SAP Data Services Reviews

Our primary use for this solution is just, one-hundred percent, ERP purposes. We were typically Business Intelligence guys and we were not focusing on dealing with the data in-house. After the acquisition of this product, we were led to believe that it was a good business development opportunity for us as well and that we could become a candidate for data analysis projects. Because of the fact that we were based in Istanbul, we quickly became number one in the region for data analysis projects. We used this product in the telecom business. A few of these companies we worked with are still using the solution.

After discovering and deploying this product for our own use in data analysis, we were able to branch out and use it to increase our product line and deploy for other organizations.

The solution helps us to collect and analyze data, and this is the most valuable feature for us. When we first used data services right after  SAP acquisition (previously Acta), we knew that we could deal with DWH projects much more easier way using the tool. Moreover, we were also sure that strong integration with BusinessObjects BI platform was also going to help us for impack analysis, automatic business layer creation etc. 

An area that seems to need to be improved in this product is that it isn't completely ready to compete as it should in the market. Because of some more recent acquisitions to enhance functionality, the product parts are not one-hundred percent integrated. Because some of the integration is still missing, it seems incomplete. People with the product should be able to use most features, generally. The main differentiation in the past product from where it is now is that the product feels like it was integrated. After the acquisitions, things became more complicated. In SAP, the added products and features lack better integration and that impacts things like the metadata. So that is why I believe it can be improved. It's a GUI issue, mostly.

I'm sure this next suggestion is already done to some extent in SAP because SAP is already HANA but it seems SAP — as one of the software giants — is not making the most of their advantage to position data services as a stand-alone product. This is a problem in the market for greater acceptance, but maybe it's the strategy that SAP has chosen. But I believe that it could do better that way and increase the speed of performance. For example, some of the functionality might sit in memory. It would be using the HANA advantage, for example, but without the service to HANA. So maybe we limit certain functionality to HANA. I believe that some of the jobs with higher priority can be done in the memory of the data services which could be differentiating the product from the rest of the market more clearly.

The product is quite stable and quite scalable. Because of our market, some companies are not convinced that these features can possibly be so good, and the cost is not helping to market the product. They want to see an example of how it is scalable. We had telecom data in our last project, and we know it works fine and we haven't had any problem. But somehow this kind of negative impression is common in our market. I believe this is just because of a lack of knowledge and not based on reality.

In the past, we have had about twenty to twenty-five users in the company. We had five to seven developers who were doing our development. On the customer side, we didn't have more than three or four for the development of external projects.

I think it may be that SAP can improve in the area of customer support because SAP is historically a data solution company. Unfortunately, they can open themselves up to better or broader product support and that this is not up to a desirable level in the marketplace. I believe the product as a whole should be improved much more to support a wider range of devices and clients.

Before using SAP, we were using SSIS — the Microsoft product. Of course, the Microsoft product is a simple product. At some point, we realized that it was not powerful enough, and, feeling discouraged, we evolved to using a better product.

Just last week we installed data services to impact data sharing in one of the bigger companies we work for and from an implementation point of view, the ease of setup is okay, I believe.

To be honest, because of the economic situation we are in we always install on-premises. This is because of the Turkish market and some telecom companies aren't quite ready to elect to deploy on the cloud. So the business environment here is not ready yet.

We do our own installations and install for other companies.

I'm not up to date about the pricing for the past three years as it is not my concern in the business, but I can advise users on some things. Since data services are not usually positioned as a stand-alone product in the telecom sector, I believe that it should be. The price should be segmented with attention to the market with some variety in enterprise packages to offer more marketing opportunities. In the past, they had some kind of pricing packaging coming from the distribution center which was definitely an advantage in the market and that's why we were able to get more than twenty projects in the past, including staying within the enterprise market. Then after that time, the pricing changed. Unfortunately, of course, SAP tried to increase revenue and the prices went up. But again, they are losing the market against products like Microsoft SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services). It is integration services, and it's also a good product for a lot of people, but in my opinion, it's not as good as SAP data services. Because of the price, the game now has changed and there is more competition.

On a scale from one to ten, when one is the worst and ten is the best, I think I would rate SAP Data Services BI a nine out of ten. For me, a product needs to be perfect to rate as a ten. I couldn't even give a ten to any product because I haven't seen any product that is perfect. My true feeling is that it is between eight and nine, but if I have to say eight or nine, I choose nine.

I can recommend SAP as a product because the negative side of the product usually comes from different approaches to development. In a way, this is a kind of marketing because some developers prefer to use one type of development where they feel comfortable and think data services can be implemented properly. I believe there are better data services approaches which are much more of an advantage in the long run for projects, but of course, people don't always project the best long-term data approach because they expect short term results.

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.

SAP Data Services is a very general tool for SAP as a source and SAP as a destination. It can also connect to any source and any destination. This is a very valuable aspect of the solution.

The logic is simple. It makes it easy to build your extraction.

You can also do data transformation any way you want to. You can do any kind of transformation to your data and you can change the data.

There is a new tool that is going to replace this one, which will be more for platform integration data services. This is a close-knit tool that SAP is suggesting for different solutions. There's a lot lacking in it. You cannot do a lot of transformations. We are facing a lot of issues from that. As a whole, Data Services, is good, but not the platform integration of the Data Services aspect.

The preview for on-prem data services needs more information. The scheduling is also weak. Scheduling of jobs in the sequence is not available. It's a very tedious process to do that particular task. If there was a tool to schedule in the sequence that would be extremely helpful. 

The system is very stable. We have not faced any challenges since implementation.

Scalability is not an issue with this solution.

We have not used a single technical support call for SAP, which is great. As a whole, technical support was good, but recently we have been facing a delay because unless you raise a call with a very high priority there is a delay in the support. A very high priority means you have a financial loss or your computer system is not accessible. I would say the quality of support has been degrading as of late but we are somewhat satisfied with support overall.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not too complex.

SAP services handled the implementation. It was part of a larger implementation called a Systems Operations Planning Tool.

We use the on-premises version of the solution. We have started using the Cloud Platform Integration with the CPA Data Service. It's a hybrid: both on-premises and cloud.

SAP Data Services has a tool, but it is not a cloud-capable solution. I would advise users thinking about integrating this solution to look at your entire landscape. If you have any cloud systems as part of your landscape, then you need to have a clear understanding of what BODS is capable of doing. BODS Data Services is not good for the cloud.

I would rate this solution seven out of ten because cloud integration is not available and the scheduling part is very immature at this point.

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.