SAP Business Data Cloud Reviews

We use this solution as part of an embedded analytics use case for an ERP application. SAP are starting to embed Analytics Cloud as a solution within their ERP application, which gives you the options for closed-loop analytics, as you go from insights to action within a single ERP application. It can also be used to bring together multiple data sources, different sources of data from various applications and use the application to blend and trade analytics solutions across different parts of the organization. The product suits small to large enterprise, it supports all user types. We are partners with SAP and I'm an analytics practice lead.  

A point of differentiation in the market for Analytics Cloud compared to other analytics products, is it offers not only business intelligence within the application, but also it has inbuilt AI and machine learning capabilities that can be used not only by data scientist types in the organization, but for general users who can get the benefit of inbuilt predictive features in the tool. The other really compelling part of it is that it's also a planning application. You can do full life cycle from plan through execution in a single platform. That's quite unique for SAP. A lot of the other software vendors do analytics products and they do planning products. This is quite a unique combination that has both BI predictive and planning in a single application. And that's really where its strengths is.

I think what could be improved is a lot of those intelligent features that I mentioned, the AI and predictive functions within the tool work really well with data that you import into the platform, but it doesn't work as well with SAP live connections. If they could make those predictive features available to any source, whether it's SAP or non SAP, it would be a really, really compelling product. 

I'd like to see formatted reporting as an additional feature, such as pixel perfect style formatted reporting. I'd also like to see the product on parity when you compare acquired data and live data models, to know that the features are identical. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

I believe the stability needs more work. The product was first released about five years ago and it's still maturing, which means a lot of new functionality is released with each update. Sometimes that can be a little bit disruptive as features change. 

The scalability is pretty good, you've got options of either having it publicly hosted, or you can also have a private hosting option in a restricted area in the cloud data center. You can also add capacity to it quite easily. It's elasticity as an application for scale-out is pretty good. And underneath the covers, it runs SAP HANA, which is an in-memory database. So that makes a pretty performance. I'm happy with it. 

The technical support could be improved. 

I would say that Analytics Cloud is definitely improving although it's not yet fully comparable. There are some features in BusinessObjects that are not yet in Analytics Cloud, but I would say, from my perspective, that the overall the benefits and advantages of using SAC outweigh BusinessObjects. 

Initial setup is somewhere in the middle of straightforward and complex, it just depends on the source of information. It's not overly simple and it's not overly complex. We have the solution up and running with customers in three weeks for a trial, and that's sending up the application, connecting it to their source systems and demonstrating one really good example of a dashboard or report. We carry out the deployment internally. There's very little maintenance required because it's software as a service, a SaaS offering, a lot of that housekeeping and maintenance and upgrade of the solution is managed by SAP, by the software vendors. Again, that's one of its strong selling points, it requires very little administration overhead.

I believe that SAC is cheaper than BusinessObjects for a basic user license. It's difficult to compare because one is an on-premise pricing model and the other is subscription based. You're not really comparing apples with apples. For some of the more advanced functionalities, though, it can be more expensive. Analytics Cloud is subscription-based. There are different tiers of licensing that give you different access to different functionalities, but assuming you have all of that, there is no additional hosting or set up costs, its fully included in the price per user. 

It's really important to think about data governance in the solution because it's very much a self-service application. It can be quite open for users to create their own versions of data, so it's really important that you think about customers, think about a data governance model to make sure that there's clear ownership of data, and there's a clear single source of truth for enterprise data in the model. It's easy to create a situation where it's open, but you still very much need to consider having a data governance strategy that underpins your Analytics Cloud implementation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are a solution provider and the SAP Analytics Hub is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

Our company integrates SAP Analytics Hub with rest of the SAP solution stack for our customers.

What I like best about this solution is that it is built into the SAP line, making it easier to integrate with other SAP products.

There is a steep learning curve with SAP Analytic Cloud for others from Non-SAP world, compared to other cloud solutions like Azure, GCP, AWS etc. 

Access to SAP training labs are a challenge compared to other vendors and the learning content can be structured better. Now, the content is spread across developer forum. Practice labs can be improved. 

Specific learning paths are not available for some of their products like SAP Data Intelligence which needs to be integrated with SAP Analytics Cloud and there are no hands on Labs to practice SAP DI on Access.

The learning interfaces on Developer forum can be more user-friendly experience. learning experiences on GCP & Azure are a breeze.

I have been working with the SAP Analytics Hub for the past three or four months.

Stability is not a problem for SAP products with Managed services.

Scalability has not been an issue, as these are cloud solutions and use micro-services to scale up and down to reduce cost. However, understanding data helps make wise choices about the tools used.

I have not been in touch with technical support.

No. Integration across SAP's product line makes it easier to get started on any new innovations quickly. One word of caution, please spend some time working on any product with SAP's Co-Innovation Labs to validate your solutions.

Trying to consumes SAP cloud services in hybrid cloud model will be easier than trying to set them on your own by buying infra & installation etc.

In-house team

I don't have a view on this. 

I am not expert in this area. A well defined Problem and A well understood solution will help reduce the cost, get the best prices and choose the licensing model that avoids vendor lock-in.

In a multi-cloud world, one has to realise that there is no One product which meets all requirements. Hence, SAP also allows integration of its platform with services from other cloud service providers and other non-SAP database platforms too.

The SAP Analytics Hub is a product that I recommend because, for SAP customers, I think that it is a good fit.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I have always appreciated SAP for its data capacity. That's a basic requirement since there is always a lot of data. We could be dealing with 100 TB of data. SAP is the only tool that can survive with that volume. 

Another good thing about SAP is that it has powerful tools like the SAP Data View and HANA and BO configuration. They will always give you better results with any type of data and any amount of data within a short time.

For report scheduling, I always prefer SAP because it has the most powerful scheduling features, like sending reports to more than 1,000 customers per day. That option is not as good in Microsoft BI and in Tableau it only exists as an add-on option.

The analytics part of SAP has not been that good up until now. They're still in the infant stage and development is still going on. SAP has some cloud analytics and they're trying to configure it in Lumira, but it's not that good at this point. 

I have been working with SAP for about seven years.

SAP is famous for technical support. You get 24-hour support and there are different types of support offered. We experienced issues in one of our implementations and we got very good support from SAP. They worked for almost three days, around the clock with us, to resolve the issue.

Deployment is another area that is lacking. The implementation is a bit difficult comparatively because it's a big system. SAP always prefers to have its back-end as the SAP ERP system, which is complex. But, once it's configured, it is good. 

SAP BW is also a bit complex, but once it's configured you are safe. With BusinessObjects, it is the same thing because it has more than 10 reporting tools. So deployment and training users will take time. 

But SAP introduced the SAP Lumira solution. Lumira's deployment is simple and it can communicate with Tableau and Power BI.

In terms of pricing, SAP is good for very large companies that have a lot of data. But small companies that don't have that much data and that can't afford SAP can go with Microsoft Power BI. You can get that for about 700 Indian rupees, which is almost $10, per user. When it comes to pricing, Microsoft is the best.

If your company is dealing with terabytes of data, go with SAP and don't think about the pricing.

SAP brought out PA, it's Predictive Analysis solution to compete with Tableau and Qlik. But since then I haven't seen much improvement in it, compared to Tableau. Tableau is the market leader and they focus on analytics; they come out with a lot of analytics solutions, such as clustering. SAP has been lagging.

But if you're talking about enterprise companies we always prefer SAP, because Tableau or Microsoft doesn't work with terabytes worth of data.

If you go with Power BI or Tableau, the data can be extracted into local tools. But with SAP Lumira, which I worked on two years ago, so it could be that it has changed since then, I found that there is no option like that, so we always have to connect it directly with the data. But SAP HANA can connect with Lumira, and that could be the best solution.

Microsoft Power BI can be easily configured with all other Microsoft products. When using Power BI, I can configure it easily with Azure Data Warehouse, with SharePoint, etc. Similarly, SAP can be integrated easily with HANA and with BW. But where SAP is lacking is that when I'm connecting my view with Azure Data Warehouse, I always have to go with the ODBC option. There is no OLE DB available in SAP.

If you're going to have different vendors, one for data warehousing and another for reporting, that's where you will find the issue, especially for SAP. SAP will charge for all the connectors and it will be expensive compared to the others. Buying a connector for Tableau is cheaper.

SAP also provides semantic layers. That is a powerful tool that I have really found to be effective, and it is something that is not available in Power BI or in Tableau. With the semantic layer, you can create a design before extracting the data. Power BI and Tableau don't have that option. They have something like it, but they are not that effective if you are going for real-time.

My first preference is always SAP because its products are more structured. SAP has its standards, so go with SAP ERP. That way, your customer is a standard object. There's a standard keyword that SAP has, as well as the concept of dividing one object into different levels, like the key text, hierarchy, and attributes. That's a good thing about SAP. But if you're going to with any other ERP or data warehouse, these things will be lacking.

SAP will always name all objects with a unique ID. Whether it's in ERP or BW, we get a unique ID for all the objects. That unique ID will not be available in other reporting tools or other data warehouses. And that's a bad thing about SAP. 

But ultimately, it's based on the company level. I will not recommend SAP to a small company because it would have to pay a lot for SAP, and not only for the implementation but for the maintenance. I will recommend a small company go with Power BI or Tableau. Most such companies will have Microsoft products, so it's easy for them to configure, whether they have data in SharePoint or in something like Microsoft Access. And Power BI is cheap. For mid-level or large-scale companies, I always prefer SAP.

SAP will always help you to simplify your data. But if I'm connecting data with Power BI and Tableau, I always have to think about how much data I have in the back-end, because that will affect the performance of my reports.

We are a consultant, so we build solutions for customers. Some of their use cases are for dashboarding, business intelligence, predictive capabilities, and planning.

I like the predictive features of SAP. It's an easy to use tool for an end-user.

You don't need a lot of technical knowledge to use the product and it is very easy to learn and easy to use. It gives you flexibility in designing your own dashboard with its new analytics designer.

These are new features that they implemented three or so months back. It provides you the ability to design your own dashboards with more flexibility and it opens more opportunities as well.

Pricing is fine for the BI license, but when it comes to client license, that fee is a bit high.

I have been using SAP Cloud Platform for the past year and a half. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Sometimes it has less flexibility when doing something. You can only do with what is available in SAP. We can't double up anything in SAP. I would take off two points for that. 

The version was launched about a month ago. We are in partnership with SAP, we're gold members. We implement SAP a lot. Working with open-source data in terms of Google Drive. 

The primary use case is working with open-source data in terms of Google Drive and other platforms. The environment currently runs on SAP, so SAP Analytics Cloud is a good way to go. The client can get value for money, instead of having to bring Oracle into an environment in which the integration might be clumsy. It makes sense to have SAP on the ground because they are running currently on HANA, which is why SAP was the first option on the list.

I love a lot of things about the product. The first is Smart Discovery and Smart Insight. It's amazing having predictive analysis and AI algorithms. A second valuable feature about SAP Analytics Cloud is the fact that it integrates with third-party applications such as Google Drive and Excel, which is amazing. Also the look and feel of the product, the user experience is very, very intuitive and the collaborative support that you have within the solution means you can share pictures, make comments, etc. It's very collaborative.

Improvement could be made in the pricing of the product which is very expensive, more than Oracle and Power BI and similar solutions. Currently, only one data modeler can work at a time. If you're working on a project and you have five data modelers, for example, if person A corrects or makes a change, person B won't see it. It makes it difficult because if you have three or four modelers working on the project, everybody should be able to work seamlessly without having to disturb one another. That's my only negative about SAP Analytics.

In the next release, I think they need to have voice-driven analytics, rather than just clicking and texting as it is now. A voice to text solution would make it funkier and more amazing. A move to include Android mobile platforms, would also be good, currently, it only works with iPhones and other Apple products. The number of people using Android is huge, so if they can extend the mobile platform to Android it'll be great. 

I've been using the product for about seven months. 

Though it is a relatively new solution, it is stable. 

I've been in touch with technical support because SAP has a presence in Nigeria. We can also get support from South Africa, and that was really helpful. 

I think deployment took us about a month and I think that was because this was very, very robust. Once you're able to get the data models it's just a matter of uploading.

The client actually wanted SAP. We checked other vendors to see if they could match what SAP could offer.

The program runs on the cloud. We push the data from the source offline entirely in the cloud, and the cloud takes over the analytics. It's a bit of a hybrid solution for now but we are thinking of moving fully into the cloud so that everything just happens in the cloud, and we get our insights and our KPIs displayed on the dashboard.

There can always be improvements and updates are coming in regularly but if you can afford this solution I would say 'go for it!' 

For now, I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

I use it if I want to see boardroom dashboards, or to see a combination of things in a chart. I also use it for planning analysis.

One feature I've found most valuable is Discovery. It is a logistics tool that will place the dashboard for you on the fly. For example, if you select a country, it will give the entire picture of where a product is high and where it is low. Another feature is peak capabilities in the applications. Another is planning KPIs

Now, improvements are coming quarterly whereas previously it was on a monthly basis. Even with this, it is still a market leader.

I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud for almost one year.

I don't know that it's stable. This cloud is occupied by major businesses who want to do a dashboard on the fly with data discovery.

In terms of scalability, it is cloud-based so it is scalable. 

No one should be able to go into our access, but they will give the space. You're the owner of the product space.

I have rarely needed to be in touch with technical support for the setup.

Previously, I used to work with products called Explorer and HANA and they didn't support it in a quick manner.

I have previously used Tableau.

The initial setup was easy and user-friendly, I did it by myself without any consultant.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd give SAP Analytics Cloud an eight.

Although we currently use version 4.2, there are upgrades very regularly. I work for multiple clients and each client has a different version. It depends on the analytics cloud SAP are distributing to their respective clients. For now, we have 10 clients but the plan is to expand this. 

Planning is the most valuable feature of the product because it's integrated and that means we don't need to rely on an independent planning environment. We have all the data available in ACP and fixed cloud and we use the same data for planning.

In terms of improvement, planning can sometimes not work the way we expect it would or should. Most of our customers are from VPC. They want to typically assimilate the scene and reflect what they are using. We sometimes have a hard time assimilating the same information on VPC.

I do understand that each and every product has its limitations. We are able to retrieve the information the customer is looking for, but whatever they are doing in VPC is what they want to be able to do in SAP, so SAP really needs to focus on that area to ensure that whatever they are doing in VPC is also in SAP.

For additional features, I have to say that so far they satisfy the requirements. I haven't worked on the planning models or the predictive models, but when it comes to planning there is a concern about the ability to match the exact requirements of the customer with what the product offers.

I've been using this product for almost two years. 

It seems to be a stable product and we haven't had any issues. It works as expected and in the long term, stability will really depend on how they update their system. 

The product is scalable.

We have, on occasion, contacted SAP for some of the issues we've had and they then forward it to the technical department who email us and solve the problem. We haven't opened any waiver messages.

The initial setup was complex. If the information is straightforward then it's fine, we're able to retrieve and carry out the basic operations, data actions, data logging, etc. and deal with it ourselves. But when you're trying to aggregate more information, for example, if you have a previous year's data and they want to see it as one column and for the current year they want to see a monthly view, it's possible in VPC but not possible in SAP. 

We carry out the implementation ourselves and there is a great variation in the time it takes. It depends on the customers' requirements. With some of our customers, we were able to deploy in three weeks, but there were others that took up to four months. It depends upon the directives we receive from our customers. Not every customer has the same requirements and each customer is unique and we need to plan accordingly.

For now, we are only using the solution on public cloud but we have several customers in the pipeline and we are planning to use private cloud for future clients.

I've worked for many business warehouses over a period of 18 years and I strongly recommend this particular product because whatever I do in multiple tools, in reporting or dashboarding, for example, I carry out a planning process where everything is integrated, so I strongly recommend SAP.  

I would rate this product a 10 out of 10 because I'm impressed with its function. 

We are a solution provider and this is one of the solutions that we implement for our clients.

The filtering options are useful.

The user interface is quite good for developing reports out of models.

There is no direct connector from SAP to Redshift, so we are required to use a third-party product that was recommended by SAP. Going forward, we would like to use connectors that are developed by SAP directly and do not require us to pay any additional licensing fees. In general, this solution should support as many databases and data warehouses, including cloud-based deployments, as possible.

There are a couple of complex reports that we cannot generate using a live connection. With the full data option, however, it is possible.

Hierarchies are not supported as of now, so it would be great if there were support for two or three-level hierarchies. It is helpful when we can drill down further into the hierarchy.

I would like to see more enhancement in terms of AI and ML. Currently, they have R visualization support in the product using a direct plugin. We need to have support for Python scripting, as well.

I am a consultant and I have been working with SAP Analytics Cloud for six months.

The solution itself is stable as of now, but we have had some challenges with connectivity. We're not sure if it is related to SAP or AWS, and it is stable at the moment, but we have had challenges.

With respect to scalability, we have only uploaded about half a million records as a pilot for the customer. At this point, we are not pushing more because we don't have the data. We do have plans to build in that regard, but for now, we cannot fully judge scalability.

We are developing solutions for enterprise-level companies.

The technical support is fine, and we have not had a problem. The SAP expert team is there if you need to speak with them.

Most of the technical support we are getting is from the marketplace. We get very good information from the SAP support portal.

For analytics, I have been working with SAP for the past twenty years. I have used the on-premises solution of business intelligence.

The initial setup is straightforward. The first time we deployed this solution it took between three and five days. This was due to some complexity that we had, including connectors. After our first experience, it now takes a maximum of two days to deploy if we have the proper documentation and connectors.

We have also recently tried Tableau and they are also pretty good. I do not find much difference between them. It is, however, the choice of the customer.

Some people like the Tableau reporting, whereas others like the SAC reporting, and it is based on the data being reported. SAC is pretty new on the market so Tableau is more flexible in terms of legacy support. A good example is Redshift. Tableau has a direct connection and SAC does not.

We have also used QlikView in the past.

We are trying to get the reports out of AWS Redshift. We are consolidating all of our data in the Amazon Data Lake, and we have it in AWS S3. It is from there that we are pushing to Redshift, but we had a challenge because there is no native connector.

This is a solution that I recommend to anybody with SAP in their landscape. We used to prefer QlikView and Tableau, but as of now, I suggest trying SAP Analytics Cloud to see the results first. There is a lot of seamless integration and you can avoid a lot of licensing costs. It is also pretty good at connecting multiple SAP systems together. It is quite useful in terms of data connectivity, data transmission, and modeling. 

Our customers definitely prefer SAP Analytics Cloud on Amazon Redshirt, regardless of the third-party connector that we had to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.