product is MicroStrategy, which is frankly a better technical product but has not been as commercially successful outside of large sites.

I am a great believe in choosing a commercially successful product rather than technical best of breed as there is nothing worse than having an 'orphan' product. That being a product that is poorly supported, does not have a development path and limited availability of expertise. Business Objects is a commercially successful product and despite SAP's poor management of the product is likely to continue to be so.

Private Cloud

Other

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.

Three to five years.

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.

More than five years.

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.

Three to five years.

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.

More than five years.

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.

More than five years.

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.

It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis. I found the SAP suite of products powerful. They scale well for enterprise use, i.e., thousands of recipients of the output of the products as dashboards and/or reports.

It gets people off Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and sharing the same reports/dashboards, so departments receive the same figures for KPIs and company performance.

This stopped the waste of time in management meetings, whereby people would spend a lot of time explaining different performance results (different Excel spreadsheets) so they could analyze results and plan to act on the results.

More thorough testing of Service Packs before release.

I have used Webi, Universe Designer, and Dashboards for 12 years. I’ve used Lumira for one year.

We had stability issues, mainly with the integration of the SAP BI products with SAP’s EIM products (Data Services, Information Steward). We had some instability when applying patches and new releases.

There was poor quality of the testing of new functionality introduced in new releases.

We have not really had scalability issues. The readiness of the products for the enterprise was a strong point.

Customer Service:

Patchy. Depending on the product with the issue (eg WebI or Information Steward) the responses can be good (WebI) or awful (Information Steward).

Technical Support:

Technical support was hit and miss. Sometimes it was good. Other times it was awful. Especially when the problem raised was hard for them to reproduce. They often ask the same questions over and over.

We didn’t have a previous solution. We have pretty much been an SAP BI shop for a long time.

Setup was quite complex due to the number of environments being used (Dev/SIT/UAT/Prod) and the integration between BI and EIM products. It is even harder now that we use SAP HANA.

Implemented in-house.

Make sure you factor in plenty of time for regression testing as the way SAP release Service packs these days there is good (new functionality) and bad (lack of thorough testing) news.

Over the years, we have reviewed other BI products, such as IBM Cognos and Tableau. Some of them are also in use along with the SAP BI products.

Check the number of intended users and which part of BI you are intending to introduce (reporting, analytics, etc.).

Check out the free trial periods and see if there are options to use cloud computing versus installing it in your own data center.

• Way of creating reports
• Ease of use
• Can connect to any database
• Create models with ease.

In our organization, they chose this product mainly due to its ease of use. They were also able to generate high revenue by identifying their backlog areas.

The calculation engine requires some improvement.

For eight years.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

A 10 out of 10.

I would say it's mostly straightforward, because it has a wide range of compatible operating systems and also it was easy to install. The whole software is bundled and provided to the consumer.

It's the best product in the market when it comes to reporting technology.

The features that are most valuable are report and dashboard development, universe layer, ability to connect to a wide variety of data sources, ability to develop robust semantic layer, ability to combine different data sources and data federation.

Provides a platform for developing reporting that can be used by end users, which will give relevant, consistent and correct results. Also, ability to combine data, I created a report based on SAP data from BW and combined it with data from SQL server to be able to report on the data in a way that would not have been possible to do except with manual steps. The solution I built replaced a manual process that would take 3 weeks and provided an automated solution. We were able to get the critical analysis in a small fraction of time and able to run the business better as a result.

Can be a little buggy. As with any system you need to do the work to set up the foundation; nothing is as easy as you install it and all your problems are solved.

I have been using this solution for 12 years.

No issues with deployment.

Sometimes encounter some bugs. SAP seems to have taken the approach of letting the users test the product lately.

No - the system is very scalable.

Customer Service:

Customer service was average.

Technical Support:

Technical support was average.

I've developed many solutions to replace solutions using Access and Excel.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I've done implementations myself.

I'm not sure, as I've been part of projects as a part of the larger organization. In general, it could be very high or very low. I know that BOBJ is costly - so you would need projects to justify the cost.

Not sure haven't been involved in this aspect.

No.

Definitely cost justify it. If you have a lot of manual processes involved in getting the reporting that you need, then this product will definitely help. You can cut out all the manual steps.

Universe Designer is the product's most valuable feature because you can manage joins or derived tables as you wish.

The business can create their own reports and dashboards.

Maybe they can improve some features in report designer, like the possibility of associating colors with the dimensions. For example, if you could associate blue with the dimension "France", red with "United States", etc.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I have not yet encountered any issues with scalability.

I rate them 9/10. Very good and very fast support from SAP.

I used Jaspersoft and I changed at the same time as I changed jobs.

I think the pricing and licensing is expensive, but the tool is aimed at the big companies.

If the business case calls for creating static reports/dashboards, this tool is awesome. If the business case is for dynamic reports/dashboards, I don't recommend it.

I guess most customers seek SAP BOBJ for its visualization and intuitive user experience.

Most of the customers where we implemented SAP BOBJ have used Analysis for Office because it uses Excel as its base and it increases efficiency. Mostly, we have seen businesses run faster because they use SAP BOBJ.

Of course, there is always room of improvement:

• The SAP BOBJ suite needs to be more stable and seamlessly integrated with SAP BW and SAP HANA (one-time variable creation, etc.).
• I would like to see one tool that combines all of the capabilities, be it ad-hoc, formatted, dashboarding, etc. I guess SAP Design Studio is that right tool.
• More OLAP functionality should be added, so that adding key figure characteristics can be done directly on the reporting side.
• Also, I think one major confusion that all customers have is what tool to use and when? It would be a good idea to slim down the options to make customers’ lives easier.

It is a really great suite with a lot of different options and a great user interface, but requires improvement on stability and scalability.

• Design Studio is very flexible because we can use JavaScript.
• We can use CSS styles for stunning visualization.

• Design Studio is a highly optimized tool for integrating with SAP BW and SAP HANA. Obviously, that increases reporting performance.
• Complex requirements can be met using JavaScript.
• The CSS editor saves time.

In Design Studio version 1.6, when creating a custom geo map component, we are not able to associate a shape layer with data sources.

We have used all the business objects tools, but this one satisfies all of the business requirements in an optimized way.

It’s a straightforward and simple tool to install.

It was a simple to implement after we met the prerequisite before installing it.

• Data integration
• 64-bit architecture

I would like to see the capability to directly access social media data.

I have been using it for 14 years.

We have encountered so many issues when the architecture and design was fragile.

Technical support is 10/10.

I previously used Microsoft DTS. Microsoft BI products are ideal for small-scale businesses. whereas SAP BusinessObjects is suitable for enterprise-level implementation.

If you have the skills and time, initial setup will be easy.

I worked for both vendor teams and in-house teams. I have been involved in the implementation of complex BI solutions on the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise platform in major USA and Canadian companies across different industries.

For successful implementation, you need a technical expert who has specialized in the area of Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) with in-depth knowledge of the data warehouse lifecycle processes (DWH design and ETL development) and extensive hands-on experience with both the SAP Enterprise Information Management (SAP Data Services) technology stack and the SAP BusinessObjects reporting products stack (IDT, Universe, Web Intelligence, Designer, Dashboards).

The manager should be from the in-house (for decision making) team and the technical experts should be from the outside (vendors and consultants).

SAP has different kinds of licensing for mid-size to large enterprises.

If you want to implement SAP Analytical applications, you need skilled resources with clear requirements.

Ease of report development is a key feature. Also, installation is largely automated. The nicest part of BOE remains the semantic layer (Designer), giving developers a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and push it out to users through Webi or WRC.

Because I am primarily an installation and configuration architect working independently through a separate company, the product itself doesn't necessarily affect us in a BI sense. That's really the big-picture issue within our community; that companies often misunderstand how BI is supposed to work and that in order for the business to really participate, there needs to be sufficient training and the cultivation of a "culture of BI".

I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement. Most of the other parts of the tool are fairly easy to get going and it would help getting user buy-in if they could extend that across the entire platform.

Like we always say, the tool is only as good as the person using it. But SAP sort of dropped the ball with their 4.x release, leaving out features that we had become used to with 3.1, which was stable.

We started with Crystal Enterprise 10 eleven years ago, transitioning through BOBJ R2, XI and now 4.x.

BOE 4.2 is currently pretty stable in our experience and we already know that it can scale to any level. The only downside to that is cost.

My personal experience with the SAP engineers is that they are very supportive and develop personal connections easily.

Depending on whether you are doing a simple, one-machine install (single-stack) or clustering according to the sizing recommendations from SAP, it can go from easy to more difficult. But the process is thoroughly documented.

We are more or less the vendor team for our clients.

Always determine your prerequisites before you kick off remotely or onsite. It can save a lot of grief. Have a detailed SOW and project plan that you adhere to as much as possible, but be flexible.

We are operating in the Electronic Health Record space using Epic and BOE for reporting. Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard.

I've evaluated other visualization tools, but BOE still has the best out-of-the-box enterprise security.

Planning is critical.

The SAP BusinessObjects product suite is made of different products. This review refers to the Web Intelligence product.

The user friendliness of the interface enables non-IT-literate persons to create their own queries without need SQL knowledge, and that has been the case a very long time. (I started to use BO in 1990.)

It gives power to the user, who can create his/her own queries without needing IT services, therefore leading to savings. However, it must be noted that the semantic layer (Universe) must be built carefully by IT staff with the full collaboration from beginning to end of future key users in order to be intuitive and user friendly. The training given to the user community and the documentation is also extremely important, so that the users know what objects they can combine together.

Since I started using BO, the desktop version gave way to the web version. The beginning of the web version (Web Intelligence) was a little bit chaotic, with some key functionalities present in the desktop version forgotten in the web version (like custom groupings, double scaling...) However, these functionalities are finally back. I think SAP should listen more and better to its customers.

I have 25+ years experience of working with SAP BusinessObjects, combining SAP and non-SAP data in BO and I also have started to use QlikView and roll it out in our organization. I hold the function of BI director now and develop an entire reporting strategy for a multinational organization.

I encountered stability issues. The beginning of the web version was very chaotic. It look a long time for Web Intelligence to open, refresh and so on. We regret that versions that are initially released do not seem to be well finished (a lot of bugs), and that a lot of patching is necessary to get to a stable version (our experience for BOXIR3, BI4 and so on).

I did not encounter any scalability issues. It is easy to deploy (weblink). But in order to be able to use the query panel, users must ensure that the Java component is installed.

Technical support is quite OK.

Initial setup is straightforward.

I cannot give any advice on this, as I am not involved at all in this issue, but depending on the licensing model used, this product can be quite expensive.

We considered Oracle Discoverer, MS BI, but BO was chosen for its flexibility of usage.

The reporting tool is easy to use and implement. Overall, you should consider how this tool is going to be implemented in your organization, and what added value it will bring to your organisation (e.g., do you have a lot of people doing a lot of reports in Excel). Finally, a decision whether or not to use BusinessObjects Web Intelligence should not be taken on its own but rather as a part of how information is managed in the organization.

In my position, it's very important to define data models in order to develop a solution that provide end users with the ability to freely analyze data. That's why the Information Design tool of Business Objects is the most valuable feature. But I also use the Web Intelligence feature for testing my personal data models.

For a recent project, I used the BI Workspace module of Business Objects. I found it to be very helpful in providing specific home pages for different user groups. Thanks to this module, I can define a home page for a particular audience.

I encountered an issue with security. When I promoted the association between the CMC security profile and the Security Universe profile as I took our application from dev to test to production, I noticed that the associations were lost. This forced me to newly associate all over again.

I've used Business Objects for four years for various projects.

I've had no issues with deployment.

Yes, sometimes the services didn't work well, generating a decreasing of performance.

I've had no issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

In my experience, customer service it good.

Technical Support:

In my experience, technical support is good.

Yes, I used other solutions, but I chose Business Objects because it's easy to use.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

The features that I think are valuable in SAP Business Objects - BOBJ (WEBi, BI Launch Pad, Rich Client) are the drill down capabilities to the nitty gritty lowest level, and perform an in depth analysis from different angles. Other products may also have this, but I believe with BOBJ, it is a lot better.

By giving more options of looking at the same scenario, in various forms, I can perform reliable satisfactory work for my clients with minimal errors. I believe this product has gained the market share well enough to call itself, the market leader.

SAP should work on performing the deployment and-post implementation support, a bit easier . I believe that would be a solid enough ground for this product to gain more pieces in the pie (market share). Also, they need to have more "Step-By-Step" documentation available for consultants, similar to what others have e,g. IBM.

7+ years.

No.

None, for the most part.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service:

N/A

Technical Support:

N/A

I have also used Bi-Query, Micro Strategy, Cognos, Tableau, etc. I like SAP BO better than other ones.

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

None.

• Publication
• Webi Reports
• UDT
• CMC
• BI launch pad to design and develop the analysis application for the business

I've used it for over seven years.

Lot of issues, because it is a huge product.

Lot of issues, because it is a huge product.

Lot of issues, because it is a huge product.

Sometimes it's average, and sometimes it's excellent.

No other solution was in place.

It can be easy or complex depending upon the scenario and complexity of your data warehouse.

We've done it both ways, you need to make sure you have a good implementation plan.

It is more suitable for huge businesses from a pricing/licensing point of view.

It is the best product for business analysis and help to grow the business.

• Universe Designer - I use single interface for all the BI users who access/create ad hoc and canned report
• SDK - important because we architected and designed a BI Product for 200+ customers using SDK
• Lifecycle management tools - We keep releasing new versions of our product based on customer requirements/changes requests depending on product changes.
• Multi-source connectivity - Extended the same BI product to support analytics/reporting on other applications/sources from same portfolio.

It's provided us with best practice reports out of the box for various modules. 
As well as an interface for creating adhoc reports with more analytical capabilities. This now allows us to exporting/share data in various formats (Excel, PDFs etc.)

We do not have self-service BI tools which would enable SAP to compete with tools like Tableau and Qlikview. Reports/Dashboards on RDBMS cannot handle or scale the demands of the latest data analytics solutions.

I've used this solution for over 10 years.

For deployment, SAP Business Objects has lifecycle management tools. It comes with features such as revert changes and automatic backup which helped us.

We had no issues with the performance.

It wouldn't scale when we needed to handle over one terabyte of data.

Customer service was found to be satisfactory.

SAP Business Objects when compared to Linux/AIX/Sun-Solaris is complex to install on Windows due to version/patch issues, and we had to put in requests for patches. Business users who used Web Intelligence were able to find some Java script plug-ins that needed to be installed.

We communicate with a vendor team as part of all our evaluations and implementations. This provides clarifications, resolutions, and additional features but mostly it was implemented an in-house by team.

It is dependent on our customer needs/requirements, and specific version with specific features were available. We also evaluated Tableau for its technical features, as per business user requirements, pricing, and licensing for choosing the product and also based on outcome of the Proof of Concept.

In my experience, the Analytics module provides the business the ability to make the appropriate decisions for improving our organization.

It provided our customer and their users usage of the product, and enable their planning team to be able to plan their stock availability accordingly.

It needs to be more user friendly for web use. Its integration into social media platforms needs to be easier.

I've used this solution for approximately 10 years.

There are issues with deployment, but only during new rollouts. Once the product development team fix the issues and provide customers with support packs, we are good.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

You have to pay to get the good service. The really nice thing about is that tech support is performed across the globe, so timezones doesn’t get into picture.

It's straightforward but you need the expertise.

We have done implementation using both in—house and vendor teams. If you are using a vendor, make sure it is done by one vendor, else it will be hard to get a good quality end product.

I did a partial evaluation as every solution has its pros and cons.

This works only for medium to large scale companies due to the high cost.

Semantic Layer (Universes), ease of use

New Undelete of Public objects..

New Dashboard of overall environment

Java Applet still relying on the quirkiness of Java VM, and potential version mis-matches.

10+ Years

With proper planning and understanding of the application landscape the deployment is fairly straight forward. Better to do a new install if you have multiple updates and patches...better to build from scratch vs remodel

Highly scalable, new configuration wizard with 4.1 version assists in scaling correctly.

Customer Service:

Fair

Technical Support:

Fair to Poor..Business Objects sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of SAP

No

Depends on the deployment. Can be very complex in a 100% fail over/fault tolerant/load balanced scenario.

I deploy for clients.

No

Use a consulting firm with expertise in deployment.

It provides every feature you're looking for to perform OLAP and OLTP-based transactional and analytical reporting.

We've used it for some time now, and it's an SAP product that gets more and more mature with each new upgrade or version.

There are definitely some areas of improvement (i.e. interface, etc.), just as every product needs improvements to meet changing demands over time.

When you test and find a bug, you raise a ticket with SAP - which gets fixed by support either because you don't know how to apply the features or it gets fixed with the next patch from their product development team. Also, apart from this, every quarter service pack enhancements come onto the market.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues scaling it for our needs.

I use IDT and Web Intelligence the most to enable self service and ad-hoc reporting capabilities for our end users. When building a dashboard with defined KPIs, I'll use Design Studio as it gives a clean and uniform look.

The combination of IDT and Web Intelligence has taken some of the burden of report creation off of our central data team. The corporate team has the task of creating sound, reusable universes, and we give 'superusers' out in the business the ability to create their own Web Intelligence reports using these universes. in this way, the business is able to develop the reports they feel would be valuable, and if a different view/additional data is needed, the corporate team would fulfill that need.

IDT and Web Intelligence are pretty mature products, and have many features that make them adaptable. Design Studio in combination with SAP HANA as a source can be valuable although when using crosstabs, database calls become costly. I would expect this functionality to change to better utilize returned data sets in the future. Lumira is also a promising tool, but at this point still feels inferior to Tableau. SAP continues to pour money into this visualization solution, and claims that in the near future will be more feature rich than it's competitor.

I've used Business Objects for about four years, versions 3.1 and 4.1.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

We've had no stability issues.

The only issue that comes to mind with the toolset is the scalability of Design Studio when using crosstabs as I stated before. When defining a dataset for a crosstab, you are locked in to that 'view' of the dataset and are unable to create a second view of the data with different dimensions from the same source - you must call the database again to accomplish this.

Customer support is responsive, the SAP help forums also have an extensive amount of knowledge and help if your organization does not have a support agreement with SAP.

Our organization also uses Tableau in some instances when we need to query several data sources/views for one dashboard because of performance. However we usually try to use Business Objects because of the synergy we find with SAP systems as a data source as well as the data security options available in SAP HANA.

I was not involved in the technical set up of the tools.

We used this product for years with Teradata as the datasource, but much can be gained by using SAP HANA as the source if possible - not only in performance but also in data security and not requiring a universe for a few of the tools.

• Universal concept
• Connectivity with databases
• Good visualization

It's improved decision making process.

• Better visualization
• Better portal
• License price is prohibitive should go back to CPU based
• Improve customer service.

I've used it for five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the stability.

I've had no issues scaling it.

Not good. SAP does resolve issues in time.

We are retiring SAP Business Object Webi and Xcelsius, they will be replaced by IBI Web Focus.

The security set up is complex, and there are compatibility issues with Internet Explorer.

We built some dashboards and an application brought some reports out of the box.

It is too expensive, charging by user and if you have hundreds of them you won’t be able to get ROI not even in many years.

Be careful with the license model. If you want to promote personal BI or ability to run your reports in disconnect/passive mode this is not the product.#

I would say universe designer as I have used or looked at other vendor tools and they don't even come close. Semantic layer is their main heart of SAP Business Objects.

Not one tool can satisfy everyone, and this tool is no different but in my opinion the ad hoc capabilities using Web intelligence over universe is very productive as users can self serve themselves

The Dashboard tool Current Xcelsius is not so user and developer friendly and is very bad compared to other vendor products. It has been wonderful but they have to integrate it with the Big Data economy system to sustain it.

This particular version six years, but I have been using Business Objects before SAP acquired for over 16 years ago.

We had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no stability issues.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service:

8/10

Technical Support:

8/10

It has been wonderful but they have to integrate it with the Big Data economy system to sustain it.

It's straightforward.

In house with a little help from professional services.

Pricing and licensing is competitive with other solutions.

Keep an eye upgrade and converting cost especially with deprecated tools like desk and it's reports, make consolidation of reports and universes and other objects early on .advise you to do user inbox,personal doc spring and fall clean up to make future upgrades easier

SAP Business Warehouse for its pre-built BI standard contents as it contain best practices generally and specific to industries both. Also standard analytic reports are very valuable.

SAP BO because of its functionalities, ad-hoc reporting, drill down, formatted reporting features. SAP BO tools like Explorer and Lumira for data explorer and trends.

All these things have benefit the main stakeholders to check and observe the trends and take the decision for the betterment of the company. Dashboards are one of the best features of SAP BO tools.

It helped the organization in analysis. It always helps the C level and upper management in monitoring the progress of the company by using dashboards and reports which contain important KPIs and trends. Based on such things, then main stakeholders take the decision for the betterment of the company.

Of course every product needs some room for improvement but currently nothing is coming to my mind. However, because SAP lacks a professional services offering, we had issues with deployment, stability, and scalability. Also, the initial setup had a medium level of complexity, so it should be done by someone with relevant knowledge.

I've used it for eight years.

There were issues because they lack professional services.

There were issues because they lack professional services.

There were issues because they lack professional services.

Customer Service:

8/10

Technical Support:

8/10

Because of its features and ease for adoption for the user. IT become strategic after adopting these tools.

It was on medium level.

Have a capable resource who knows how to work and have a good knowledge and experience in the relevant field.

SAP Business Objects Data Services is user friendly and easy to learn. It is easy to connect to SAP ECC or SAP BW, and does not require any additional plugins like for the other ETL tools.

Our organization uses SAP BI tools, and Qlikview for building reports for our doctors and other teams. It has helped us to build an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). It helps the BI teams to build reports over this warehouse.

It needs some improvement in its performance. It handles our data great as we do not process much data daily, but we are going to process huge amounts of data. I don't think it can handle well when compared to other ETL tools. I would like to see its data handling improved.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I think this product is best if we are not loading huge data. Also for its easy to use and learn.

• It provides centralized access for business users to all enterprise reporting content. This includes SSO access, reports with content personalization and tools for ad hock data access (Web Intelligence, Lumira)
• Customers highly benefit from Semantic Layer applications – they successfully hide the complexity of the databases and provide possibility to build queries using business vocabulary
• It provides easy administration of content using web based CMC application
• It provides scheduling, publishing capabilities of Business Objects reports

My company creates SAP Business Objects based solutions for many customers in the Middle East. The benefit customers have is easy access to their company’s information, simple ad hoc reporting tools, and the possibility to share created reports by using the portal.

There are a lot of stability related issues with all SAP BI products, especially compared with similar Oracle, Cognos or QlickView tools. This has a huge impact to BI implementation projects and overall customer satisfaction. Especially big issues are coming in SAP BW/BO integration project. Though SAP had acquired BusinessObjects quite long time ago still they did not manage to integrate their older SAP Business Warehouse with Front end BusinessObjects tools.

SAP Support is next to useless in many cases. Out of more than 100 tickets created by a project team in one of my projects, only less than a third was resolved by SAP support personnel. The resolution of tickets usually takes a long time. SAP engineers are mostly working from India, in a different time zone, and seem to be more interested in demonstrating proactivity by asking customers to perform various tests or activities which don't seem to be related with the original issue the customer has. Some of the questions they ask demonstrate that they have little knowledge about the products they are trying to support. In my biggest SAP BI/BW implementation project at British American Tobacco, SAP support asked me to demonstrate issues we were having with the Analysis For OLAP product, however after a call in a meeting, the minutes he had written said that we were having Web Intelligence session issues.

It is definitely useful as an integrated platform for medium or large enterprises which require a modern information management solution. It is definitely not without issues, but looks like SAP has a clear vision about where they want to get and that vision is supported by the customers.

• Web Intelligence reports because they have flexibility for detailed data analysis
• Dashboard designer for managerial reports
• OLAP Analysis reports for ad-hoc analysis.

We were able to combine data from two different sources and compare and identify data discrepancies thereby enabling us to correct the data.

It needs to become more user friendly. Currently, it is very cumbersome to use.

I've been using it for seven years.

We have no issues with the deployment.

Some database issues were encountered, but SAP has vastly improved on technical support for Business Objects over the last three to four years.

We've been able to scale it for our needs.

It's good, and around three to four years ago, SAP’s technical support was not up to the mark. Now SAP it is reliable and fast.

It's complex and has technical challenges.

We achieved the implementation in-house with hard work and technical support.

We went with it because my organization already had SAP deployed as the corporate ERP.

Go ahead with it -- it’s a good product.

The security features and flexibility of the product are the most valuable functions of BO.

BO helps our organization make important business decisions with the data it provides. It has great integration with an ERP solution.

They need to improve the processing of software as it has lag when it initially starts.

I've used it for four and a half years.

We had no issues deploying it.

There are some issues with the stability, but this is improving.

We have had no issues scaling it for our need.

The tech support is pretty good.

I've been using it for a long time.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The implementation is much more fun when you know what kind of requirements you're going to process I think it is the best product on the market as it has good integration with ERP.

Ability for the user to easily schedule the reports and managing them is a big plus. Most of BOBJ tools are also data source agnostic which makes them versatile across all environments.

WebIntelligence, Analysis for Office, and SAP Lumira were designed for businesses. So the adoption rate by the is very high. Quick intuitive analysis of data, and in just a few clicks WebI and Lumira can Merge Dimensions from different sources.

• Lot of Automation of routine reports. Analysts can now focus on analysis rather than pulling in reports from multiple places.
• Scheduling of the reports makes sure we are not duplicating work across all regions for the same report.
• Brings in standardization.
• Self-Service BI or DIY-BI
• Reports are easily available on Mobile devices

• Reusability of the reports and tables from between the different tools
• Improvements needed in charting
• Direct and easy integrations to easily bring in data from other applications across all the tools like Salesforce, reading RSS streams etc. and not just other databases
• Big data source support across all tools.
• Bringing Predictive Analysis to the main stream

I've been using it for 12+ years, and all the other products since their inception.

We had no major issues.

We had no major issues.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

First level support is generally is good for basic issues. Second level support is informative when it comes to bigger issues.

The BOBJ solution was so ingrained within the organization, and powerful that there was no necessity to change.

It was smooth.

Did both cases. Even if you have an external vendor, make sure you who have an experienced lead in-house who knows how the organization works to guide the implementation team.

ROI is absolute.

SAP has flexible licensing when negotiated correctly.

When deploying SAP BW and BOBJ together, get an experienced practitioner who can educate and implement keeping the business users in mind, not just the deadline and processes of IT.

There are a lot of limitation in SAP BW especially for scheduling, which can limit the full utilization of BOBJ, but there is a solution for it all if you think out of the box.

• Easy interface for business users
• Advanced functionality in BI
• It connects any data sources with SAP Business Objects tool

There are many tools that help the organization like SAP Lumira, SAP Business Explorer, SAP Design Studio and Dashboard to give you the summary and detailed analysis. With some of these tools, the technical dependency is much lower.

The Events feature needs to be improved, and I have already suggested this in the SAP Ideas portal. It is related to BOBJ.

I've been using it for the last seven years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The stability is again dependent on your sizing activity. If you don't have enough hardware and use it a lot, the tool will crash.

We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

10/10 - technical support is brilliant.

It's dependent to the client requirement. As I said earlier if sizing is done properly then you will not face any issues. If not, you may face issues if your utilization is high and resources are low.

I performed multiple implementations and upgrade projects for the BOBJ and BODS tool.

It depends how the customer is utilising the solution.

Business users can learn it very fast because it is easy to operate.

It has got a broad range of options for SMBs and enterprise level companies.

1. Dashboard Design (xcelcius) - this feature is a great tool to visualize information especially for enterprise dashboards in a board room and it can do what if analyses simply. The possibility of creating a specific dashboard format is unlimited.
2. Web Intelligence - this feature is the most mature feature of Business Objects, and it has the capabilities of ad hoc reporting, pixel perfect reporting, formatted style, as well as complex and advanced calculations. It can also publicize reports to help with distribution
3. Explorer - the best of breed for self service and visualization before SAP Lumira came in. The ease of use is unrivalled by the other features of Business Objects.

My company uses this to monitor revenue and its achievement for every product, salesman, period and department. We also implement for financial statement purpose such as profit loss statement, balance sheet statement and opex report.

Our sister company also use SAP Business Objects to monitor all the sales activities, stock, aging stock, and forecast.

At the end of the day, Business Objects reduces the manual process of gathering and creating reports into a much simpler and easier ways via self-service and dashboard management.

1. Annotation in the BI Launch pad. Previously there was the Discussion board function, but it was not good and no one used it. If SAP could create a functionality like annotation just like when we open in SAP BI Mobile application, it would be a great boost of functionality and collaboration feature.
2. Clear roadmap, they need to simplify the tools and features
3. Speedometer/Gauge in SAP Lumira
4. Integration of Lumira with SAP BI Platform on a non-Windows OS
5. Ability to Visualize in a browser SAP Lumira when it is uploaded into BI Platform

It was straightforward.

In-house development since I’m in a consulting company

The dynamic scheduling and the user interactive features (input controls, drill down and drill up features) as well as the ability to export the reports to Excel or PDF are some of the best features.

Web Intelligence has allowed our company to move to a self-service delivery model by allowing our internal clients to access, run and schedule reports dynamically without intervention of the BI team.

The dynamic scheduling capabilities, the performance and ability to handle large data sets when connected via BICS to a BW warehouse needs a lot of work. The BW safety belt severely limits the performance of data through the DSL Bridge which makes Web Intelligence appear slow and unable to handle large data sets.

I have used SAP Business Objects for 4 years. I have used both the BICS direct connection to a SAP BW warehouse, as well as connecting to a Universe.

No issues with deployment that I, as a functional user, was aware of.

Stability seems to be an ongoing issue with the tool and as much as that could be attributed to the tool, it can also be attributed to the configuration including the BICS connection, the DSL Bridge, and the tomcat server that it is installed on.

I joined after it was implemented.

1. Dynamic Visibility

2. Query Prompt Selector

3. Query Refresh Selector

1.5 Years

No

No

No

Customer Service:

Very Good

Technical Support:

Excellent

No

Straightforward

Excellent. Through the vendor SAP India.

A very creative tool to present the data in graphical and pictorial form, so as to make better decision for the growth of the organization.

The ad-hoc reporting in a web environment is great.

We have integration with 30 different systems now. Business users manual data-entry load has decreased, and data between different systems are consistent in almost-real time.

We can develop time-based, visualized analyses with our BI platform, and four years ago, business users had to prepare their complex records in Excel every time they needed data reports. Now they only need to refresh reports. On the other hand, business users were only able to query data four years ago, but now their visions are changing and they are now performing data mining and forecast analyses.

Data mining and more visualized reports are the next steps.

I've used it for four years.

We had to deal with data quality problems.

It has inadequate data analysis and data profiling, which has increased testing and user acceptance duration.

BO Web Intelligence, v4.0 is more unstable than XI v3.x. We’ll upgrade to v4.1 in Q3.

There were issues in v4.0 SP1 but we are now using SP5 and it has improved.

No, we did not.

Setup was straightforward, but the customization and implementation process was complex.

We started with a vendor-partner, but now we have in-house team and still get consultancy advice from the partner.

• Cognos
• Microsoft SSIS 
• SSRS

First, perform an analysis of your business users' requirements.

The data quality and your data warehouse models are the most important parts of a BI project. Design the model from both business requirements and source data. Make sure you involve business users from the beginning and explain the advantages of business intelligence to the data life-cycle well. Assign a short and attractive name to the web site and/or tool that users can remember easily and will like.

• Universe Designer
• Web Intelligence
• InfoView

Able to quickly create and publish reports using WebI. Eliminated most printed reports, they are now emailed or consumed online via InfoView. Has given users the ability to run reports on their own and get the information they need without having to ask IS.

Compatibility of Crystal Reports within BOE, especially when using universes and prompts – the prompts are turned into static values, not generated on-the-fly.

Scheduling functions. We have to maintain separate lists and custom apps of report schedules so that we know what’s scheduled when, and who is getting what reports. If a person leaves and is on distribution lists, we have to manually go through and remove/replace them. There is also no easy way to bulk re-schedule reports.

Report documentation must be manually maintained. Can’t EASILY find all reports using field X.

WebI needs a report template function so that basic re-used elements and formatting don’t have to be re-created with every report. Also need to be able to do more with custom SQL and merged dimensions.

SAP patch methodology is horrific, it was much better pre-SAP. As it is now, if you are on 6.1 and report a bug and it gets fixed in 6.2 you update and confirm it’s fixed. Then, a new release comes out and you update but because its cut-off date was prior to the date 6.2 fix, the fix isn’t included! Imagine trying to manage a system if you are waiting for multiple fixes. You can (we did!) end up with a system where major issues were finally fixed but other major problems not fixed and when the outstanding issues were finally resolved, the other previously addressed problems weren’t included in the newer update! It’s a maintenance and tracking headache.

Approximately nine years -

BusinessObjects Enterprise 3.1 SP6 (CMC, LCM, WebI, CR, Universe Designer, Business View Manager, InfoView)

(previously used XI R2)

Original XI R2 install was done by consultants, the install was a disaster and non-functional and we had to completely start over. Tech support walked us through doing it ourselves and we’ve managed it since. Biggest issue of the upgrade to 3.1 was functionality change in WebI merged dimensions, all reports using them broke and had to be re-written. Looked at upgrading to 4.0 over a year ago and installed in a sandbox, but the product did not function out of the box. It required massive reconfiguration of the default settings to run bare bones and there was no upgrade path to multi-source universes. As a result, we haven’t upgraded yet.

Rarely and was always due to bugs in new SP or FP. Current patch level is very stable.

Customer Service:

In a word, bad. Account reps constantly change and it’s impossible to find out who your current rep is. Phone calls and emails are not returned. At one point we were interested in buying additional licenses, but no one could/would help us. The licensing renewal process is severely lacking. They sent renewal emails to the wrong people, these are non-IS line staff not even on our account, and we have no idea how they even got their contact information. They refused to accept the PO that our accounting system generated, wanting one specially designed for them. Our purchasing agent, literally took a black sharpie and wrote all over the PO to meet their requirements. Who is the customer? Do they really want to make that sale? It doesn’t seem like it. Maybe we are too small for them to bother with?

Technical Support:

First level support is horrible. I avoid opening cases because of the bad experiences. I would typically find myself explaining very basic product functionality to the support personnel and in the end the response is always that they will consult their resources and get back to you. After going around in circles for days or weeks, the stock response is “it’s working as designed,” yet they can’t explain why. If you are lucky enough to get to higher level support (which is rare), they are very knowledgeable and able to quickly help get to the bottom of issues and find real solutions.

No previous solution was used.

Initially a vendor, recommended by BO. They had the product installed multiple times on the server, it was a mess and had to be completely blown away and reinstalled. Since then, we’ve done it in-house.

• The "View where used" option is very useful when looking to see where work flows, data flows etc.. have been used throughout the project
• Migration from one version to another because it's simple
• Being able to query the metadata has been very useful

• The Business Object tool from SAP has provided the business with reports both in graphical and table (spreadsheet) form
• Provided an easy way to send out reports on a schedule
• ETL has been able to be implemented thanks to the many components available in the Data Services tool.

• Better community support
• More support resources should be available
• They need to make it possible to rename data stores once they are created.

I've used Business Objects together with Data Services for 10 months.

No issues encountered.

The amount of resources used has caused the system to fail from time to time. To resolve the issues, it is necessary to perform server and service restarts.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

5/10.

Technical Support:

5/10.

When I came to work for the company they already had this solution. However, we did an upgrade to a more current version.

The wizard is pretty straightforward. The configuration and connections were also aided by a wizard.

A mix of both, before moving forward with the upgrade the vendor gave us suggestions on what we needed to do after looking at our current system. They were helpful in that initial stage of the upgrade, but the actual upgrade was done by an in-house team.

Make sure you understand the needs of the business and to evaluate different products before committing to a specific one.

1. SAP BO/BI

• Enterprise scalability
• Security
• Ease of use
• Semantic layer

2. Tableau

• Visualization
• Data discovery
• Turnaround time

3. IBM Cognos

• Enterprise scalability
• Security
• In-memory feature

4. MS BI - Flexibility

5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade

6. QlikView

• Data visualization
• Turnaround time.

7. OBIEE

• Enterprise security
• Semantic model

1. SAP BO/BI

• Visualization

2. Tableau

• Scalability

3. IBM Cognos

• Ease of use

4. MS BI

• Visualization
• Ease of use

5. Pentaho

• Ease of use
• Semantic layer

6. QlikView

• Scalability

7. OBIEE

• Visualization
• Database connectivities

• I have used SAP for almost 12 years
• Tableau – Rate 6/10 overall but 9/10 for visualization. I have used it for three years
• IBM Cognos - Rate 7/10 and I have used it for three years
• MS BI - Rate 5/10 and I have used it for two years
• Pentaho - Rate 5/10 and I have used it for over five years
• QlikView- Rate 7/10 and I have used it for two years
• OBIEE – Rate 7/10 and I have used it for five years

Customer Service:

• SAP BO/BI - Below average
• Tableau - Good
• IBM Cognos - Average
• MS BI - Average
• Pentaho - Average
• QlikView - Above average
• OBIEE - Average

Technical Support:

• SAP BO/BI - Below average
• Tableau - Good
• IBM Cognos - Average
• MS BI - Average
• Pentaho - Average
• QlikView - Above average
• OBIEE - Average

There is no perfect solution or one size fits all. Be clear on the requirements that you are trying to meet with the tools and solutions and do a POC and thorough evaluation. Also most of the time a single vendor works better than using best of the breed solution.

Being able to utilize a connection to the database with a semantic layer, so it can be modified if needed to fit a particular need. The Universe does this quite well and allows for business names to be used in place of the cryptic database name.

Instead of downloading the information into a spreadsheet or something similar, you can now develop the graphs and drilldown, drillup needs for the different departments in an easy to use and functional method.

The development of the Design Studio to be ready for prime time. It is pretty well ready now just needs a few points finished to make it completely ready.

I have used this solution in different areas for about 17 years

A few, these were related mainly to the development team not realizing how much data they actually had.

Not really, there have been a few hiccups but that was mainly due to bandwidth since we have a centralized location for the servers now.

No issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

For SAP it's not too bad, would always like to have it better of course.

Technical Support:

Very good.

We used Cognos however the price was getting too prohibitive, and it was time for a change.

Fairly straightforward but, not as easy as the vendor made it sound. As with most things it was not just a flip of the switch.

We used a mix of both in-house and vendor teams.

Take time to realize how much data you will be processing and how many users you will have, this will help you to scale the needs to the product. The product works well, but is only as good as the servers it uses.

Web Intelligence for its ad-hoc ability and user interface for allowing business users to create reports without depending on the IT department. The ability to merge data from multiple databases also allows more flexibility and business solutions.

Since SAP purchased Business Objects, they have made some nice improvements, but have still not managed to seamlessly integrate and harmonize the many products they offer.

Life Cycle manager needs to be more stable and easier to use. The Information Design tool could be improved when creating a multi-source universe for improved memory usage and SQL functions available.

? I have worked with the Business Objects tools since 1999, SAP BW since 2006 and SAP Business Objects since 2011 with XI3

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Customer service for the most part is good and a part of that may be due to the size of the investment the company has with SAP. We were provided a customer advocate on site to escalate issues within SAP as necessary.

Technical Support:

The technical support has been a challenge when it comes to finding the correct support analyst who is familiar with how the various product components integrate. Many times we would get someone familiar with Crystal Reports but not with BW or Xcelsius etc.

Business Objects XI 3 was implemented in house with assistance from various outside consultants. The upgrade to 4.0 was done the same way.

I don’t know the exact cost but one of the reasons the business chose to use Business Objects was that they could reduce licensing costs since it was already an SAP R/3 and BW customer.

Microstrategy and Web Focus were also considered back in 2010 when SAP bought and promoted the product for use with BW (replacing Web application designer). At the time none of the products were determined robust enough to use with BW as an enterprise level reporting tool.

Do not undersize the system hardware. Turn on all functionality for a product when installing – even if not anticipating using immediately. Spend ample time up front planning the security set up and only go with one option whether SAP, Enterprise, Windows AD or LDAP.

Flexibility and 'integratability'.

Can integrate the reference services of a metadata repository. Saves a ton of maintenance and ensures Data Quality.

Performance, but they all have room for this. Nevertheless, performance is highly dependent on data architecture and design as well as server capability. Far less so on the reporting tool that can fetch results; set once and re-use over several 'reports'.

I have been using the solution since 1998.

Confessions ... this is hardware and networking and unix. All of the server based reporting products are complex to install and beyond my skills. Adapting these products to the foundational environments is always adventure-prone but most vendors provide substantial help in installing.

With most of these products, BO, too, instability arises often when resources are challenged. So, in general, planning for capacity processing is a good way to keep systems stable.

BO has had 1000's of individuals in organizations running BO when they want to. Most toolsets address scalability.

I am a consultant; even if I advise changing BI reporting toolsets, I do so reluctantly. It is more involved than at first glance, particularly if you have a user base. To date, I have not encountered a situation where I would advise changing BI toolsets that have some traction in the organization. At least not without a plan.

Strongly recommend a vendor team for the initial period. Make sure they interface heavily with network, DB and DW folks.

ROI for the reporting product alone, as a component in a whole stack of things contributing to ROI, is in my view a minor contributor. How reports are developed and cast, the underlying data structures, data quality efforts, etc... these are the major contributors to ROI, not to mention the comprehension of the report viewer.

This can vary from site to site. Depends greatly on folks at the company and on the licensing deal worked out.

Category leaders have their strengths and weaknesses but as seen from the lens of the person using the tool. Some may want ease of use ... others a full-blown suite of DML tools. From this perspective, BO is as good as any of the other leading tools for reports. If anything, BO is great at controlling the user's interface eg highly user friendly capable. It does not come out of the box that way, but a competent BO wizard can make that happen on balance easier than other products. Finally, BO supports conserving server resources better than most. BI solutions are not about the tool. Any solution concerning the presentation of information has to focus on the business requirements and then a corresponding data foundation. Getting these is often a challenge at several levels and so I understand that there is this hope that maybe the toolset can make up for a lack of clear specifications. Bottom Line: Get the data foundation in shape first prior to implementing a reporting tool.

The Universe in BO ensures consistent coding for business rules etc.

Made reporting of data from the ERP systems in Oracle more consistent.

None

3 years - Blokker and BT, Netherlands

None

None

None

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Good

Reporting was previously done ad-hoc.

I was not involved in the setup of the solution.

We implemented in-house with assistance from BO and consultants.

Not involved in the setup or costs of the product.

I was not involved in the decision-making process.

Check out the competition - SAP BO is expensive.

Business Object is truly a scalable and complete business intelligence solution for larger organizations. We have made use of the following components: Live Office, Xcelsius, Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence. We extensively use the publication features of Crystal Reports and scheduling features of Web Intelligence. For an organization that uses Excel extensively, the Live Office direct connect is fast, accurate and user friendly. Be sure to have some super users in the business who can develop Crystal Reports and well as Web Intelligence ad hoc queries. This will make the life of the IT developers and administrative employees much easier. Overall, with past experiences, I would have to rate our opinion of BOBJ very highly.

On the downside, we have had some challenges with upgrades. Be sure to fully test every aspect in your development environment before applying any patches or service packs to Business Objects production servers. SAP was quick to respond to issues, but this still caused problems for users. The bugs we found were deep into software features (displaying column headings, formula logic, etc) and weren’t something we found in our extensive testing. I do admit we pushed the limits and had a lot of custom coding, but we expected these features to work and not break in future releases.