SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Reviews

Here are second thoughts:
- BO development team release patch every two weeks.
- Patchsets are released very often.
- Every new patchset introduces several new bugs,
- including many bugs regression.

In small project I have raised several incidents, including one with high priority.

I've been using BuisnessObjects since early 2000's.
In my ( but not limited) opinion, after SAP took over control of product development, entire software quality gone worst

This is just a quick post to share a lesson learned while I was on an engagement where the client’s reporting environment was using SAP Business Objects (BO)running on Linux for reporting. We were doing a test to move the underlying data warehouse from another database platform to SQL Server 2008 R2.

As we changed connections over, however, we quickly ran into a roadblock. It seems when we tried to make a connection to SQL Server via BO we got the error of ‘Unable to bind to Configuration Objects WIS 10901′. What made this situation strange is that from a Windows box you could connect but from Linux itself, it wasn’t having any of it. After some digging around we found we needed a third party ODBC driver to make this connection work.

Read full post: www.sqlchicken.com/2013/05/business-objects-on-linux-and-sql-server/

Yes, SAP Business Objects (BO) will address your BI needs – no doubt about it. But so will many other products – MicroStrategy, Oracle, IBM Cognos and so on come to mind. Now BO is big. It is big on capability, big on footprint, big on required skill-sets and tends to be big on cost (consultants love it). SAP groupies will undoubtedly want to use BO, others might want to reflect more carefully.

SAP BO comprises over twenty products that address everything from Microsoft Office integration through to data integration. It would be truly futile to provide details on these components, although it is worth pointing out that SAP Predictive Analysis uses the same visual front-end as the rest of the products – and this is a particularly useful feature as the boundaries between BI and data mining start to blur – as they inevitably will.

Criticism of BO usually revolves around complexity and cost. Some of the newer BI entrants (specifically QlikView and Spotfire) provide much more manageable BI environments at a fraction of the cost. But then again they are not quite so all-embracing. As always it’s a trade-off. If you really want a huge monolithic BI environment then be prepared to pay for it. If you don’t, then accept that some of the bells and whistles might be absent – although an extensible BI environment (again QlikView and Spotfire) should make up for this. The choice is yours.

At Amtrak we used BO. One of things we struggled with was Excelsius. It has a limitation- it expects you to aggregate your data before you can use it. Otherwise you'll have performance issues because it's not made to handle large volumes of data. To work around it we would have the aggregated Excelsius and drill downs would link back to a webi report to provide more detailed information. We were able to a provide a dashboard for our 9 board of directors, provided that we aggregated to a level that we weren't exceeding the limitations of Excelsius.

Been using BO since 2010 - mixed response of success

High level points from our experience:
Ad-hoc reporting capabilities are hit and miss:
For lite needs such as simple quires, summary level, what happened last month- it's pretty good.
For transactional level data we see universes that spin up for 3-10 minutes and then time out.
Robustness of the universe doesn't allow us to do the types of detailed analysis that we would like to be able to perform.
Static reporting works really well. We have reports that are scheduled and reports that are distributed via email. We also have a self service que- works well, well tested, great for our customers

Dashboarding- we have leveraged the Excelisus product- we have 25 dashboards- includes simple graphs, more detailed analysis with limited drill through (can do drill throigh back in the BO report). What's really missing is the ability to do any clickthrough in the dashboard itself. It's parameter driven and a little clunky (unlike products such as Tableau). It doesn't give users (at least the way we implemented it) the flexibilty to interact with all the graphs around the dashboard
Overall: It's great if you have a static customer base that has standard expectations who knows what they want and need to perform, but if they're trying to do self guided analysis, it's not a robust enough environment

We're upgrading to 4.x and also moving from a unix platform to a linux one. We're looking to see some savings and performance improvement. We're also looking to take advantage of the new dashboarding capabilities in 4.