SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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