SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Reviews

SAP BusinessObjects offers a comprehensive solution with all BI functionalities. It includes valuable features like a dashboard, reporting, visualization, etc.

The platform's pricing needs improvement. It is very expensive. They should work on this particular area.

We have been using SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio for five years.

The technical support services are good. However, the response time could be better.

I have worked with Oracle BI and IBM Cognos before.

The platform's pricing needs to be revised, and thus, one of its disadvantages.

We evaluated various options to replace Tableau, considering products like BusinessObjects, Apache Superset, and other BI tools. For us, pricing is the major factor in deciding, as we have a limited budget. We are trying to find the best option.

I rate SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio an eight out of ten. However, if someone doesn't have a budget, it could be rated a one out of ten in such scenarios.

We use the solution to manage our databases.

The solution is more difficult to use than other products. 

We have been using the solution for five years.

I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution. I rate the solution as a seven out of ten.

I'm currently using the solution for a client. We use it for general reporting in the bank.

The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution.

Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix. 

If you want to make a change in one part of it, you cannot track the change. They need something to help track changes. That would make it better. 

I've been using the solution for over ten years.

I don't use it to do any system administration. Therefore, it's hard to really gauge the scalability.

I don't know how many people use it currently. I'm on the client-side. I'm only in one department, and I don't know who else is using it or where in the company.

From SAP, I honestly have never used technical support. I usually have enough knowledge to figure out any adjustment that's needed. I have not used support in over ten years. It's been a long time. I can't provide good feedback.

I didn't install it, however, it's not simple as just using a cloud group. You have to install it and provide services. I'm using the onsite version. It is, I'd say, relatively complex.

I'd rate the solution a three out of five in terms of the ease of setup.

I don't deal with the licensing. I can't speak to the costs. 

I know it has a reputation for being expensive. The thing is, it ensures that you do have continuity. It's also easy to use, whereas other tools that people build on their own don't offer that. You can control everything much easier and make it much more user-friendly for non-SAP users.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

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.

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.

We use it for our customers and to schedule reports. We use it so we can provide them options, to let anyone type in the system and run the report anytime they want.

What I find most valuable is that you can run the reports anytime and you can receive the report at a scheduled time. When someone wants to receive these reports at a certain time, we schedule the report to be sent at their requested time. The user can access the application and run the report anytime he wants, whenever.

In terms of improvement, some reports need more customizations. Customers request reports that need more customization.

I have been using this solution for about five years. 

It is reliable. 

Technical support is good, but we have to renew the support license every year. If we don't renew, we don't get any support.

The setup was a little complicated. It's not as easy to install it and there is not much information on the internet, so you have to depend on yourself. When you compare it to other applications, like BMC, HP, Dell, and IBM, there are many users who have experience with the solution and share their knowledge on the internet, but there is not much information online for SAP.

It integrates well with many other solutions. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the product for reporting and dashboards. We only have those two use cases, although there are other ways to use them.

I have a 24-hour company, and the business layer on top of the database can translate database data into business language so that people can easily understand what's happening. It allows us to quickly create reports without IT or programming skills.

The stability is quite good.

According to our experience, SAP BO is too heavy and very difficult for customers with medium, or smaller-sized businesses to install and maintain. It is such a heavy reporting tool.

Even though they provide the business layer, it's difficult for the programmer to create their own business layer. It's too complex for them. They need to simplify this.

The user interface should be easier to use and navigate.

The initial setup is difficult. 

Technical support could be more responsive. 

I've been using the solution for five years already. I've used it for quite a while. 

The stability is pretty good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good. 

We only have three or four people who are using the solution at our company at this time. They are the admins and the ones who generate the reports for us. 

We haven't really looked into scaling as the data volume is very limited. I can't speak to how easy it is to expand or how well it handles extremely large data sets.

Technical support could be better. We tried to get them to help us with the implementation, and they were not quick to respond.

We currently also work with Crystal Reports, which is dated, and Jasper, which is also not that great of a product.

When we began to switch to SAP, we really wanted customization capabilities and we wanted the business layer. We needed something to provide a middle layer or translation layer so that people can generate reports much quicker, and, at the time, SAP was a good option.

The initial setup is not easy. We need a very experienced developer and they need to get enough training from SAP in order to be able to do anything effectively. It's not like other reporting tools that are really easy to use or easy to install and maintain. This one is complex and takes work and inside knowledge. 

There isn't too much maintenance required. You just need to update it every once in a while. 

We needed some help implementing the solution, however, in the end, we weren't completely satisfied as the level of response time was slow. 

I cannot speak to the exact cost of the product, as it's not an aspect of the solution I handle. 

We're currently looking at Power BI and Splunk among other options.

We are SAP partners. 

I use the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the product to others. Even now, for ourselves, we are looking into an alternative option. 

I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.

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. 

Right now, we're using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for an in-house project — we don't have any customers. 

I work for an educational institute — in the main reporting area. I create different reports based on student performance using exam results and other data from various schools. In our university, we have around 20 different departments. One for Computer Science, one for Engineering, one for Audio Civil, one for Electronics, etc. I was planning to build a consolidated report that would show how our students are performing compared to other schools — a consolidated view. Then I can drill down further into individual fields. 

Big organizations can implement Business Warehouse on the cloud. Small organizations, like educational institutes, don't have that much complex data, so it doesn't make sense for them to buy Data Warehouse on the cloud. We want to use HANA and something called SLT. This will cover our replication and allows us to do modeling directly in the cloud, which is a great feature. 

As the technology stands, and from what I have researched at this particular point in time, companies that don't have much complex transaction data available on a day-to-day basis, don't need Business Warehouse or Data Warehouse on the cloud. We want to use SAP Analytics Cloud directly and do our data modeling on HANA Data Modular. This would really help because we wouldn't need separate licensing for Data Warehouse and for SAP, etc. We could remove all of this. We could do everything with HANA and SAP.

There should be more integration with other platforms. 

Everybody wants to use SAP Business Intelligence. Because we need a Business Warehouse or a Data Warehouse, we have to create a universe consisting of everything that we'll use as an input in BI. For this reason, we have a lot of dependencies. We require connection with the two different platforms. If we were to use HANA, then we wouldn't need Business Warehouse or Data Warehouse — we could just use SAP Analytics Cloud. We could use SAP Analytics Cloud as a standalone solution for reporting purposes and we could also use Business Intelligence as a standalone solution for reporting. 

This should be fixed so that companies don't require three separate licenses for three separate applications. Not everyone has that kind of a budget. It should be an all-in-one solution — this only turns away potential customers. If SAP provided a feature like standalone BI, we could use it directly, access ERP, get the data we need and start building reports. Single application licensed universities are ready to pay for that. But when it's three to four different applications, it's beyond their budget. 

I have worked in data services for the last eight to nine years. 

I haven't used all of the features yet, so I can't answer this question properly. 

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable. 

I haven't connected with support because we're using it for an in-house project. We installed it and work on it ourselves so we haven't had to contact them regarding SAP. Regarding ERP issues they are proactively able to help clients. We're a client for SAP. They've been able to help us. 

The initial installation is quite simple for me, but for inexperienced users, it may be difficult.

At my previous job, I deployed this solution myself. Deployment took two to three days.

As of now, we don't pay for a license. I think SAP has a program in which they give free access to Analytics Cloud for our university. Under that scheme, I have access to SAP Analytics Cloud, where I have explored different features; however, I don't have access to BI.

I am interested in SAP for the cloud because where I work, we have SAP ERP on the HANA Cloud. Currently, we don't have a license for SAP Analytics Cloud. That's why I'm exploring different methods to implement it. Currently, Business Warehouse is on-premise but I am planning to upgrade it to the cloud.

Although I haven't been able to use the BI portion, I would give this solution rating of eight. 

If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better. Power BI is just getting into that space. They've concentrated more on visualization, which is what the SAP Lumira does. With Web Intelligence, you are able to build reports that users can interact with. They can also do a lot of querying themselves.

It is robust in terms of security and integration. It is also quite scalable.

I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools. Web Intelligence is good for reporting and all kinds of stuff, but I would rather have one product. All the reporting features of Web Intelligence should be developed within Lumira.

A lot of predictive abilities have been brought into the cloud version of SAP Analytics. It would be nice to see a lot of newer technologies and AI. Predictive capabilities are becoming a little more standard. Instead of having to get another model, we are just looking for one solution to deal with analytics including predictive.

My first engagement with SAP BI was in 1998, so it has been more than 20 years.

Its environment is quite robust, especially when it is on-premise.

SAP BI is quite scalable. It supports multiple servers and multiple combinations of landscapes. It is quite good. You can add more servers to get better performance. You can also separate services. You can separate the application server from the webserver. If you want to deploy a large on-premise setup, it would be the way to go.

I work for an SAP partner company. We were the first SAP BusinessObjects partners in Nigeria, which is where I'm based. We've been partners since '98. Our goal as consultants is to be as self-sufficient as possible. We hardly need to get in touch with tech support because we are self-sufficient.

The installation of SAP BI is an extensive function. Typically with an SAP installation, you need a combination of on-premise and cloud. The cloud functionality is still evolving and maturing. As compared to Power BI, it would take a lot more work. However, if I went the way of Lumira, I could use Lumira Desktop standalone, and I get to use the features.

We have our own team for maintenance within our company. We used to have five people, but we have scaled down to just two full-time employees. We also have a number of people who are available on request.

I have always found SAP BI to be expensive. It is expensive even when you compare SAP BI Cloud with Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is probably around $9.99 per month, and the cheapest SAP BI is around $20, which is double. In terms of price, Power BI is definitely a lot better. If you have budget issues, you may want to go for Power BI.

I will be a bit biased, and I would definitely recommend SAP BI. It is a bit more robust and mature as compared to Power BI. Power BI keeps changing every day, which is not a bad thing considering how old it is. For a serious setup, I would rather use SAP BI, but I look forward to having one tool rather than two.

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