SAP Data Services Reviews

We use this solution for financial reporting.

The most valuable feature is the user interface.

This product could improve the uploading of documents and the amount of time it takes to upload.

The required typing could be minimized by adding Voice recognition.

It takes some time to get familiar with this solution.

Our company has one hundred and twenty thousand people around the world that use many SAP solutions.

We are happy with technical support and we have had no problems with it.

The initial setup is complex. It takes time to get used to.

Pricing is good. We don't have any problems with it. 

I would recommend this product, but nothing is perfect, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

The fact that it's built on SQL, makes it easy to write code. Also, the database and the connection are quite smooth. 

The solution lacks user-friendly features. Compared to other integration tools I've used before, it's less user-friendly and the built-in features just aren't sufficient. 

The description of error messages isn't extensive, although they do point out the problems. With other solutions, like Talend, I was able to use the debugger to get directly to the problem, but with SAP Data Services the debugger is not working. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the version specifically, but I'm using it in an enterprise environment and I can't do an upgrade.

The query feature does not allow a lot of flexibility in building the code. They need to make progress with this feature as well.

In future releases, I'd like to see the integration of a big data solution within SAP Data Services. I don't know if they offer that right now. The version I have is quite basic. If I was able to use more data sources with other software, and have the solution be more compliant with more data source types and big data sources, that would be helpful.

I would rate the stability seven out of ten. It's good, but it's not the best.

I wasn't part of the initial setup, so I can't speak directly to the implementation of the solution.

We are using the on-premises version of the solution. We work on the enterprise version and have a few hundred users.

I like the platform. It's quite robust. It's just there are little improvements that could make the solution better, but it's quite a good tool.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

Data migration and data quality.

It offers short development time and pre-built processes.

Ease of development.

Big data, real-time connectivity without the need to use SAP Replication Server

Excellent too

Excellent, you build a network of Job Servers to balanced the execution load

Local teams always available, plus direct support from Walldorf if required

I'm using SAP Data Services since it was an OEM product in Cognos in 1998

Data Services itself, none. The must difficult (kind of) ids to setup the databases connectivity for sources and targets.

In-House

Lower time to put applications in Production

The SAP Data Services EE License has all the additional products for enterprise wide data delivery, like Information Steward, Event Stream Processing, etc.

None, because other products cannot connect to SAP generating ABAP code to access pool and cluster tables

• Data warehousing project (with CDC or comparison table to update our histories).
• Four sources: SQL Server, Oracle, SAP ECC, Excel file.
• One target: Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
• Complex transformation to load the Data Warehouse (good and simple optimization).

• It's very simple to build a data flow.
• The development is faster than SSIS or Talend.
• Impact analysis is very useful to know who used this KPI (the report on the user that had access to this report).
• Profiling data is very useful to know the interesting fields.

• Portability of development (you can change your source/target from Oracle to SQL without changing your code).
• Web console monitoring.
• Auto-documentation.
• Simple toolbox with all you need.

• Development with web tool (today is with client tool).
• Connection to Active Directory to extract user and group.
• A PaaS cloud service (today is on-premise).
• Better connection to SAP BW.

ETL is very useful. We use Data Services not only with data warehouse development but also integration with other 3rd parties and external data.

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.

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.

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.

Connectivity with SAP and low impact on SAP environments. Also overall stability of the product.

Kellogg (the company I work for) used this product for data migration into the new SAP environment that we have established for North America. We also used the tool during the Pringles acquisition.

Matching Transforms are quite complex.

5 years.

No issues that would impact our timelines.

Data Services is extremely stable and stability information steward is considerably higher in version 4.2 than it was at the initial version 4.0.

Easy to scale horizontally or vertically.

Satisfied.

Needs improvement as far as responsiveness.

No.

I was not directly involved at the initial setup.

I heard Kellogg used a combination of SAP and Accenture for the initial setup.

Data Quality has an indirect ROI and we have not derived a fixed number.

Since I was not involved with the initial setup I am not able to answer a question about the start-up cost. As far as day-to-day cost, it is minimal (1/4 FTE) due to its stability.

Depends on the environment. If you are connecting to SAP environment I would recommend involvement of a 3^rd party vendor with experience.

1. Impact and Lineage analysis.
2. Auto Documentation.
3. Recovery of jobs.
4. Text Data Processing.

I've done a migration project (from OWB to BODS) in Singapore. The reason customer opted for BODS over OWB was automated trigger E-mail when job fails and the recovery of the jobs from the point it failed in the last execution. Also, when loading data from flat files, once the data loading from a file is complete BODS is capable enough to call any batch files to move the processed files to another location after completion.

When working with custom functions, many times it fails to execute (from 4.0 onwards) because of the data types mismatch errors. This has to be corrected.

More than 6 Years.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

100% as no manual intervention is required once the solution is implemented.

100%.

It was quite straightforward for me as I had experience with other ETL tools and the concepts.

Through vendor team and the level of expertise was satisfactory.

OWB.

SAP ERP and Salesforce.com integration.

We now have a single ETL tool for all data integration.

Technical Support; platform and database version support.

No.

Yes, with some of the SAP extractors.

No.

Fair.

Not good enough.

Yes. We previously used Microsoft SSIS, but found this a poor solution for our environment. It lacked strong integration with SAP or Salesforce and had extremely limited support for web services.

Initial setup was fairly simple.

In-house.

Estimate this saves us 2 headcount.

Only Microsoft.